CABIN and New York Life Gallery are pleased to present Haystacks, a collaborative exhibition of works by the inaugural cohort of CABIN's artist residency: Julia Elise Hong, Christian John Munks, and Pauline Rintsch. Over the two months working in residence in the North Country of New York State, each artist's process was informed by the rural landscape.

Julia Elise Hong employs impressionistic shapes and suggestive figures in her atmospheric paintings, creating an intimate yet involuted dialogue within each work. She considers each formal compositional element an interlocutor in an open-ended conversation, though despite "the flatness and opacity of the image, neither can fully access the other."

Christian John Munks meticulously works and reworks the surfaces of his paintings, constructing and deconstructing layers of distemper, pigment, charcoal, and oil paint. This iterative process of overpainting gives form to Munks' preoccupation with doubt, vulnerability, and anxiety, especially as they relate to masculinity. The resulting impedimenti are testaments to the artist's ruminative approach to painting and his equivocal, multivalent relationship to his subjects.

Pauline Rintsch explores the effects of scale and texture to offer unexpected and alienating perspectives on her subjects. Close-ups of faces or cropped-out bodies often fill the entirety of her small-scale compositions, frustrating the viewer's attempts to situate them in pictorial space. The thinness of her paint and its variable application, by turns smooth and coarse, give the surfaces of her paintings a transparency and luster that lends her subjects a fey, haunting quality.