Understories
Understories
September 25 - November 9, 2025
Opening reception: September 25 | 5-7pm
The Women’s Art Center of the Hamptons is pleased to present Understories, an exhibition that reveals the hidden beauty of the natural world—what stirs in the soil, shimmers in the sea, and unfolds quietly beneath our everyday gaze.
Featuring works by Robin du Plessis, Laurie Lambrecht, Kiki Smith, Anne Seelbach, Tiffany Shlain, and Marianne Weil, Understories celebrates the elemental rhythms and patterns of life itself. Through sculpture, photography, and painting, these artists illuminate both the visible and invisible forces that shape our connection to the living world.
From the fusion of bronze and glass in Weil’s sculptural forms to the delicate tracery of Shlain’s mixed media sculpture, the works on view explore nature’s properties—fluid and solid, fragile and enduring, seen and unseen. Together they remind us that the natural world is composed of countless variations, each one imperfectly perfect, each one a story unfolding beneath the surface.
The exhibition features six acclaimed artists whose practices engage with the natural world in diverse ways. Robin du Plessis transforms natural artifacts gathered on her daily walks into layered photographs that reflect on evolution, mutation, and our shifting relationship with the natural world. Laurie Lambrecht merges deconstructed painting and landscape photography, transforming both into new abstractions that invite us to reconsider how nature is perceived. Kiki Smith is internationally recognized for her explorations of the human body, animals, and nature; Anne Seelbach brings attention to environmental concerns through abstraction and color; Tiffany Shlain, an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist creates works that meld themes of feminism, philosophy, technology, and nature; and Marianne Weil works in bronze and glass, evoking geological and archaeological processes.
Top image: Marianne Weil, Veil, cast bronze with cast clear glass and open mesh, 11 x 5 x 3 in, courtesy of the artist.
Tiffany Shlain, Everything You Will Never See, mixed media sculpture, 19 x 17 in, courtesy of the artist
Kiki Smith, Earth, photopolymer, 7/9, Edition of 9 + 4AP + 5TP, 14 1/2 x 12 in, courtesy of Thirteen Moons
Anne Seelbach, Troubled Waters #12, acrylic on paper, 22 x 28 in, courtesy of the artist
Robin du Plessis, Bouquet of Pin Oak, Norwegian Maple and Pussy Willow, courtesy of the artist