09/23/2026
Opening tonight. Join us in celebrating Eve Ackroyd solo exhibition
CALL IF YOU NEED ME. Reception from 6 - 8 pm.
~ This series of portraits are inspired by fictional characters drawn from short stories. The exhibition is shaped by writers Ackroyd admires, including Samanta Schweblin, Guadalupe Nettel, Lucia Berlin, and, most significantly, Raymond Carver. Its title hails from Carver’s story about a couple whose son leaves for college. Ackroyd first read it twenty years ago, when she was closer in age to the son; revisiting it now, with a son nearly the same age, the story has unfurled new meanings, as her half-remembered impression entwined with the life she has lived in the two decades since.
Emerging from softly saturated fields of color, Ackroyd offers vignettes of people’s lives in which remarkable things sometimes happen, and sometimes do not. Her sinuous and fluid figures occupy an active stillness, casting glances that are emotional yet reserved, inhabiting poses impervious yet vulnerable. Ackroyd approaches the canvas in the same way a writer would a short story: each character caught in a single moment, yet imagined as continuing on forever.
“Call if you need me” can be said by a parent, a lover, or even a stranger, heartfelt or offhand. The paintings can be read as a single story, an interconnected collection of characters whose lives overlap into one larger tale. Just as Carver’s own stories reveal the strangeness behind the banal, Ackroyd is less concerned with what we already know than with what we have yet to discover.
