Focus on Inner Landscapes : Photographs by Justen Ahren and Paintings by Whitney Cleary
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A Gallery's POP UP on Main Street, Edgartown opened 2 weeks ago, and will run through September 2025.
The first gathering is on Thursday, July 24th, from 5:30 to 7:30pm - for a Focus on Inner Landscapes by two local Martha's Vineyard artists – Justen Ahren and Whitney Cleary.
Justen's aerial pictures of the Spanish landscape are printed on metal by means of dye sublimation. Whitney's signature oil paintings are on on canvas, and sometimes on wood panel.
Justen intentionally framed his images without horizon or linear perspective, inviting viewers to shift fluidly between grounded detail and expansive abstraction. From the marks of tractors and patterns of orchards to mythic forms that seem to emerge from the land itself, the experience of viewing becomes a kind of visual flight—moving between the concrete and the symbolic, depending on where attention lands.
Metallic fields ripple like brushed steel, grooves and gullies recalling both topography and drawing. The land becomes a living canvas—plowed soil transforms into ancient mark-making, and furrows echo the gestural energy of charcoal or etching.
Whitney creates images that come to her from memory. Not of a specific place, but of an inner landscape that lives in the mind. A realm untethered from physical reality, yet deeply familiar. For her, beginning a painting means locating that internal space and letting it unfold naturally on the canvas.
This process often draws from dreams, brief glimpses of the past, and the emotional layers of the human experience. Why these translate into landscapes, she's not entirely sure. Her suspicion is that landscapes feel like the most honest mirror of our inner world, a reflection of the mind in external form. As if our thoughts, feelings, and environments are all fragments of a larger paradigm. Perhaps that’s why these images tend to be vague, amorphous, and open-ended. They are universal, yet deeply personal, microcosms shaped by something vast and unknowable.
The first gathering is on Thursday, July 24th, from 5:30 to 7:30pm - for a Focus on Inner Landscapes by two local Martha's Vineyard artists – Justen Ahren and Whitney Cleary.
Justen's aerial pictures of the Spanish landscape are printed on metal by means of dye sublimation. Whitney's signature oil paintings are on on canvas, and sometimes on wood panel.
Justen intentionally framed his images without horizon or linear perspective, inviting viewers to shift fluidly between grounded detail and expansive abstraction. From the marks of tractors and patterns of orchards to mythic forms that seem to emerge from the land itself, the experience of viewing becomes a kind of visual flight—moving between the concrete and the symbolic, depending on where attention lands.
Metallic fields ripple like brushed steel, grooves and gullies recalling both topography and drawing. The land becomes a living canvas—plowed soil transforms into ancient mark-making, and furrows echo the gestural energy of charcoal or etching.
Whitney creates images that come to her from memory. Not of a specific place, but of an inner landscape that lives in the mind. A realm untethered from physical reality, yet deeply familiar. For her, beginning a painting means locating that internal space and letting it unfold naturally on the canvas.
This process often draws from dreams, brief glimpses of the past, and the emotional layers of the human experience. Why these translate into landscapes, she's not entirely sure. Her suspicion is that landscapes feel like the most honest mirror of our inner world, a reflection of the mind in external form. As if our thoughts, feelings, and environments are all fragments of a larger paradigm. Perhaps that’s why these images tend to be vague, amorphous, and open-ended. They are universal, yet deeply personal, microcosms shaped by something vast and unknowable.
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