Recalls
Adler Beatty
April 30, 2026- June 26, 2026
Adler Beatty is pleased to present Recalls.
In Recalls, Mariel Capanna, John Hyen Lee, and Danny Sobor present new work that captures the transient experience of memory. Each artist, working with a distinct set of motifs to explore the fleeting nature of an individual’s engagement with the world around them, transforms memory into visual experience. Each wrestles with the idea that our memories are unreliable and everchanging, morphing as we remember and forget passing details. This exhibition asks what it means to capture a memory as a visual moment in a work of art.
Mariel Capanna (b. 1988, Philadelphia, PA) investigates the material traces of moving images. Working directly from films, documentaries, B-roll footage and even slideshows, the artist observes and gathers shapes, objects, and colors and indexes them on canvas as fragments of visual information; she juxtaposes the visual memory of objects against surreal, color-washed backgrounds. Objects – candles, flowers, the silhouette of a lawn chair – hover against ethereal planes of color and seem to exist out of time. The images feel uncannily incomplete, presenting recognizable, quotidian forms while also feeling as if there is something left out, a moment just out of our reach that we can’t seem to recall.
John Hyen Lee (b. 1994, Los Angeles, CA) explores memory through language. Beginning by creating his own substrates out of wooden panels, Lee’s practice examines the repetitive acts of mark-making, particularly in Hangul, the Korean alphabet. Repeating the same phonetic marks over and over again, Lee simultaneously considers repetition as an act of committing something to memory, while also allowing that repetition to venture into the realm of abstraction. In displacing the letters from their context of language, the artist forces us to forget their meaning. In this way, he collapses the boundaries between English and Korean, creating a bilingual composition through the dissociation of letters from language. This reflects Lee’s primary interest in the instability of memory and its ability to alter the original meaning of what is remembered or misremembered.
Danny Sobor (b. 1992, Chicago, IL), sourcing images from the Russian search engine Yandex, embraces the pixel as a unit of color and looks for moments of breakage and deterioration in his lo-fi source imagery as an opportunity to inject color and emotion into the work. Taking an impressionistic approach to the digital age, Sobor attempts to capture the impact of a digital image that exists on the web even after it is deleted, just as the image is preserved in a viewer’s mind. It is that lasting impression of an image, found only in a brief encounter through a screen, that Sobor captures in his work.
In placing these three artists together, Recalls draws out the parallels and contradictions between them as each takes a distinct visual approach to the idea of fragmented memory and the relationship of memory to the self. While Capanna finds memory in objects, Lee explores the ephemerality of language, and Sobor considers the effects of the digital encounter on the human psyche. Shown together, the works exist as an investigation into the nature of memory.
Each of these artists slows time - in freezing a scrolling social media image, in capturing a film reel, in calligraphic strokes of language - and asks a viewer what it is to encounter an image in the analog, an experience that is increasingly rare in our technological age. These artists safeguard visual memory in an environment where images are easily doctored or even AI generated. The exhibition investigates how painting can preserve memories, both visually and emotionally, and foster true human connection between artist and viewer.