WHAT DREAMS MAY COME is a group exhibition presenting the whimsical and fantastical realms inhabited by SABINE CARLSON, IRENE CHRISTENSEN, STEPHANIE LEMPRES, and SARAH RILEY. The exhibition will be on view from January 6–24, 2026. An Opening Reception will take place on Thursday, January 8, 2026, from 6–8 PM, followed by a Closing Reception on Saturday, January 24, from 4–6 PM.

WHAT DREAMS MAY COME unfolds through surreal imagery and recurring figures that move fluidly between the conscious and the unconscious. Sabine Carlson conjures scenes of water birds and humans entwined in acts of rescue, evoking tenderness, risk, and mutual reliance. Irene Christensen reveals fragments of unseen landscapes, intimate microcosms poised between growth and decay, where body and terrain blur into one another. Stephanie Lempres offers abstract, geometric, color field paintings that establish a quiet architecture, opening a temporal window for dreaming, stillness, and possibility. Sarah Riley’s mixed media works and sculptures draw from myth, literature, and personal history, transforming memory through acts of reinvention.

Bursting with creativity and defying traditional aesthetics, the artists use their visual languages to search for meaning, expand narrative possibilities, and reshape contemporary understandings of artistic expression.

SABINE CARLSON, an American painter born in Cologne, Germany, features paintings that reveal moments where humans and water birds converge in acts of rescue. Humans hold signs, megaphones, or orange floats, often barefoot and clad in costumes or protective gear. Meanwhile, the birds balance delicately on feet woven from seashells and fins. Their legs stretch tall, their stance both steady and uncertain, poised between action and hesitation.

Inspired by the mud hen, or coot (a migrating water bird known in some Native American traditions as the Earth Finder), these creatures are said to summon worlds from depths of lakes. Carlson has long worked with this shape, using it to express curiosity and puzzlement in its encounters with humans. The bird’s feet speak of paradox: skilled for swimming and diving yet awkward on land, they symbolize the fragile balance of existence.

Traversing landscapes remains a persistent theme. Rivers, lakes, seas, and land form the stage for these strange meetings, where figures seem locked in quiet conversations as they struggle to find or hold their footing. Where have you been? Where are you going? These questions linger in the spaces between and within the paintings.

IRENE CHRISTENSEN, born in Oslo, Norway, and based in New York, creates art that weaves memory, myth, and nature into surreal landscapes. Her works, fragments of unseen terrains, exist between growth and decay, body and environment, offering glimpses into worlds both strange and intimate. The female head often appears as a symbol of perception and human connection, and in her renderings, images shift, transform, and evolve like lines in a poem. Through her symbols and imagery, Christensen conveys the importance of nature and humanity’s deep, inseparable bond to it, grounding her mythopoetic visions in universal experience.

Her process is intuitive, drawing inspiration from nature, ancient cultures, and relics. Recurring calligraphic and runic motifs shape the imaginative worlds her figures inhabit, while her flat, stylized paintings evoke a contained, otherworldly universe. Christensen describes her art as a personal mythology and iconography, inviting viewers into a dialogue with phantasmagorical representations that celebrate life, beauty, and the marvel of existence.

STEPHANIE LEMPRES is a contemporary abstract artist based in California. Her paintings are layered compositions of color, combining bold brushstrokes, fine lines, loose mark-making, and deliberate technique. Moving beyond pure color field painting, Lempres creates dynamic relationships within each work, using contrast and harmony to invite the viewer to look closer and experience a carefully considered aesthetic.

Her work evokes the feeling of an endless summer, a space for dreaming, possibility, and a deep connection to nature’s beauty. Over time, her paintings have evolved to include landscapes, botanicals, and vibrant abstracts inspired by the sea, sky, and the luminous space and light of the western United States. Through her work, Lempres captures the interplay between natural elements and human perception, offering both wonder and reflection in every layered surface.

SARAH RILEY is a painter, printmaker, and ceramic sculptor based in Port Charlotte, Florida. Her work combines images, textures, and techniques to reflect the fragmented, sometimes chaotic nature of memory and experience. She blends printmaking, digital art, drawing, photography, and paint to create layered compositions where shapes and forms overlap, interact, and transform. Unusual textures and shifting imagery evoke recollection, imagination, and reinterpretation, inviting viewers to look closely and engage with the stories embedded in her work.

Riley draws inspiration from sources as diverse as 15th-century sculptor Agostino di Duccio, Samuel Beckett, and the remnants of biodiversity in Southwest Florida. The exhibited works, entitled Pigs Fly and Ostriches Dance in the Garden of Unreason, inhabits a space where memory, identity, and dreams dissolve into one another. Drippy glazes and shifting figures suggest the erosion of old boundaries, while hands take shape and feet listen in a world still forming. The work conveys a sense of messages surfacing, fading, and repeating, reflecting the constant dialogue between perception, memory, and imagination.

The exhibition showcases each artist’s idiosyncratic visual style, where Neo-Surrealism meets Narrative art to reveal magical, enchanting worlds that linger in the imagination.

Presented at Viridian Artists | 548 West 28th St. #632  NY, NY 10001