Balancing Ecosystems

The exhibition Balancing Ecosystems features the work of four artists: Lauren Comito, Milcah Bassel, Amanda Thackray, and Rachel Frank. Their multimedia artworks invite viewers to explore the visible, hidden, and symbolic aspects of natural beauty found in aquatic environments. Each artist expresses ideas of interconnection between organisms within ecosystems through imagery such as grids, nets, and repeating patterns.

This idea for this curated exhibition was conceived after visual artist Lauren Comito received a Community Art Grant from the Lower Adirondack Regional Arts Council in 2025. The New York City and Huletts Landing-based visual artist used this grant to examine and portray copepods, tiny crustacean zooplankton, along with aquatic plants found in Lake George, bringing to light the interconnected systems that contribute to the purity of the lake.

Comito enlarges the scale of these microscopic organisms through cyanotype prints, making them visible. The images reveal the delicate and intricate structures of these tiny creatures that play an essential role in filtering and purifying the water, elevating them to the status of “guardians of the lake.”

Milcah Bassel, whose work has been exhibited at the Rubin Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and other venues both nationally and internationally, applies unique materials and processes to explore both cultural and natural structures. Her pieces in the exhibition are inspired by the use of a grid to represent water in ancient civilizations, creating intersecting rippling patterns on unique pulp papers.

Amanda Thackray, who is currently the inaugural Environmental Protection Agency Artist in Residence for the lower Passaic River in New Jersey, also utilizes grid patterns in handmade paper designs that combine notions of nature, industry, and human experience. Her netlike imagery is a malleable grid referencing both organic material and human intervention within an environment.

Brooklyn-based artist and wildlife rehabilitator Rachel Frank employs various material processes, including ceramics, fabric, and drawing. The material transformations that occur in the art-making process mirror the restorative processes that take place in the healing of lives and habitats. The repeating patterns in her work express the interconnections and exchanges between species.

Images:
Top: Lauren Comito, Postcard
Middle left:  Rachel Frank, Wading Foot Tangle (detail), 2024, Ink, watercolor, and pigment on paper, 11″ x 15″
Middle right: Milcah Bassel, Untitled (detail), 2024, Color pencil on black Fabriano paper, 9″ x 12″