I’ve seen the rings of Saturn / And the craters on the Moon / Oceans of Venus in the middle of June / Mirrors of Mercury and Mars’ electric skies / Pearls of Neptune in Jupiter’s eyes
— “Synthesize Me,” written by Joel Dunsany, performed by The Space Lady.
IRL Gallery presents Synthesize Me, a two-person exhibition featuring Olga Titus and Michael Dickey. The title carries an invitation to imagine beyond the familiar: oceans on distant planets, electric skies, surfaces that shimmer with an otherworldly light. In Titus’s sequin compositions and Dickey’s sculptural vessels, this spirit of invention takes physical form. Color, texture, and pattern conjure worlds that feel at once recognizable and wonderfully strange.
For Titus, the sequin functions as both a painterly mark and a pixel. Informed by her background in video and her Malaysian-Indian-Swiss heritage, her compositions move between botanical suggestion, ornament, and abstraction. Their reflective surfaces respond to light and the viewer’s movement, allowing images to appear, dissolve, and reassemble. Each work offers a shifting landscape, its small, repeated elements opening onto an expansive imaginary.
Dickey’s vessels extend this sense of discovery into three dimensions. Textured surfaces and swelling contours evoke plants, bodies, and unfamiliar organisms. Their silhouettes retain the familiarity of a vessel while suggesting objects that might have grown under different conditions, somewhere beyond our own environment.
Together, the works invite a kind of speculative looking: a sequin becomes a distant glint, a textured contour becomes an imagined terrain. Synthesize Me gives voice to this restless process of becoming, asking what new worlds might emerge when familiar elements meet in unexpected ways.
