September 6, 2025 – October 4, 2025
Artwork by:
Anna Brass,
John Brown and
Kelly Popoff
This is intelligent and playful artwork – and for me, there is something akin to happiness in it. As though in defiance of all that is grim and leaden. Anyway, It plays in the face of all that, in spite of it even. It is a hopeful exhibition. It is material evidence that our shared humanity persists. Chinks of light drawing on the wells of unfathomable love.
These artworks are idiosyncratic and guileless microcosms, distilled from heavier matter. They are invitations to explore again, as we all once did, the strangeness and wonder of the world.
Anna Brass
Anna was born in Cambridge (1988) and grew up in Greater London. She studied at Fine Art at Newcastle University (BA) and Experimental Film at Kingston University (MA). In 2018-19 and was the Sainsbury Scholar in Painting and Sculpture at The British School at Rome; in 2020. She was a recipient of the Stuart Croft Foundation Moving Image Award. In 2023 Anna made a quasi-science fiction film called ‘Haukebodde Hacoud Hacwod Aukud’, which was recently acquired by the Arts Council Collection. In 2023/24. Anna was artist in residence at The Ferens Gallery (Hull), where she made a new body of work in response to two Canaletto paintings.
John Brown
John Brown is an Edinburgh-based artist and teacher who uses a wide range of sources, methods and formats to make large, complex installations that place small multiple scenarios and objects against a backdrop of the epic to create new narratives. At the core of all his work, there is an obsession with drawing, painting, model-making and an interest in the heart-breaking amount of imagery and stuff that the world contains at this point in history. Recent work has explored the idea of the ‘unrealised project’ as a way of investigating large-scale or potentially impossible undertakings through small-scale proposal drawings, paintings and models.
John was born in Dumfries in the southwest of Scotland and received an MFA from Edinburgh College of Art in 1991. He returned there to teach and now works with students from all year groups. He has taught and lectured in art colleges around the world including Kansas State University (USA), Kyoto Seika (Japan) and SMFA Boston (USA). He has won various awards for his work including the William Littlejohn Award, Lyon and Turnbull Award for painting, Royal Scottish Academy Award, John Gray award and the Ucross Foundation residency award.
Kelly Popoff
Artist and teacher, Kelly Popoff, is an artist from the US and is based in Greenfield, MA. Kelly’s recent awards include: Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Drawing 2020, The Clowes Fund Fellowship and Residency, Vermont Studio Center 2019, Millay Colony Fellow 2018, The Artist’s Resource Trust Fellowship and Residency, Vermont Studio Center 2017, The Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation Grant 2017, a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation 2016, Finalist Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Painting 2016. Recent solo shows include For You at Pulp Gallery, Holyoke MA, American Snapshot at Melhop Gallery, South Lake Tahoe, NV, At Home with Our Histories at The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, O Children at Herter Gallery, The University of Massachusetts and Rock on Doily at Augusta Savage Gallery, The University of Massachusetts. Kelly has also exhibited in a number of international group shows.
