‘Staying with ambiguity’

“Suspension’’ (charcoal, pastel), by Lesley Cohen, in her show “Shift-Response,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston Sept. 3-28

The gallery says:

Lesley Cohen’s exhibition “questions our relationship with uncertainty, to time passing, and to what shifts inside and outside of us: the why behind it all. The drawings are not about solving or fixing, but about holding the tension between what’s known and what’s still revealing itself. It’s about staying with ambiguity and change—subtle, persistent, and often beyond our control—long enough to see what might emerge and what it has to teach us. 

“The exhibition invites the viewer into a quiet space where perception is not just visual, but visceral. Using black, white and a palette of grays, Cohen’s drawings explore how even small changes—on the page or in life—create a need to respond. The exhibition invites a slow kind of seeing—the kind that reveals more over time….

“Each drawing holds a moment in suspension—a tension both formal and felt. Each mark is a reaction, a response: to what came before; to a shift seen, sensed, or remembered; or to the resistance of the surface itself. This is drawing as dialogue—between tension and release, presence and absence, sensation and thought.

“We can remain optimistic that even late in the story, we’re offered chances to begin again, to press reset, and to keep discovering what we didn’t see before.’’