HEMPHILL

HEMPHILL HEMPHILL is a contemporary art advisory with a 33 year history as a contemporary gallery in Washington, DC.

The Preamble Paintingsby Mark KelnerMy art is rooted in the refraction of overlapping, and often competing, national ide...
09/04/2026

The Preamble Paintings
by Mark Kelner

My art is rooted in the refraction of overlapping, and often competing, national identities.

It’s a practice that documents and distorts imagery drawn from art history, popular culture, advertising, and the built environment, revealing the contradictions embedded within these familiar symbols of contemporary life. I’m interested in the ways such images can function as false representations of ideals and as false idols within a system of consumerism in which both things and people become commodities.

This year has been a particularly charged one in which to engage these themes. The obvious milestone of America’s semiquincentennial helped shape my solo exhibition, American Mosaic, a retrospective of work exploring ciphers, symbols, slogans, and logos.

At the same time, the deepening divisions within the country have felt especially immediate in Washington, DC, where the political is inseparable from the everyday. Thousands of National Guard troops are now deployed throughout the city, while the fundamental question of Home Rule, and the rights of those who live here, remains under threat.

In response to this cultural moment, these three new paintings engage with the language of aspiration and the reality of contested ground. They are simultaneously absurdist and perfectly serious. By recasting the 52 word Preamble to the United States Constitution through the visual look of The Home Depot, Dunkin’ Donuts, and the New York Post, I continue my examination of the role of words in shaping collective history and examining belief.

At the center of these works is a persistent question: what happens when the language of our founding ideals is filtered through the optical vocabulary of contemporary commerce, consumption, and mass media? In bringing ancient political language into the present through the codes of branding, I seek to expose the distance and the oft-uneasy continuity between the ideals we inherit and the culture through which We (The People) now encounter them.

Home Depot Constitution, 2026
acrylic on canvas
60 x 54 inches

09/03/2026

ANNE ROWLAND: It's Breaking Apart Like Nothing You've Ever Seen is on view on hemphillartworks.com, Artsy and Artnet. The exhibition will remain on view through October 18, 2026.

Spinning as fast as you can in circles, arms outstretched, you watch the world blur—trees become abstract shapes, colors intensify, and familiar surroundings transform. When you finally hit the ground, dizzy and disoriented, the world around you bends into something simultaneously familiar and new.

It's Breaking Apart Like Nothing You've Ever Seen features fourteen new works by Anne Rowland, each transforming a real location into something otherworldly.

"I work with aerial imagery from Google Maps’ “Satellite View.” I begin by making hundreds of screenshots and then assemble them in Photoshop into a large, legible aerial view of a location. This composite becomes the ground from which the image is transformed with software.

Through processes of stretching, warping, and reworking, the source material slowly departs from its origin. Recognizable geographies loosen and reorganize themselves into something more ambiguous. I manipulate the imagery, looking for the moment when something unexpected or foreign emerges out of it, unstable and turbulent.

These pictures exist at the intersection of photography, software, and painting. The photographic component is the machine-made aerial image itself. Software operates throughout the process: in the primary automated capture of the satellite imagery, in its assembly for online viewing, in my secondary act of capture through screenshots, and finally in the digital manipulation that shapes the image into its finished form. The result is a picture that begins as a kind of documentation and ends up as an abstract invention."

~Anne Rowland

Click the link in our bio to view the exhibition.

The Preamble Paintingsby Mark KelnerMy art is rooted in the refraction of overlapping, and often competing, national ide...
09/03/2026

The Preamble Paintings
by Mark Kelner

My art is rooted in the refraction of overlapping, and often competing, national identities.

It’s a practice that documents and distorts imagery drawn from art history, popular culture, advertising, and the built environment, revealing the contradictions embedded within these familiar symbols of contemporary life. I’m interested in the ways such images can function as false representations of ideals and as false idols within a system of consumerism in which both things and people become commodities.

This year has been a particularly charged one in which to engage these themes. The obvious milestone of America’s semiquincentennial helped shape my solo exhibition, American Mosaic, a retrospective of work exploring ciphers, symbols, slogans, and logos.

At the same time, the deepening divisions within the country have felt especially immediate in Washington, DC, where the political is inseparable from the everyday. Thousands of National Guard troops are now deployed throughout the city, while the fundamental question of Home Rule, and the rights of those who live here, remains under threat.

In response to this cultural moment, these three new paintings engage with the language of aspiration and the reality of contested ground. They are simultaneously absurdist and perfectly serious. By recasting the 52 word Preamble to the United States Constitution through the visual look of The Home Depot, Dunkin’ Donuts, and the New York Post, I continue my examination of the role of words in shaping collective history and examining belief.

At the center of these works is a persistent question: what happens when the language of our founding ideals is filtered through the optical vocabulary of contemporary commerce, consumption, and mass media? In bringing ancient political language into the present through the codes of branding, I seek to expose the distance and the oft-uneasy continuity between the ideals we inherit and the culture through which We (The People) now encounter them.

