Photographed by: Adrian Wilson

An exhibition curated by Michael David

R.E.M. 's Fables of the Reconstruction is one of the band’s most enigmatic albums. The title seems to hold several ideas at once rather than one definitive meaning. There is a sense of landscape, memory, history, and the stories we create from the places we have been.

I see some of that same complexity in the work of the artists in this exhibition: Jake Berthot, Staver Klitgaard, Patricia Richards, Sam Shaffer, and Kyle Staver.

For me, the word “reconstruction” is less about rebuilding something that has been physically destroyed and more about the ways we continually remake our understanding of the world. We reconstruct our histories, our identities, our memories, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. We take what has come before and rearrange it, question it, preserve it, discard parts of it, and sometimes discover something entirely new within it.

Painting is particularly suited to this kind of reconstruction.

A painting can begin with an image, a memory, an object, a landscape, a feeling, or simply a mark. From there, the artist begins to build. Things are added and removed. Forms emerge and disappear. Decisions are made, reconsidered, and made again. The surface becomes a record of that process.

The paintings in this exhibition each carry that sense of searching. They are deeply individual, yet they share an understanding that making a painting is rarely a straight line from idea to conclusion. There is room for uncertainty, accident, intuition, memory, and discovery.

Painting creates a shared and intimate space. It can be a place for thinking, remembering, imagining, and sometimes healing. There is something profoundly hopeful in the simple fact that an artist can put something down on a surface with their own hands and leave a record of having been there.

The paintings in this exhibition carry that record.

They also remind us that we are all, in one way or another, constantly reconstructing. Our memories change. Our understanding of ourselves changes and the society we live in and the politics of our times. The meaning of an experience can shift over time. What once seemed fixed can become something else.

Perhaps that is what connects these artists most deeply. Each of them, in very different ways, is making something out of what came before—reworking it, questioning it, remembering it, transforming it, and sometimes simply trying to make sense of it.

These are their fables of reconstruction.

And that, to me, is the heart and soul of painting.

It is also the heart and soul of every artist who so generously lent their work to this exhibition.

About the Artists:

Staver Klitgaard (b. 1992) is a Brooklyn born and based artist. They studied painting and received a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (2015), as well as an MFA at Hunter College (2019). Klitgaard is a figurative painter who primarily uses acrylics and a variety of sizes and surfaces. S constantly references mythology embedded in pop culture, the supernatural, art history and cartoons while carefully toeing the line of humor and angst.

Their work has been exhibited at Empty Circle Space, New York, NY, Steven Harvey Fine Arts Project, New York, NY, Trestle Gallery, New York, NY and M. David & Co., Brooklyn, NY among others.

Sam Shaffer To introduce myself and my practice, I’m originally from Baltimore where my parents lived in the same house for 65 years. I now live in Philadelphia where I’ve been for the past 15 years. The rest of the time in between I lived in New York City.

My current work started when a broken ankle led to nine months of drawing that became notations for the work that would follow. The past three years have been an outpouring of works on paper. I’m filling all kinds and sizes of paper with image after image. Sometimes there’s a reference point, but usually the work just comes out of my hand. The works take place in some mystic reality in my head or maybe in the yard I had growing up. There are creatures and birds, saints and my father—but mostly just me, usually on a journey taken alone to see and feel what exists and where past and present get confused. Based on the way people are responding, I think it is a world most people have in the back of their heads, but that has been lost behind the life we have now.

Jake Berthot (1939–2014) was an American artist whose abstract paintings contained elements of both the minimalist and expressionist styles. During the first 36 years of his career his paintings were entirely non-figurative. His style changed in 1995 when he moved his studio from New York City to a rural community in upstate New York. While continuing to be abstract his paintings thereafter contained figurative elements and were seen to have greater emotional content.Throughout his career, Jake Berthot’s work frequently appeared in solo and group exhibitions in both commercial and public galleries. It has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, National Gallery of Art, and other major American art museums. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981 and a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1983.

Kyle Staver Kyle Staver is an American painter who also works in relief sculpture, drawing, and etching. Engaging with canonical Western mythological and folkloric traditions, Staver finds her inspiration in sources ranging from the Bible to ancient Greek oral-poetic traditions. Staver captures critical moments within these narratives in her fastidiously refined color palettes, identifiable for their stark highlights and rich use of darker tones which blanket figures and their environments in shadow. Despite working with stories that have been re-told throughout centuries, Staver cultivates an enigmatic atmosphere within her paintings—both formally and narratively. As Dan Nadel put it in Artforum: “Her sources are the urtexts of patriarchy, but Staver often flips the script” to offer intelligent re-workings of gender dynamics enshrined in ancient archetypes. Her paintings traffic in a kind of narrative uncanny, as the stories to which they refer are simultaneously familiar and new or unsettling.

Kyle Staver (b. Virginia, MN, US; lives and works in New York, NY, US) earned her BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale University. In 2015,

she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, and in 2003, she was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. She has had solo exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels; Half Gallery, New York; Zürcher Gallery, New York; Galerie RX, Paris; Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York; among many others. Her work is in the collections of the National Academy of Design (New York), The American Academy of Arts and Letters (New York), The National Arts Club (New York), The McEvoy Foundation (San Francisco), and Portland Community College (Portland, Oregon). Staver is also recognized as a distinguished member of the National Academy of New York. (Courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery)

Patricia Richards is a painter based between Florida’s Gulf Coast and Kennebunkport, Maine. Her work explores the beauty, vulnerability, and surreal mystery of the natural world through vivid, layered images that blend observation, memory, and magical realism. With a background in biology and medicine, Patricia brings a deep understanding of living systems to her art. Her paintings often feature coastal plants, tropical environments, forests, water, and expressive figures—charged scenes that feel playful, sensual, and subtly haunted by ecological threat.

Originally from Long Island, Patricia studied biology at the University of Chicago and later became a medical doctor. Throughout her medical career and while raising two daughters, she maintained a dedicated painting practice. She later studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the New York Studio School, and earned her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Patricia is a member of the Yellow Chair Salon, Women Contemporary Artists of Sarasota, National Association of Women Artists, and Art Center Sarasota. Her work has been featured in Antennae: The Journal of Nature and Visual Culture, and she has exhibited nationally. She completed artist residencies at the Rokeby Museum (Vermont) and Château Orquevaux (France), and presented her work on the Painting the Plantocene panel at the Modern Language Association. Awards include the Mercedes Matter Award from the New York Studio School and being shortlisted for Jackson’s Art Prize 2025.

Fables of the Reconstruction will be on view at 1GAP Gallery through December ??, 2026.  The gallery is located at 1 Grand Army Plaza, across the street from the Brooklyn Library, a few short blocks from the Brooklyn Art Museum, and easily accessible by subway.

Please make an appointment to view the exhibition. For further information, please email: 1grandarmyplazagallery@gmail.com