New York, NY - My Pet Ram is pleased to present Net Vein, a group exhibition curated by Lindsay Burke and Beth Parker, featuring works by Rachel Borenstein, J.A Feng, Linnéa Gad, Whit Harris, and Richard Tinkler. The exhibition opens on Friday, March 14, with a reception from 6–9pm.

Inspired by fascia — the connective tissue that supports and binds the body’s interior — Net Vein examines how this sensory network mirrors patterns found in nature.  Each piece in the exhibition carries traces of what came before, growing organically yet intentionally — like ripples expanding from a droplet, or cells assembling into a honeycomb. Layers of paint, paper, and clay reference porous membranes and webs of veins, mapping the spaces where the body and nature converge.

Often working on a miniature scale, Rachel Borenstein meticulously renders delicate shifts of crinkled paper in oil paint and micron pen.  A single eye, half hidden within the topographic folds, returns our gaze, challenging the perception of a two-dimensional illusion. Another piece of paper, this time painted in oil, shows a bright green leaf, its veins and pockmarks creasing along a tissue-thin surface, recalling the fragility of human skin.

By depicting vessels – a set of pelvic bones and a woven basket – with layers of dense, fibrous, undiluted paint, J.A Feng asserts that they are more than just their potential to hold.  Acidic and opaque, the pelvis fills its central composition, declaring its presence, with or without company. The basket, poetically described in a softly lit space, compels the eye to look between its strands, where negative space looks back.

Linnéa Gad’s folded screen-like sculpture of paper pulp, cardboard, and steel, mimics boundaries found throughout living organisms – separating one space from another, yet porous as a membrane. In another piece, blown amber glass, which she describes as “the closest earthly thing to liquid sunlight”, bulges like an amoeba, its welded steel casing and porcelain base serving to both protect and restrain.

In Whit Harris’s paintings, Black female figures melt into their surroundings as if in a hallucination, a letting go of control that inspires both bliss and, perhaps, dread.  Her expressive, gestural marks merge flesh with landscape, questioning the relationship between individual and environment, and if it should be accepted, avoided, or altered – a haze that is pierced not only by the tip of a knife, but two open eyes.

Woven with rhythmic brushstrokes, Richard Tinkler’s paintings throb and breathe. In one, a contained palette of blood reds and velvet blacks emanates heat like the deep interior of a body, or the core of a planet. In another, the bright teals and blues flicker like sunlight through a canopy of trees. While the paintings’ thick impasto skins firmly ground them in the physical world, soft pointillist shifts in color and light imply an interior divinity.

Net Vein will be on view beginning Friday, March 14 through Sunday, April 14, 2025. The gallery is located at 48 Hester Street in the Lower East Side. Gallery hours are Thursday - Sunday from 12-6pm and by   appointment. For more information, please email info@mypetram.com.