Water pours from the mouth of a face sculpted from stone. Birds land briefly at its edge before lifting again into the air. In Heart of Hearts, Rachel LaBine isolates this interval: a still drawn from motion, held just before dispersal.

A fountain's stream expands into a field of color; a mouth becomes a basin; movement thickens into saturation. Two central works, At the bottom there's a rose and And in the rose there's another river, take their titles from two consecutive lines in Jack Spicer's poem "Narcissus." A single sentence is divided across two paintings, unfolding within the same space. From a shared source, the compositions take shape in vertical and horizontal orientations. Reference dissolves twice into abstraction: once as figure, once as terrain. In this split, flow and containment remain bound to one another.

This interruption follows a compositional logic LaBine shares with cel animation, in which background, figure, and motion are assembled across discrete planes. Yet she reverses that logic, arresting motion and extending a single frame into duration. Painting becomes a way of holding time: forms appear and dissolve at once, while color gathers into shifting fields across the surface. Greens, yellows, and reds hover between riverbed, desert expanse, and planetary surface. What first registers as vastness reveals itself as structure: basins, openings, enclosed currents. Even at its most expansive, the work turns inward.

LaBine's experience growing up on the plains of North Dakota, where horizon and sky collapse into a single field, quietly persists beneath these works. The sensation of inhabiting a seemingly limitless environment informs her long-standing interest in vastness held within form. What persists here is not grandeur so much as a child's sense of scale, in which infinity feels intimate and near. That tension extends the exhibition's sense of landscape, where the surface of Mars operates as an analog: a terrain that remains recognizable yet otherworldly. The rose invoked throughout the exhibition originates in a small white ceramic sculpture that has followed the artist across cities. Here it functions less as symbol than as vessel: a form that holds another current within itself, a portable chamber of memory and familiarity. A river inside a rose; a landscape inside a monument; a terrain within a frame. Like the fountain's mouth, the rose holds another opening through which currents continue. Recursion begins to organize the work at the level of structure rather than motif.

This recursive structure extends into the sculptural installation One need not be a chamber (2026). A horizontal tube light rests low to the floor, with one stained-glass form positioned just above it and a second suspended from the gallery's overhead fixture: a vertical pairing that echoes the nested structures introduced in the paintings. In one glass element, a collaged image of the moon widens the sculpture's sense of scale. The glass forms trace a doubled heart—inverted, repeated, and, in the hanging form, elongated into distortion. Two small ceramic cats—salt and pepper shakers given to the artist by her mother—quietly support the tube.

Throughout Heart of Hearts, dualities remain in tension and do not calcify into opposition: vertical and horizontal, figure and field, stillness and motion. Each retains the trace of the other. The title names a singular heart that does not stand alone. The heart here is a chamber under pressure: a core held within another core, where currents move between the singular and the shared.

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Rachel LaBine is a visual artist living in New York City. She was born on a new moon in January of 1987 in Grand Forks, North Dakota. When she was 10 years old, the river she lived next to flooded the entire town. Rachel completed a MFA at Columbia University in 2019, and a BFA at RISD in 2010. She received the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award in 2019.

Her previous solo projects have taken place at 12.26 (Dallas), Et al. (San Francisco), Bibeau Krueger (NYC), Fourteen30 Contemporary (Portland, OR), and Material Fair (Mexico City) presented by Bibeau Krueger. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Naranjo141 (Mexico City), False Flag (NYC), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), and a three-person show at Lyles & King (NYC). Her work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, and mentioned in Artforum and Artnet.