The Re Institute      
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                   1395 Boston Corners Rd, Millerton NY 12546

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf A show of new work by James Esber and Jane Fine (with work by J. Fiber – a pseudonym for the artists’ collaborative drawings) The three bodies of work exist at the border between figuration and abstraction; each one a stew pot of pop culture and art historical references. Opening May 30th from 4pm to 6pm Closing July 12th Upstate Art Weekend June 25th to June 29th extended hours 12pm to 6pm Saturday June 27th Exquisite Corpse with Jane and James June 6th, 2 pm Artists talk: Rachel Seligman, Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, will be in conversation with Jane Fine & James Esber. Rachel has known James and Jane for over 15 years, and promises a conversation that will touch on the artists' relationship to popular culture, comics and abstraction; their long marriage; their collaborative work; and their affectionately fractious relationship. Both artists are represented in the collection of the Tang Museum and their work has been included in several group exhibitions at the museum, including Flex (2020) and Twice Drawn (2006) for James, and Never Done (2020) and Melt (2011) for Jane.

J. Fiber, Who Axed Who?, Detail of a multi-panel work on paper, 2024-2026. Jane Fine’s brightly colored paintings are near-abstractions, complicated and contaminated by references to our current political reality, as well as a recent surprising discovery about the artist’s family. Her paintings, at first glance, offer a window into a simple and joyful world, but the illusion of safety is broken apart with paint that is alternately dripping, crusty, scraped and sanded. James Esber distorts and disassembles the emotionally charged and often clichéd images of Americana, prodding figuration into abstraction. The characters he’s drawn to, pawed-over icons of popular culture, include things like gunslingers, flag-wavers, dimpled children holding flowers, and tattooed hipsters. His paintings are done with myopic focus on each part, shifting between scales and allowing for improvised digressions. In the work of J. Fiber, abstraction and figuration push up against each other. Esber and Fine approach the paper as if navigating a battlefield. Made with a wide variety of media, their drawings are rife with drama, and the boundary between his and hers is always surprising. Working independently, section by section, the couple pass the drawings back and forth, challenging each other at each exchange. Jane Fine, The Admiral, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 52 x 40 inches James Esber, Suburbia, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 78 x 62 inches