Library Street Collective is pleased to present Field Guide, a two-person exhibition featuring Sarah Blaustein and Christy Matson, opening March 28, 2026. The exhibition brings together abstract paintings and textile works that approach landscape as both an ecological condition and an interior state.
Matson’s woven works reassemble landscapes into composites built from remembered, imagined, and sensorial forms of awareness. Referencing visual, tactile, and atmospheric encounters, her weavings avoid direct representation, instead privileging perceptions shaped over time. Woven on a Jacquard loom, though developed as if paintings, the works employ shifting weave configurations as a form of mark making, generating layered fields of depth. Landscape functions here as a proxy for ecological attention, a register subtly inflected by Matson’s engagement with domestic textiles, including hand-woven lace made by her ancestors that introduces inherited patterns and modes of labor into the field. New to this body of work is a rose motif embedded within the lace, which reappears as a partial, provisional form, folding memory and care into the works’ ongoing negotiation of beauty and anxiety.
Blaustein’s paintings similarly engage the natural world while moving toward interior terrain. Her new works unite everyday observation and a more intuitive, emotional landscape shaped by ritual and material sensitivity. Working with fast-drying paint and ink, Blaustein’s process demands a careful balance between looseness and control, resulting in surfaces that feel at once wild and delicate. Botanical references and environmental conditions—fog, light, and the rhythms of the studio—inflect the paintings, lending them a sense of quiet volatility. Blaustein describes these works as “internal landscapes,” sites where external ecology is absorbed and transformed into emotional topography.
Shaped by their West Coast environments, the artists’ practices resist romanticized views in favor of terrains marked by memory, labor, fragility, and perception. Both artists pursue disciplines that remain open to contingency, treating landscape not as a fixed image but as something continually negotiated. Framed as a contemporary field guide, the exhibition proposes ways of navigating environmental and emotional uncertainty through gesture, surface, and careful observation.
Field Guide is on view from March 28–May 16, 2026 at Library Street Collective.
Matson’s woven works reassemble landscapes into composites built from remembered, imagined, and sensorial forms of awareness. Referencing visual, tactile, and atmospheric encounters, her weavings avoid direct representation, instead privileging perceptions shaped over time. Woven on a Jacquard loom, though developed as if paintings, the works employ shifting weave configurations as a form of mark making, generating layered fields of depth. Landscape functions here as a proxy for ecological attention, a register subtly inflected by Matson’s engagement with domestic textiles, including hand-woven lace made by her ancestors that introduces inherited patterns and modes of labor into the field. New to this body of work is a rose motif embedded within the lace, which reappears as a partial, provisional form, folding memory and care into the works’ ongoing negotiation of beauty and anxiety.
Blaustein’s paintings similarly engage the natural world while moving toward interior terrain. Her new works unite everyday observation and a more intuitive, emotional landscape shaped by ritual and material sensitivity. Working with fast-drying paint and ink, Blaustein’s process demands a careful balance between looseness and control, resulting in surfaces that feel at once wild and delicate. Botanical references and environmental conditions—fog, light, and the rhythms of the studio—inflect the paintings, lending them a sense of quiet volatility. Blaustein describes these works as “internal landscapes,” sites where external ecology is absorbed and transformed into emotional topography.
Shaped by their West Coast environments, the artists’ practices resist romanticized views in favor of terrains marked by memory, labor, fragility, and perception. Both artists pursue disciplines that remain open to contingency, treating landscape not as a fixed image but as something continually negotiated. Framed as a contemporary field guide, the exhibition proposes ways of navigating environmental and emotional uncertainty through gesture, surface, and careful observation.
Field Guide is on view from March 28–May 16, 2026 at Library Street Collective.