Amy Sturgeon approaches art-making like a story teller who understands the constant push and pull between life’s callousness and wit. The fictions she creates within her oil paintings nimbly access perpetually relevant binaries: beauty and ugliness, loneliness and belonging, isolation and transportation. Sturgeon’s characters seem to be continuously searching for something, wandering through colloquial, ethereally painted, orange, green, red and grey landscapes. The paintings maintain a delicate balance between careful detail and folk-inspired generality. Sturgeon offers a pervasive sense of place, by depicting scenes that are familiar enough to occur anywhere. The stories in her paintings invite viewers into an imaginary world that ultimately gives them a new outlook on the themes that shape their actual lives.