Where We Find Ourselves

Two person exhibition featuring Helen Shulman & Julia Jensen

June 27th – July 26th, 2026
Opening Reception & Artist Conversation: Friday, June 27th, 3:00PM – 5:00PM
Edgewater Gallery on the Green – 6 Merchants Row, Middlebury

Abstraction is often described by what it is not. It is not representational. It is not literal. It is not a direct depiction of the world. Yet the paintings of Julia Jensen and Helen Shulman suggest something quite different: abstraction may be one of the most direct ways of speaking about lived experience.

In Where We Find Ourselves, both artists use gesture, color, texture, and movement to explore the emotional terrain that exists beneath the surface of everyday life. Their paintings do not seek to illustrate a particular place, event, or narrative. Instead, they inhabit the spaces where memory, feeling, and perception converge.

For Julia Jensen, the landscape remains a point of departure, but not a destination. Her paintings are gestural, luminous, and deeply atmospheric. Forms dissolve and reemerge, creating spaces that feel simultaneously familiar and elusive. Her work suggests moments of transition and reflection, inviting viewers into works that are less about observing a scene than experiencing a state of being. Rooted in the natural world, Jensen’s paintings become meditations on presence, movement, and our relationship to place.

Helen Shulman’s work similarly balances structure and intuition. Built through layers of oil, cold wax, drawing, scraping, and revision, her paintings emerge through a process she describes as both intellectual and emotional. Often beginning with observed landscapes, figures, or memories, the work gradually transforms into something less fixed and more expansive. Her paintings carry traces of stories, experiences, and associations, while remaining open enough for viewers to bring their own. Her work reveals abstraction not as an escape from meaning, but as a vessel for it.

Together, Jensen and Shulman remind us that mark-making is never simply mark-making. Every gesture records a decision, a memory, an impulse, a hesitation. A painted line can function as a sentence. A scrape through pigment can feel like an act of excavation. Layers accumulate like experiences, obscuring and revealing what came before.

The title of the exhibition reflects this search for meaning in unexpected places. We find ourselves not only in moments of clarity, but also in ambiguity. We find ourselves in the periphery, in the subtle and the fleeting, in what cannot be fully articulated. We find ourselves in memory, in loss, in wonder, and in the spaces between words. Sometimes we find ourselves in landscapes. Sometimes in color. Sometimes in paintings that are not about us at all until, suddenly, they are.

Please join us in the conversation on abstract art-making with Helen Shulman and Julia Jensen during our Opening Reception– Saturday, June 27th, 3:00 – 5:00pm.