Plastic Eden (Fire), mixed media (acrylic and oil) on drop cloth, 72" x 108"
Linnea Paskow, Ecstatic Collapse
May 14–June 6, 2026
Equity Gallery
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 14, 6:00–8:00 PM
Linnea Paskow’s paintings have historically been a battlefield where emotive expression has dueled with tempered restraint—a hundred-year war with neither a lasting truce nor a winning side. Paskow explains, “my father was a stereotypical WASP—not exactly a person in touch with his feelings. My Jewish mother, on the other hand, bounced from effusive to hysterical. Both have taken up equal space in my head. Until now.”
Needing space to act out the psychic push/pull of mind vs emotion whilst resisting a complacency culminating (yet again) in a disquieting statis, Paskow spread out 6 x 9 ft. drop cloths on her Bushwick house rooftop, and let it rip with a Pollock-like chromatic storm that paid homage to both his abstract action-painting techniques and earlier narrative mythologies—albeit through an unabashedly feminist lens. The resulting cycle loosely correspond to the classical elements—earth, air, fire, and water—not as illustrations of elemental conditions but (in the words of the artist) as “energy states”. She adds, “The paintings resist resolution; they remain in motion, suspended between coherence and unraveling. Fragments accumulate—plastic debris, rooftop skies, animal forms, gestural marks—pressing against one another until a fragile order begins to emerge. Images surface and dissolve within fields of color and texture, sometimes appearing vivid and immediate, sometimes slipping back into the surrounding atmosphere. I am interested in how pattern emerges without authority and how beauty can arise from visual excess.”
Most mortals spend a fortune and a lifetime circling around psychic gaps barely conscious of the irrepressible motive to reenact past traumas with highly choreographed dramas in a good-faith effort to finally figure it out. Artists are no exception. On the contrary. The quest for wholeness becomes the foundation for a profession legitimizing the creation of coded narratives cast with archetypes allowing contemporaneous dramas to unfold in full view. For Paskow, “…the work circles a wound, it is a chromatic storm where destruction, color, and elemental force lead to spiritual transformation”.