Satellite Events

A Glimpse Elsewhere brings together artists Elisa Abeloff and Nanci Hersh, reminiscing about the past and understanding alternative perspectives in such fleeting moments. Each artist uses gestural patterns in their work, creating an airy atmosphere and feeling of retrospection.  In Elisa’s work, we see flashes of natural scenes that are borderline abstract, visualizing distant memories. Similarly, Nanci uses imagery of water and reflections to represent how our momental perspective can change over time.

Elisa Abeloff

She/ Her

Bio

Elisa earned her BFA in Printmaking from Washington University in St. Louis, with a minor in Art History. She also studied at the Santa Reparata Printmaking Studio in Florence, Italy, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been exhibited in solo and two person shows at Elliot Smith Contemporary Art in St. Louis, Fontbonne University, and The Contemporary Art Workshop in Chicago, and she has taught painting and drawing at Webster University. 

After moving to Philadelphia in 1999, Elisa drew inspiration from early motherhood, later stepping back to focus on family life. When she returned to her studio, she found freedom in its privacy—space to explore materials, ideas, and her own artistic voice, apart from outside influences. Over the past fifteen years, her continued practice has shaped a distinct process and visual language, and she now looks forward to reengaging in dialogue with the wider art world.

Statement

“My recent paintings create private worlds in which overlooked and sometimes broken bits of everyday objects, tiny natural forms, and even space itself become animate and full of subjective meaning. The work arises from the desire to slow down, look closely and define my own sense of reality while also relating to the larger world. Sometimes those two desires are in conflict. Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott observed that artists are fueled by “the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.” My work dances on that boundary, inviting the viewer in with glimpses of recognizable objects while also remaining mysterious. 

At the core of my practice is the question: How is our interpretation of what we see shaped by personal history? Each of us encounters the world through a distinct lens, informed by experience and memory. The iterative nature of my process itself becomes a personal lab on how individual perception develops and retains integrity within a large, loud world. 

I develop each piece through an extended process that unfolds across photography, gouache, and oil painting. I begin by constructing miniature spaces of tiny domestic and natural objects, further complicated by the use of glass, reflections and water.  I then photograph the scene, capturing details that can’t be seen with the naked eye. From these images, I create gouache studies, which I then photograph. When I enlarge those photos new layers of information are revealed, including drips, marks, and ghosts of earlier decisions. The much larger oil paintings synthesize these multiple sources, holding in tension the illusionistic space of photography and the material presence of paint. 

Because this process can take months or years of intimate engagement, objects and their relationships accrue meaning in my imagination. Time, accumulated decisions, and unseen layers remain embedded in the surface. The resulting spaces are indefinite, shifting, and at times vertiginous. They suggest that reality is not fixed or singular but layered, provisional, and in flux. Rather than offering resolution, the work dwells in uncertainty, embracing not-knowing as a necessary condition for discovery — and for connection."

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Nanci Hersh 

She/ Her

Bio

Nanci Hersh is a mixed-media artist working across painting, sculpture, and installation. Her practice explores how personal experience intersects with collective memory, and how moments of change, rupture, and renewal take form through material, process, and repetition. Through layered surfaces and tactile constructions, her work traces a process of discovery and transformation, where meaning accumulates through making and unexpected connections.

Hersh has exhibited nationally at venues including the Delaware Contemporary, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art in New York, the Museum of Encaustic Art in Santa Fe, and the Monmouth Museum in New Jersey. She is the recipient of three Purchase Awards from the Hawai'i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and three Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grants. Her work is held in public and corporate collections including Johnson and Johnson and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Statement

Water has always been my center. Growing up near the Jersey Shore, living and surfing in Hawaiʻi for many years, and now sitting beside our backyard pond, water is where I return to myself. It is where I meditate, practice yoga, and paint. Where I hike along White Clay Creek and watch life shift above and below the surface. Water taught me early what I now understand as the essential condition of being: everything is constantly in flux.

This is also how I understand the body. Experience doesn't pass through us cleanly. It settles, accumulates, resurfaces. Memory is physical. It is what can be held, altered, or released. My work begins with this truth and with presence, the practice of staying close enough to notice what is moving.

Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, I build in layers the way water builds: through repetition, accumulation, and interruption. The pond and the creek are not simply subjects or backdrops. They are teachers of process. Life there is continually moving and changing with the weather, the seasons, and moment to moment. From this, I make nets, webs, and nests from mixed media and found objects, structures that hold, filter, and catch the minutiae of our lives, the way water catches light, debris, and reflection all at once.

Materials carry their own histories, and I work with them in ways that allow both structure and unpredictability to coexist, much like water itself, which is simultaneously yielding and forceful, transparent and deep. I am drawn to moments of change, rupture, and renewal: where what was fixed breaks open and what is new begins. The body is my landscape, marked by time and everything it has carried. What emerges in the work is not a fixed narrative but an open space, where the personal becomes shared, where the surface gives way, and where, as always, something continues to move beneath.”