ENTROPY: For Those Who Dream Awake Between Dawns

In a time marked by daily tumult—social, political, environmental—ENTROPY gathers artists who move through fragmentation with intention and poetic force. Their work speaks urgently from what James Baldwin called the artist’s struggle for integrity, with a refusal to sleep through rupture or conform to silence as a substitute for peace. These artists are not retreating; rather they dream awake, attuned to the unstable rhythms of the present – bearing witness, offering litanies of fellowship, care, and becoming.

Our exhibition unfolds as a constellation of bold juxtapositions that resist fixation. It reveres difference, where an elliptical movement of voices, mediums, methods, and scale challenge the bounds of the gallery. With existing and newly created multidisciplinary installation, image, gestural forms, and painting, these works act as temporal parables of survival: testaments shaped by ancestral knowledge and lived experiences, guided by histories, myths, mourning, and metaphors of ecological persistence, pressing on the present and into unexpected futures.

ENTROPY resists erasure. It asks what might be made from the broken, what remains after collapse, and who dreams between dawns while others look away. What binds these artists is not sameness, but a shared instinct to create in spite of—and because of—disorder. In the face of entropy, they speak, move, and make—not for permanence, but for collective transformation.

Text by Berette S Macaulay, 2025 Neddy Curator

Featured 2025 Neddy Finalist Artists:

Lauren Boilini, Craig Cundiff *, Andy Cash DeLapp, Dierdre Patterson, Romson Regarde Bustillo, Bri Chesler, Jordan Monloire, Hanako O’Leary *

* Neddy Grand Prize Award Recipient

Exhibition Poster Art: Romson Regarde Bustillo, Fatima of Yesler Terrace, 2016, Collagraph and stencil monoprint. Courtesy artist and J. Rinehart Gallery.