March 6-April 10, 2026
Twice Found Charlotte Saylor + Kiefer Ledell Waterman
Opening reception Friday, March 6 from 5-8 pm
Twice Found brings together two artists whose practices begin with moving through the world — walking, noticing, gathering, and allowing small encounters to shape what happens later in the studio. For both, these walks act as a kind of research, where overlooked objects and everyday textures become sparks for new visual ideas.
Each artist brings a strong painterly sensibility to the materials they collect. Surfaces, color and marks transform, turning fragments into expressive images and layered narratives. Saylor often folds in hints of personal history: echoes of family, memory, or daily life. Ledell Waterman’s collage paintings mix identity, pop culture, and emotional texture, using discarded objects as starting points for more complex, imaginative worlds.
Like field notes, the works in this exhibition record what the artists encounter, but also what they make of it. They trace a path from observation to interpretation, from the ordinary to the newly expressive. Together, they invite viewers to look closer, consider the stories held in everyday things, and see how meaning shifts when materials come back in from the world.
Charlotte Saylor Darkroom, 2026
Charlotte Saylor: “My practice centers on collecting and transforming fragments of lived experience into sculptural paintings. I gather found materials — camera boxes, cassette tapes, sticks, books, discarded palettes — and often hold onto them for years before they resurface in an artwork. These objects function as memory carriers and compositional elements, allowing me to build work that reflects daily observation and accumulated time. My paintings reference places that shape my life, including my studio in Chicago, Humboldt Park, Lake Michigan, and my childhood home in New Jersey. Through painting, cutting, tearing, stapling, and assembling, I create layered surfaces that merge abstraction with subtle references to environment, memory, and human presence.
I work spontaneously and responsively to the surrounding landscape through walking, journaling, photography, meditation, plein air painting, and material collection. I use oil paint, acrylic, watercolor, charcoal, pencils, paper, and canvas to absorb the rhythms and textures of the landscape while allowing locally gathered materials guide the direction and physical structure of the paintings I produce.
My work embraces what I think of as ‘serious play.’ Influenced by Dada and Neo-Dada strategies of recontextualization and material experimentation, I balance improvisation with formal concerns such as color harmony, spatial tension, and compositional balance. Architectural motifs — windows, thresholds, and structural divisions — frequently appear in my work, influenced by my father’s career as an architectural photographer and early exposure to observing and analyzing built environments.
I aim to create paintings that invite slow looking and encourage viewers to notice subtle details, recall personal memories, and reconnect with creative freedom. Ultimately, my work seeks to model an ongoing practice of attention — one rooted in curiosity, play, and sustained engagement with everyday life.”
Saylor grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. She received her BA in Art Studio from the University of California, Davis in 2019, and earned her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025.
Her work has been exhibited at EXPO Chicago, Secrist Beach Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art, Site:Brooklyn Gallery, Circle Contemporary, Patient Info, Ivory Gate Gallery, Purple Window Gallery, ARC Gallery, .liminal.projects., Art City, Union Street Gallery, Howling Pages, the Dittmar Memorial Gallery at Northwestern University, and SAIC Galleries. Her work is published in Secrist Beach’s Masterclass Exhibition Catalogue.
Kiefer Ledell Waterman is a Milwaukee artist who also works with found objects and materials. They go on weekly trash walks with a friend in and around the city. On these walks they, like a crow, are drawn to certain objects that have been discarded. Taking them from their initial context of trash the objects are added to found material collected over years. Kiefer layers and builds up patterns, leaving behind the marks of their passage. Stitched or glued to surfaces, materials interact and are embellished with the use of makeup and other pigments. The collage paintings span a wide variety of themes: the physical materials themselves, the natural world, the artist's day to day experience as a non-binary person, as well as humor and nostalgia with a visual language that borrows from popular culture. They also manage to hold onto a sort of unattainable ambiguity created by obscuring and placing blocks between viewer and surface.
Kiefer’s work is influenced by the artistic practice of Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, philosopher Graham Harman and Object Oriented Ontology, the layering and physical griminess of the paintings of Danica Lundy, and the detail and care for craft seen in hand work.
Kiefer graduated from UW-Milwaukee with a BFA in Drawing and Painting in 2012. They have a studio at the Nut Factory in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee.
Kiefer Ledell Waterman After The The Ships, 2025
Press release here