OVR|WRKD
May 8 - 24, 2026
An Exhibition By:
SAM BELISLE
Opening Reception: Friday, May 8, 2026 at 6-9PM
Gallery Hours: Fridays 6-8PM, Saturdays 12-5PM, Sundays 12-5PM
In his first professional solo exhibition entitled OVR|WRKD, Sam Belisle continues the enduring tradition of documenting the everyday experience of working-class citizens through moments of work and leisure. Unlike documented societies of the past, however, we are presented with a unique and complex set of hurdles that are both tangible and intangible. The marriage of capitalism and technological progress has birthed an economy of attention that has modified human behavior on a population-wide scale and has shaped a culture surrounding work and leisure that is highly exploitative and unsustainable. The social media platforms and efficient digital tools considered essential to contemporary life have insidiously coerced people into a liminal state of being. We must continuously negotiate between two separate yet interdependent realities (digital and analog), often unable to strike a healthy balance between the two. Belisle speculates whether we are over indexing on progress and efficiency at the expense of personal well-being and genuine human connection.
OVR|WRKD is a collection of 10 large-scale oil paintings depicting banal micronarratives that center moments of respite from the chaos of living and working within the Digital Anthropocene.The title of the exhibition attempts to describe a lasting feeling of mental fatigue and anxiety that seems inherent to a society where identities are monetized, attention is colonized, and lived experience is replaced by the referential. The duality of modern life is not-so-slowly reducing personal experience to a cycle between work in the analog and leisure in the digital, with no clear understanding of the consequences of such a shift.
Belisle’s paintings are heavily influenced by different canonical tropes of art history. By utilizing traditions from notable art movements — the sublime/picturesque, vanitas, and depictions of work and leisure — he hopes to create a contrast between the values and expectations for life held in the documented past and those we serve today. The visual narratives in his paintings implicate the viewer and encourage the self-reflection of their own experiences. This is achieved using visual metaphors, embedding repetitive symbols, and employing the use of scale and linear perspective.
The juxtaposition of idyllic natural landscape and urban space is a repeating motif in this body of work. His landscapes reference the sublime — a concept that bridged Enlightenment inquiry and Romantism’s emphasis on subjectivity, emotion, and nature as investigated by philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, as well as artists like Thomas Cole from the Hudson River School — while chaotic urban narratives reveal how opportunities to experience the sublime in daily life have become increasingly unavailable. Instead, we are sold counterfeit versions in the form of tourism or digital representation, completely void of the vastness, beauty, logic, and personal understanding inherent to an authentic experience of the sublime. Through such comparisons, Belisle confronts the apathy through which we engage the natural world and uses that relationship as point of departure to discuss what else is traded and denied when ethics and methodologies shaped by technology and commerce go unexamined. In a way, the landscape becomes a metaphor for loss.
Through his use of overly complex compositions, familiar tableaus, scale, and linear perspective, Belisle demands the sustained attention of the viewer — offering a reprieve from the short-form media and setting the stage for self-reflection. The impact Belisle’s narratives have on the viewer relies heavily on the vantage point from which it's described. The specific perspective and scale of the work invites the viewer to step inside, creating an embodied simulation that is self-referential and forces the viewer to reconcile their own values and experiences with the scenes Belisle proposes.
Through the lens of personal experience, OVR|WRKD presents a critique of late-stage capitalism and technology fetishism that aims to both document and reimagine: to record how we live now, to reveal what we sacrifice, and to imagine forms of attention and care that might reorder value for our own well-being and that of future generations.