Tabloid Constitution, (New York Post), 2026
acrylic on canvas
66 x 52 inches

ANNE ROWLAND: It's Breaking Apart Like Nothing You've Ever Seen is on view at hemphillartworks.com, Artsy and Artnet thr...
09/02/2026

ANNE ROWLAND: It's Breaking Apart Like Nothing You've Ever Seen is on view at hemphillartworks.com, Artsy and Artnet through October 18, 2026.

Click the link in our bio to view the V. Exhibition!

How Bad Can It Get (Dulles Virginia - Red Green, and Blue), 2026
archival pigment print on rag paper

Today is the last day to view the V. Exhibition, Optimistic Objects on hemphillartworks.com, Artsy and Artnet.It is not ...
08/31/2026

Today is the last day to view the V. Exhibition, Optimistic Objects on hemphillartworks.com, Artsy and Artnet.

It is not a fantasy or the fancy language of an art dealer; empirical research confirms what artists have long understood: aesthetic experiences alter and often benefit human psychology, brain function, and physical well-being. These rewards can be slow to arrive or immediate. Sometimes one goes to art to contemplate. Other times one wishes to be uplifted, carried away by a pattern, or a scene, or a combination of colors. The creation of art is inherently generous; therefore, art is inherently optimistic. For your enjoyment, we have selected five artworks we believe do the trick.

Link in bio!

Looking back at Spring studio views with Rush Baker IV as the school year starts back up at SAIC.
08/29/2026

Looking back at Spring studio views with Rush Baker IV as the school year starts back up at SAIC.

Studio visits with Sophia Belkin > Sophia Belkin uses dye painting, embroidery and textile collage to create intricate a...
08/27/2026

Studio visits with Sophia Belkin >

Sophia Belkin uses dye painting, embroidery and textile collage to create intricate and dynamic compositions that reference natural processes. Her work is deeply inspired by the lush, humid, verdant nature of swamps in the gulf south, as well as the wetlands in the mid Atlantic. She works from a collection of original photographs that are printed on chiffon and attached to dyed backgrounds using a computerized embroidery machine. The appliqué technique references craft and fashion, while the content of the work mimics biological structures and movements. Like membranes within the body, or cell walls of a flower- the forms appear both permeable and rigid. Calibrating between intuitive gestural mark making and the controlled line of the embroidery machine, the textile paintings create layered, multidimensional environments that imply a constant state of regeneration, expansion and flux. Her paintings explore our inextricable interconnectedness to the environment, and consider alternative futures for our ecological landscape. She uses a lens of sci-fi and abstraction to imagine how our ecology and our humanity can continue to morph, evolve and adapt in the face of unprecedented uncertainty.

ANNE ROWLAND: It's Breaking Apart Like Nothing You've Ever SeenV. ExhibitionSeptember 1 - October 18, 2026It's Breaking ...
08/26/2026

ANNE ROWLAND: It's Breaking Apart Like Nothing You've Ever Seen
V. Exhibition
September 1 - October 18, 2026

It's Breaking Apart Like Nothing You've Ever Seen is the fifth in an ongoing series of virtual exhibitions presented by Hemphill Artworks.

Anne Rowland received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the joint program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, and Tufts University, Medford, MA, with additional studies at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. After splitting her time between rural Virginia and New York City from 2005 to 2019, she relocated full time to Virginia in 2019. This is Rowland’s fourth solo presentation at HEMPHILL since 2006.

On view at hemphillartworks.com, Artsy & Artnet

The V. Exhibition, Optimistic Objects, is on view on hemphillartworks.com, Artsy and Artnet through August 31, 2026.Soph...
08/24/2026

The V. Exhibition, Optimistic Objects, is on view on hemphillartworks.com, Artsy and Artnet through August 31, 2026.

Sophia Belkin
Snow Blink, 2024
digitally printed fabric, screenprint, dye, and embroidery on denim
24 x 22 x 1 1/2 inches

Everything about stretched canvas defies motion: the hard stops at each edge, the fabric’s warp and weft, a fixed field of microscopic vertical and horizontal lines, asserting a near-undeniable grid. All exist before any paint is applied or images conjured. The Western pedagogical progression, with its development of perspective, made a fixed-ness inherent to the drama of the rectilinear presentation of a painting. Even after early 20th-century artists began bucking the grid, their paintings inherently referred to the illusion of time frozen, captured. After all, Cubism is cubistic. How can an artist defy the grid of the stretched canvas?

Sophia Belkin takes a radical approach in an intuitive move against the grid. She is neither a painter nor a fabric artist. Yet her work is fabric-based and presented as painting. She stains, screens, and digitally prints into various fabrics, moving colors fluidly, unconscious of the grid below. Then the artist stitches together the pieces of fabric, asking our fingers to wander the threaded paths as if following a bumblebee tracking a scent. Belkin’s pictures are more concerned with their organic energy than being explainable. One feels as though we are looking through the window frame of a glass-bottomed boat, viewing only a part of a powerful natural world that freely disregards the possibility of being captured by a grid or anything else.

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