Duo Exhibition: Between Us
Cindy Hsu Zell & Carmen McNall
Dates: May 2 - 30, 2026
Reception: May 2 | 6-8 PM
Glass Rice is proud to present Between Us a duo exhibition of new sculptures by Cindy Hsu Zell and paintings by Carmen McNall. In this exhibition, both artists approach the body as something both held and continually unfolding — shaped through gesture, embedded in material, and extended across time. Suspended between what feels ancient and what has yet to arrive, these forms suggest that the body can carry multiple moments at once.
Zell’s ceramic wall works emerge from an intuitive, process-driven practice grounded in touch and perception. Her Gestures series gives form to fleeting bodily movements—an embrace, a lean, a subtle shift in posture translated into softly contoured shapes. Fired clay preserves the memory of softness, holding these movements in suspension as both record and transformation. Drawing from the Light and Space movement, her luminous surfaces refract their surroundings, engaging in a playful dialogue between color, light, and shadow. These works hover between artifact and proposition — equally suggestive of something unearthed and something not yet realized by inviting the viewer into a shifting field of reflection and embodied perception.
McNall’s practice approaches the body through a hybrid material language of painting and wood-carving, where intricate patterns, carved texture, and expanses of saturated color coexist. Her faceless, goddess-like figures occupy interior landscapes that collapse distinctions between the ancient and the speculative. Positioned in states of rest and quiet strength, they function as vessels carrying tension, energy, and intuition across their surfaces. Through carving into the painted ground, McNall embeds gesture directly into the structure of the work, reinforcing the physicality of the handmade while suggesting a deeper continuity between body and environment. These figures appear timeless and otherworldly, inhabiting a space where histories and futures fold into one another.
Together, Zell and McNall approach the body not as a fixed image, but as something continually shaped through gesture, perception, and material. Where Zell distills movement into minimal, abstracted forms, McNall expands it into a symbolic and figural language; where Zell’s works engage through light, reflection, and subtle spatial shifts, McNall’s unfold through pattern, texture, and narrative presence. Across these approaches, the body emerges as both form and vessel in Between Us — something that holds, carries, and transmits experience across time, reasserting the handmade and the sensorial against increasingly disembodied modes of living and seeing.
Cindy Hsu Zell & Carmen McNall
Dates: May 2 - 30, 2026
Reception: May 2 | 6-8 PM
Glass Rice is proud to present Between Us a duo exhibition of new sculptures by Cindy Hsu Zell and paintings by Carmen McNall. In this exhibition, both artists approach the body as something both held and continually unfolding — shaped through gesture, embedded in material, and extended across time. Suspended between what feels ancient and what has yet to arrive, these forms suggest that the body can carry multiple moments at once.
Zell’s ceramic wall works emerge from an intuitive, process-driven practice grounded in touch and perception. Her Gestures series gives form to fleeting bodily movements—an embrace, a lean, a subtle shift in posture translated into softly contoured shapes. Fired clay preserves the memory of softness, holding these movements in suspension as both record and transformation. Drawing from the Light and Space movement, her luminous surfaces refract their surroundings, engaging in a playful dialogue between color, light, and shadow. These works hover between artifact and proposition — equally suggestive of something unearthed and something not yet realized by inviting the viewer into a shifting field of reflection and embodied perception.
McNall’s practice approaches the body through a hybrid material language of painting and wood-carving, where intricate patterns, carved texture, and expanses of saturated color coexist. Her faceless, goddess-like figures occupy interior landscapes that collapse distinctions between the ancient and the speculative. Positioned in states of rest and quiet strength, they function as vessels carrying tension, energy, and intuition across their surfaces. Through carving into the painted ground, McNall embeds gesture directly into the structure of the work, reinforcing the physicality of the handmade while suggesting a deeper continuity between body and environment. These figures appear timeless and otherworldly, inhabiting a space where histories and futures fold into one another.
Together, Zell and McNall approach the body not as a fixed image, but as something continually shaped through gesture, perception, and material. Where Zell distills movement into minimal, abstracted forms, McNall expands it into a symbolic and figural language; where Zell’s works engage through light, reflection, and subtle spatial shifts, McNall’s unfold through pattern, texture, and narrative presence. Across these approaches, the body emerges as both form and vessel in Between Us — something that holds, carries, and transmits experience across time, reasserting the handmade and the sensorial against increasingly disembodied modes of living and seeing.