RECESS: a first encounter between artists transforms the gallery into a living stage, chronicling the inaugural meeting between two artist/curators, Melanie Carr and Madeline Eldridge. Loosely inspired by THE COUNTER, this exhibition explores how routine interactions serve as vital opportunities for collaboration and play.

Though strangers before the conception of this exhibit, Carr and Eldridge engage in an improvisational dialogue, curating their works on-site to mimic the vulnerability of a first conversation. Guided by intuition, inquiry, and intention, this exhibit highlights the creative effort involved in understanding another person. RECESS suggests the gallery is not just a place to look, but a site for collaborative learning; a space where playing with form, self, and others becomes a radical antidote to isolation.

Formed from love and distance, Mahsa Attaran’s exhibition My Heart is Tight For You offers meditations of family, home, and language shaped by life apart from Iran. The details within Mahsa’s work linger: the smell of a mother’s cooking, the touch of a father’s hands, moments that hold both comfort and longing. Persian, with its rhythm and tenderness, runs through the work, carrying meaning that can’t always be translated. These gaps in language echo the experience of living between cultures. In this space, art becomes a way to hold grief and love side by side, to honor resilience, and to celebrate beauty. Each piece asks to be seen and heard, offering presence, tenderness, and connection. mahsaattaran.com

Peter is a Hartford based artist, curator, and gallerist. After receiving his BFA, Albano spent 18 months spelunking Hartford’s underground Park River and producing documentative/interpretive work mapping the riverway, under a project titled The Hog River Revival. Later, Albano became a resident muralist/sculpture artist at Wild Bill’s Nostalgia in Middletown, CT. In 2021, Albano founded The Arts Industry and Loading Dock Gallery in West Hartford, eventually becoming the Visual Arts Manager at Real Art Ways in Hartford. Albano is a recipient of a 2014 Hartford Arts Catalyze Placemaking Grant, 2016 Regional Initiative Grant from the Shoreline Arts Alliance, and 2023 Artist Fellowship Grant from the city of Hartford.