SPRING AWAKENING

GROUP EXHIBITION
APRIL 25-MAY 24, 2026

OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, APRIL 25, 6-8PM

CLOSING RECEPTION: SUNDAY, MAY 24, 1-3PM

A 4-PERSON GROUP SHOW:

MARY LYNN BURKE|SYDNEY CROSKERY|AMANDA MEARS|JULIA SCHWARTZ

The Middle Room is pleased to present Spring Awakening, an exhibition featuring works by Mary Lynn Burke, Sydney Croskery, Amanda Mears, and Julia Schwartz, on view from April 25 - May 24, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 25, from 6-8pm. Curated by Shannon Rae Fincke, the exhibition brings together four artists whose work expresses psychological, emotional, and physiological experiences shaped by their immediate surroundings. Moving between varying degrees of spontaneity and abstraction—from altered physical realities to action painting—they are united by an intimate awareness of shifting mood, temperature, light, and energy.

Spring Awakening borrows its title from the provocative 1891 German play, as a thematic nod to its exploration of time, tactility, introspection, and discovery—where hope arises amidst societal conflict, hypocrisy, repression, and suffering. Emerging from the gallery’s first pause in programming since its inception, Spring Awakening reflects a period of intentional rest and recalibration aligned with seasonal cycles. The exhibition embraces spring not as a purely uplifting gesture, but as a complex moment of reemergence—marked by both fragility and endurance.

Across the exhibition, color, line and shape operate as dynamic forces, guiding compositions rich in movement, vitality, and emotional depth. Though distinct in approach, the four artists engage in painting as a responsive act—highly attuned to internal states and external conditions—resulting in both melancholic and optimistic works with a shared sense of strength and sensitivity. Together, their work creates a dialogue around transitions, tenacity and transformation.

At once a respite and a call to pay closer attention to interconnectedness, impermanence, and the human experience, the exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the rhythms of abundance, decay and renewal. Set against a backdrop of contemporary instability, Spring Awakening considers the resilience of living systems and the persistence of growth, even within profound uncertainty and positions alertness as a quiet yet powerful form of resistance.

Mary Lynn Burke (Brzuchanski) lives and works in Lexington, MA. She creates vibrant abstract paintings that translate time spent in nature, immersing herself in the textures and scents of forests, water, and meadows. Through this process, complexities of belonging and identity become distilled and clarified, revealing a reciprocal relationship with the natural world. Gestures and symbols of flora and fauna emerge through layered, instinctual painting processes that reflect cycles of growth and connection. Often beginning with cyanotype, she collaborates with natural elements to imprint herself and her surroundings directly onto the canvas, followed by soak-staining and varied and intuitive applications of acrylic, spray paint, oil and pastel that retain a visceral sense of touch.

Sydney Croskery, born and based in Los Angeles, makes paintings that are both materially and conceptually rigorous. Her process combines detailed action painting coinciding with writing, connecting the highs and lows in the physical process of abstract painting to political, emotional, overwhelming and hilarious aspects of our world. Through titles and accompanying essays, her work connects personal experience with broader societal conditions, creating a layered visual record of the present moment and complexity of contemporary life.

Amanda Mears, British-born and Los Angeles-based, makes paintings influenced by developments in plant science that show how linked we are to our environment. Her work reflects the understanding that humans exist in constant exchange with our surroundings—sharing microbes, fungi and viruses—and are a part of the larger elemental and molecular system that connects all carbon-based beings. These ideas are realized through arrangements of line, color, and shape that emphasize interdependence and connection. Her compositions suggest a fluid boundary between body and environment, where all living systems remain intertwined. In a time when painting the natural world feels inseparable from concerns about its fragility, her paintings offer a sense of hope.

Julia Schwartz, based in El Cerrito, California, creates paintings that straddle figuration and abstraction and are deeply influenced by her background in psychoanalytic study and practice. She approaches painting as a dialogic process that parallels analytic experience—an exchange between making and receiving, as vital as any other language. Color, indexical mark making, and symbols (such as archways, crosses, and waves) materialize in her paintings as means to convey and process personal and global events such as her daughter’s sudden passing, her husband’s life-threatening illness, political upheaval. Since relocating mid-pandemic from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, her surroundings—an untamed field, a growing orchard and garden—have become integral to her imagery.

The Middle Room is open Saturdays & Sundays from 1-3pm—for inquiries & appointments, contact Info@TheMiddleRoomGallery.com