In Light Lives as an Animal at 1053 Gallery, Melissa Murray dives into the darkness of Catskills nights, bringing the magical, haunting world of raw, gorgeous wilderness to life in her extensive solo exhibition. Drawing from her relocation from Brooklyn to the Catskills years ago, Murray shares her fascination with the immersive, nocturnal world of the forest. Darkness to her is not simply a void or a passive backdrop, but a thick, generative medium through which a landscape reveals its independent interior life.
Murray’s treatment of glowing or reflective light at night, so prominent and hard to describe and most certainly nearly impossible to photograph, gives the paintings a haunting quality and uncertain depth. A Weary Ursa Major Rests, a painting of what appears to be a void that may also be a reflection, hides a secret within the barely visible silhouette in the center. The glowing blue light doesn’t allow the eye to settle and begs for a continuous gaze. The shape is organic, suggesting a natural formation. Murray’s brushstrokes are active, gestural, and even aggressive at times. She creates the hum of the night so accurately that it’s not just the observative depiction, but the existential uncertainty that she captures perfectly.
In Learning to Hunt, one of the larger works in the show, a realistically rendered coyote is juxtaposed with its sharp, blue, cut-out silhouette. The coyote, which appears in this body of work multiple times, is a strong symbol of mysticism, wisdom, and transformation. In this work, the coyote is the migrant and mysterious subject of the night. Repeated moons and rippling water suggest the passage of time, and the wasp nest is a painful lesson of nature. The work is not just a story but a reflection that feels familiar and personal.
It is important to note that Murray’s palette for this work is centered around saturated blues, dense blacks, and muted earthen tones to construct a sense of physical weight. Transparent colors are applied to build deep surfaces that strip away the superfluous detail of daytime vision. By denying the viewer easy legibility, Murray forces sustained attention. A flower caught in moonlight or a snake moving through grass is captured with timely urgency, full of symbolism and meaning. Most notable are her isolated pools of luminescence that emerge from within dark fields of transparent blues in such paintings as What It Was Worth and Finding Space for the Rest of Time.
One remarkable piece, The Mother Tree, is perhaps the most humorous in the show. After a few moments, the realization strikes that the two glowing forms looking straight at the viewer are a pair of nipples. The tree is pictured emerging from the top, splitting the composition like a dark lightning bolt. This work embodies the strange. It’s alive and active, yet the brushwork is smoother and flatter than other paintings in the show.
The show is an exploration of Murray’s personal transition from urban observer to active participant within the Catskill ecosystem. By engaging daily in foraging, gardening, and night walks, Murray moves away from portraying nature as passive scenery. Her paintings reflect her own being as an artist as one living organism navigating a dense matrix of non-human activity. Murray does not seek to master or simplify the wilderness of the Catskills; instead, she constructs a visual language rooted in uncertainty, intuition, and proximity. The paintings demonstrate what occurs when one lingers in the dark long enough for the familiar world to become strange again.
All photos courtesy of 1053 Gallery.
Light Lives as an Animal: Melissa Murray’s Nocturnal Ontology @1053gallery
1053 Gallery, Fleischmanns, NY
August 15 – September 27, 2026
About the writer: Anna Shukeylo is an artist, writer, educator, and curator working and living in the New York Metropolitan area. She has written for Artcritical, Painters on Painting, Whitehot Magazine, and Art Spiel. Her paintings have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Kean University, NJ, Manchester University, IN, as well as an upcoming solo show at Watchung Arts Center, NJ and in group shows at Auxier/Kline, Equity Gallery, Stay Home Gallery, among others. She is a full time lecturer at Kean University in Union, NJ. Her curatorial projects include The Clemente, The Arts Council of Princeton, James Howe Gallery, among many others. @annashukeylo