March 6-April 10, 2026
Twice Found Charlotte Saylor + Kiefer Ledell Waterman
Opening reception Friday, March 6 from 5-8 pm
Charlotte Saylor Windscape, 2024
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.
Kiefer Ledell Waterman Murmur, 2025
Charlotte Saylor is a Chicago-based artist whose practice involves collecting, composing, and painting. She forages for discarded objects such as cardboard or VHS tapes, arranging them in unexpected ways while still allowing for their previous forms to linger. The color, texture, and rhythm of the paint—whether it’s oil, acrylic, casein, or encaustic—recontextualize these objects, framing and holding them with care.
Saylor grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, and graduated from the University of California, Davis, in 2019 with a BA in Art Studio. In 2020, she moved to Florence, Italy, for an artist residency at the Santa Reparata International School of Art, where she began experimenting with unconventional painting materials such as wine and olive oil. This experimental approach continued and accelerated in her practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her MFA in the Painting and Drawing department in May 2025.
Her artwork 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. She also co-curated Synchronicities with Isaac Armendariz at Ivory Gate Gallery, featuring artwork by Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Ayanah Moor, among others. Saylor’s work is published in Secrist Beach’s Masterclass Exhibition Catalogue, which includes essays by exhibition co-curator Lisa Wainwright and SAIC professor Michelle Grabner.
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.