Natural Order

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce a curated group exhibition titled Natural Order, featuring a selection of works by artists Karin Davie, Lisa Corinne Davis, Douglas Melini, Alexander Ross, and James Siena.

This exhibition explores the system of rules, patterns, and relationships that dictate the physical universe independently of human design. Through varied approaches to color, form, repetition, and composition, their works examine the complex interplay between order and unpredictability. Natural and constructed landscapes are reimagined through bold abstraction, capturing both organic harmony and underlying structure. Evoking the visual languages of maps, topographical formations, cellular structures, interconnected networks, and landscapes, their compositions suggest alternative ways of interpreting and organizing information.

Karin Davie (b. in Toronto, Canada) received her Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. Karin Davie is internationally recognized for her dynamic, sensate abstractions, where undulating bands of color record the choreography of the artist’s body in motion. Her paintings operate at the intersection of optics, gesture, and perception—oscillating between presence and absence, the corporeal and the cosmic. Overlapping accumulations of lush, wavelike strokes create pulsing spatial illusions and temporal traces, reflecting Davie’s long-standing exploration of how movement, form, and color shape visual experience. Davie lives and works in Seattle, WA.

Lisa Corinne Davis (American, b. 1958) in Baltimore, MD. MFA: Hunter College, BFA: Pratt Institute. Lisa Corinne Davis’s work explores how systems of reasoning are constructed and undone, using a distinctive visual language of geometric abstraction that evokes maps, blueprints, and shifting structures. Her paintings offer multiple interpretive paths: fluid, snaking brushstrokes intertwine with precise grids, and jagged, dynamic trajectories. Despite their complexity, her compositions remain controlled, showcasing Lisa’s technical mastery of oil paint. Davis lives and works in Brooklyn and Hudson, NY.

Douglas Melini (American, b. 1972) in New Jersey. MFA: California Institute of Fine Arts, BFA: University of Maryland. Douglas Melini has long explored the rhythmic resonances that connect the natural and built worlds. By combining unexpected materials, Melini blurs the boundaries between painterly and naturalistic forms; reclaimed wood hums with synthetic vibrancy, and mushrooms emerge from rigid, mechanistic structures. His work eschews geometric abstraction and embraces the traditional painterly approach of oil on canvas, though his technique and subject matter remain anything but conventional. Melini lives and works in New Jersey.

Alexander Ross (American, b. 1960) in Denver, CO. BFA: Massachusetts College of Art. Alexander Ross’s elusive and expansive biomorphic assemblages extend a distinctive visual language shaped by biological systems, material transformation, and the porous boundary between abstraction and representation. Color and surface remain central to his work. Vivid yet tempered hues lend the compositions a tactile intensity, while shifts in depth subtly destabilize the picture plane. Ross lives and works in Great Barrington, MA.

James Siena (American, b. 1957) in Oceanside, CA. BFA: Cornell University. Before the “dot com” boom of the mid-90s made code a cultural cornerstone, Siena was already exploring the aesthetics of computational logic. By giving form to the concepts of artificial intelligence and data transmission, he was an early voice in the nascent intersection between art and code. As he embraces the inevitability of human deviation from code, each disruption in his hand-drawn code is generative, and small mutations cascade across the surface in a feedback loop of chaotic logic. Siena lives and works in New York, NY and Otis, MA.