Pen + Brush is pleased to present Right About Now, featuring artists Hannah Layden, Lacey McKinney, Rowan Renee, and AV Ryan, an exhibition that tackles the present and explores what the recent work of four distinct artists says about right now. The show’s title is a reference to the fluidity of ‘the now’— a moment so resistant to definition and impossible to capture, especially in contemporary art, that by the time we’ve named it, it becomes the past. Right About Now, showcases new bodies of work from four artists whose most recent work deals, increasingly, with urgencies surrounding emotion and the body.

Each artist on view has created new and divergent processes—be it artistic labour as art object, reconfiguring human forms through cyanotypes, building new utopias where inclusivity reins on the neon-tinged surface of a painting, or pronouncing social tensions by building up thin paper layers and buffing them with gesso to create sculpture that looks as heavy as marble but is, in fact, lite. These are the ways in which artists are creating, right about now. It’s ongoing. It’s a part of the immediate past and it’s a part of the immediate future. But we do not know for how long.