Lobster Club is pleased to present Strata Memory, a duo exhibition by Ellen Rutt and Aaron Glasson, opening Saturday, April 19, 2025. Through painting and sculpture, the artists unearth meaning amid layered crises, exploring the partnership between love and grief anchored by a shared belief: we make things holy by the quality of attention we give them.1
Strata Memory features five new paintings by each artist, a 15-part collaborative painting, and a site-specific installation composed of found objects, earth and food.
Rutt’s process-driven abstract works are formed through an act of reverent tracing. Using charcoal, pigmented chalk, and milk paint she records elements from her surrounding landscape and personal life. For this show, Rutt departs from her typical employment of primary colors in favor of earth tones and pigment found in her surroundings. Often working directly on the ground, she maps ancient rock veins and surface textures, the silhouette of a community bulletin board, a rusted trash can lid, her phone. These tracings transform both the mundane and the monumental into gestural maps that hold the dissonance of scale and time.
Time itself acts as a collaborator within the work: canvases and materials are often left outside for months or years, allowing weather and decay to leave their own marks underscoring how time erodes, alters, and ultimately reinvents form.
Glasson’s practice centers on an inquiry into the spirit of ecology and humanity’s place within it. His materials—natural pigments made from rock, rust, and charcoal, and installations constructed from discarded objects—mirror his philosophical exploration. The paintings for Strata Memory were created between Mexico City and the Mojave Desert and unfold as meditations on the tangible and the intangible. Shaped by outer observation and inner reflection, they seek to reveal what is visible, invisible, and the intricate web that connects all life. His imagery invites viewers into liminal yet familiar spaces—shifting abstract terrains of loss and renewal.
Their collaborative painting weaves together each artist’s mark-making practices into a unified whole—an aggregate of canvases that resemble a quilt or an aerial view of farmland. With a palette of desert ochre and earthen sienna, the piece merges translucent washes, soft-edged geometries, and quiet narrative scenes to explore the convergence of spirit and substance.
Together, Rutt and Glasson’s paintings and sculptures offer meditations on our estrangement from the natural world and the potential for reconnection. At the heart of this exhibition lies a question: Might the solutions to our ever-growing crises not lie in discovering something new, but in remembering something ancient? And perhaps through grieving what has been lost, we can awaken a memory that shifts how we relate to each other, to the land, and to life.
1 Based on a quote by Martin Shaw
