Are You Experienced

Patrick Brennan, Linda Sormin, Stephanie McMahon

Opening Reception: Friday, Oct. 16, 3 to 5 p.m.

Show Dates: Oct. 16 to Dec. 18

Location: Pratt Munson Gallery

Exhibition Statement

Are You Experienced borrows its title from Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 debut album. Provocative and open to interpretation, the exhibition centers on ideas of exploration, discovery, and lived experience. Through painting, sculpture, sound, and installation, Patrick Brennan, Stephanie McMahon, and Linda Sormin create three interconnected environments that unfold sequentially throughout the gallery. While each installation retains its own distinct language, the works remain in constant conversation, linked through material, space, sound, and sightlines that connect one room to the next.

Rather than presenting separate bodies of work, the exhibition asks viewers to move through a series of evolving experiences. Sculptural armatures become both objects and thresholds. Openings, gaps, and layered structures reveal glimpses of what lies ahead, encouraging movement through the galleries as an act of searching. Sound carries across spaces, dissolving the boundaries between installations and creating an invisible thread that binds the exhibition together. As viewers move forward, the exhibition gradually opens toward a horizon, a destination that is never fully fixed but continually discovered through the act of looking. In this way, Are You Experienced is less about arriving than about the experience of searching itself.

Linda Sormin explores fragility, upheaval, migration, survival, and change through sculpture, sound, and site-responsive installations. Her ceramic-based sculptures integrate hand-cut watercolor paintings and found materials that accumulate on armatures, simultaneously responding to and generating architectural space. Sound extends beyond the physical objects, creating a connective presence that resonates throughout the exhibition.

Patrick Brennan's paintings function as records of the places, encounters, and situations that shape his experience. Working with acrylic, spray paint, collage, silk, popsicle sticks, mylar, foam, paper, found objects, video, and sound, he builds layered environments that move fluidly between painting, sculpture, and installation. Existing both on the wall and as freestanding structures, the works create moments of transparency that allow viewers to look through and beyond them, framing glimpses of the next gallery while reinforcing the exhibition's recurring search for a horizon. Brennan has long resisted the pursuit of a polished or fixed style, favoring a practice in which the process of searching and making remains as important as the finished work.

Stephanie McMahon's precise yet improvisational approach to gestural abstraction creates connections between painting and the surrounding environment. Her site-responsive works investigate how paintings are encountered, weaving through referential forms, color, and elemental shapes with both intuitive and deliberate decisions. Positioned as the final destination within the exhibition, her paintings become a horizon that has been visible, obscured, and anticipated throughout the viewer's journey, a place of arrival that remains open, expansive, and continually shifting.

Artist Statements

Patrick Brennan

Patrick Brennan is a painter and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the space between painting, sculpture, installation, and moving image. Through immersive environments and materially driven works, he investigates perception, memory, and the ways physical space shapes experience. Incorporating repurposed materials, architectural structures, and cinematic references, his work navigates themes of searching, orientation, and the elusive horizon—where abstraction and lived experience continually intersect.

Brennan is an assistant professor of painting and drawing at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented by Halsey McKay Gallery. His work has been presented at venues including MoMA PS1, Artists Space, Galerie Lelong, the Andy Warhol Museum, and Anthology Film Archives. He is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and the 2026 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. A founding member of Essex Flowers in New York City, Brennan’s work is held in the collections of the Everson Museum of Art, the U.S. Embassy in Bahrain, Cornell University, and the Scholes Library at Alfred University.

Stephanie McMahon

Stephanie McMahon’s paintings extract and distill her observations and perceptions of a particular environment while presenting the possibilities of abstraction. Weaving in and out of referential forms, color, and elemental shapes, her work balances intuitive, spontaneous gesture with deliberate structure. Luminous brushstrokes impart a sense of physicality while gliding weightlessly across smooth surfaces. Geometric structures counteract the immediacy of the gesture as figure-ground relationships oscillate and conflate, revealing a sense of time and continual movement. Through this measured adjustment, McMahon transforms seemingly free flowing gestures into deliberate acts, simultaneously referring to the intuitive action of the body while invoking a stillness and precision in the intertwining of distinct marks. This process creates an active space for exploration that connects the present activity of painting to a previous experience, allowing McMahon to work in a constant negotiation with the elements as they shift in relation to one another. McMahon approaches painting as image, object, and action, expanding the possibilities of the picture plane.

Stephanie McMahon is a professor of painting at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University and co-founder of the Alfred/Düsseldorf MFA in painting and residency program. She has been included in exhibitions at Galerie plan. d., Düsseldorf, Germany; Devos Art Museum, Mich.; Heaven Gallery, Chicago, Ill.; Northern Illinois Art Museum; Tang Contemporary, Beijing, China; Gravity Gallery, North Adams, Mass.; and Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, N.Y., among others. McMahon is recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts Tri-County Artist Grant, Memorial Art Gallery Award of Excellence, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Grant. She recently completed artist residencies at Two Coats of Paint in New York; the International Center for the Arts in Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy; and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Her work has been reviewed and published in Two Coats of Paint, Art Maze Magazine, The Boston Globe, Hyperallergic, and New American Paintings Blog and Magazine, among others.

Free and Open to the Public
The Pratt Munson Gallery is located at Munson Museum of Art at 310 Genesee St., Utica, N.Y.

Gallery Hours
Tuesday to Saturday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday: noon to 5 p.m.