Hold and Release is a two person exhibition with painter Marion Wilson and photographer Sophie Barbasch at The Gallery at Heimbold Arts Center, Sarah Lawrence College in January 2026- March 2020. It presents a year-long collaborative conversation consisting of portraits, landscapes, and sketchbook studies. Centering themes of the body, aging, femininity, intimacy, vulnerability, and the family, the images explore everyday moments with humor and honesty.

Mark Alice Durant writes in the exhibition essay…”especially for the large-scale images for which, reminiscent of the anarchic humor of Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, Wilson dips a household mop into a bucket and attacks the paper like a dirty floor. Broad washes of color spread out across the paper, staining, blooming, and drying into unpredictable textures, after which, with a more delicate brush, she fills in details to the lips and eyes. This liquid birth is even more emphatic when one learns that many of Wilson’s images were made in her floating studio, a houseboat moored in the  brackish waters of a Martha’s Vineyard lagoon. She says: “The true collaborator in this process is the water—unpredictable, alive, and resistant to mastery.”