Meet the artist behind our current exhibition: Other Asterisms, created by Deborah Hesse with a free Artist Talk on Friday, September 5th at 6 pm. Hear about her creative process and ask any questions you might have about her creation process.
Other Asterisms by Deborah Hesse
August 1 - September 7, 2025
Located in The Workshop Gallery, Building 3.
Opening Reception on Friday, August 1st from 3-6PM
Artist Talk on Friday, September 5th at 6PM
Regular Gallery Hours from 12-4 pm on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.
Other Asterisms is a solo exhibition by Deborah Hesse featuring sculptural, light-responsive wall works made from industrial and everyday materials. Together, the pieces form a constellation—charting imagined links between the material and immaterial, the physical and virtual. Evoking underwater ecosystems, celestial maps, and microscopic life, these luminous, biomorphic forms blur boundaries and invite reflection on unseen systems beyond the known world.
Deborah Hesse is a multimedia artist and independent curator based in New Haven, CT. She holds a B.A. from Smith College and an M.A. in Painting and Printmaking from the University of New Mexico, where she was a Tamarind Institute Fellow in Lithography. Her honors include a Connecticut Office of the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship and a Regional Project Initiative Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Hesse was an international artist-in-residence at the Hongti Art Center in Busan, South Korea, where she created a solo exhibition based on research into traditional seaweed cultivation. She has also received Rhode Island and Connecticut Visual Artist Sea Grant Awards, as well as artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, GreenWave, and Weir Farm Art Center. Her work has been shown internationally and nationally, with exhibitions in South Korea, New York, New Mexico, and Connecticut—including venues such as Real Art Ways, Housatonic Museum, University of Connecticut, Artspace, University of New Haven, Silvermine Art Gallery, and Governors Island Art Fair.
Full Artist Statement:
Other Asterisms features luminous, shaped, biomorphic wall works organically arrayed across the gallery. As a group, these abstractions evoke celestial constellations, bioluminescent aquatic forms, and microscopic life—confounding scale and seeking to make the immaterial visible.
This constellation of forms emerges through a layered process that blends digital fabrication with intuitive, material-based experimentation. I work with industrial byproducts—mainly sign- making materials—alongside birch wood, photo fragments, acrylic, and ink to create dimensional wall pieces that function as spatial paintings.
The initial shapes are inspired by natural forms and phenomena—seaweed pressings, fluid dynamics, the contours of spills—drawn from local specimens and debris gathered on daily walks. These fragments are translated into digital outlines and cut with a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine, then altered by hand with paint, adhesive color gels, and embedded imagery—merging precision with improvisation.
By combining fabricated and hand-altered materials, I explore how light, transparency, and surface interact to produce shifting forms and layered visual experiences. The planar, layered structures also reflect how digital life flattens and fragments information, reducing complexity into fleeting impressions.
These works probe the shifting boundary between physical and digital realities, drawing on the materials’ signage origins to question what is real, simulated, or invented. The process— manipulating synthetic materials into organic, responsive forms—reflects a broader interest in transformation, perception, and the increasingly fluid spaces we inhabit between tangible and virtual realms.
Together, the pieces form a kind of sensory map—linking the digital, natural, and constructed to explore connections between the infinite and the everyday.