Speaking About something else

willa Richards

JUNE 27-August 1, 2026

Speaking About Something Else brings together densely symbolic paintings in which Willa Richards places fictional figures within fictional spaces. The works on view sit at the threshold between allegory and speculation, giving their metaphors enough room and dimension to become visionary worlds of their own, blurring the line between what is purely symbolic and what could plausibly exist.

Throughout the show, Richards draws on personal experience to explore cyclical time in its many forms: life and death, past and future, history and futurology. Themes of queerness, grief, self destruction, desire, and dreaming move across the paintings, rendered with an intimacy that resists easy resolution.

Taken together, the works in Speaking About Something Else favor the permeable, the diffuse, and the vulnerable over the closed, the concise, and the guarded. These are systems built to remain open, inviting the viewer into worlds that stay porous, unfinished, and alive.