"Dropped into an Unknown Country,” an exhibition of individual and collaborative works by Clea Felien and Robert O’Connor, will be featured at the Atlantic Highlands Arts Council Gallery, from June 19 through July 24.
The two artists, who met while students in the M.F.A. program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, challenged each other in 2018 to disrupt the often solitary and private act of making art by bringing each other into their individual process.
While living on opposite coasts in the United States, they would mail paintings back and forth, communicating virtually long before a worldwide pandemic would transform their voluntary practice into necessity for millions.
The 3,000-mile distance required them to explore new ways of seeing and making art, expanding their solitary focus into larger themes of identity and communication across a divide.