White Columns Online #34:
Thresholds
curated by Antonia Machado Oliver

Min Baek
Fabio de Faria
Marissa Delano
Coco Klockner
Jacob Muilenburg
Catherine Mulligan
Levi Robb
Ali Jet Vaughan

Gray begins in transition–the Middle English grai meaning between white and black. In Latin it derives from cinis, ashes–the color of decomposition. We have now entered the threshold season, when color drains from the sky and the trees, when asphalt and buildings become indistinguishable from the natural world. It’s a time of reveling in the liminal. 

The eight works in Thresholds are, both formally and affectively, gray. Each holds its own weather–touched by melancholy, mystery, humor, and longing. Material accumulates, gestures repeat, held in tension by the silence of their ashen tone. 

One of the masters of gray was the French painter Marie Laurencin—born October 31—whose subtle contrasts of grisaille spoke to a quiet, brooding logic of interiority, femininity, and sensuality. Gray is skin, hair, hide, curtain, surface—distinguished by interplays of luminosity and opacity. Laurencin’s figures seem to smirk beneath their haunting beauty, the gray undertone in their pink cheeks casting a somber, conspiratorial glow. Jasper Johns’s favorite color was gray; he believed it to be the most ambivalent. Ambivalence is not a void but a contradiction—a fullness of uncertainty. Gray, the trickster, reveals in its impenetrable monochrome the depths of Johns’s emotion. 

Gray is the color of contemplation because it resists clarity. It is the color of mulling over, of grappling with, of dwelling in the unresolved. It is the liminal’s exemplar—the space just before release. On one side, remnants; on the other, rebirth. Brooding becomes a kind of building, a phantasmic accumulation—a cloud expanding with rain, a cast setting into form. Gray is of this in-between: mystery, agitation, and also the quiet of decay. These works address nostalgia, corporality, and solitude, mirroring the transitory state we inhabit when blue inevitably transforms to gray. 

Antonia Machado Oliver is a curator and gallerist from Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MA in Art History from Hunter College where she produced a thesis on the Brazilian modernist textile artist Regina Gomide Graz. In 2023 she founded Iowa, an apartment gallery in Crown Heights, Brooklyn that presents emerging and mid-career artists with a focus on conceptual and material explorations of intimacy. She currently works as a project manager and curatorial assistant for artist Jeffrey Gibson. She previously held positions in the studio of Laura Owens, at Kayne Griffin Gallery, and at SADE LA.

This exhibition is the thirty-fourth in a series of online exhibitions curated exclusively from White Columns’ Curated Artist Registry.