April Barn Door Gallery 2026
The Land is Still Good
Diane Martonis & Kerry St. Laurent, and audio artist Adam Michael Kozak.
April 3 - April 25
Opening Reception on Arts Night Out
The Land Is Still Good explores the terrain that follows loss, whether environmental, structural, or emotional, and considers the persistence of what remains. Bringing together the materially rich mixed-media works of J. Diane Martonis and an immersive audiovisual installation by Kerry St. Laurent and Adam Michael Kozak, the exhibition creates a shared space of reckoning and regeneration.
Both bodies of work engage natural elements as medium and metaphor, approaching collapse not as an ending but as a threshold.
Martonis combines two-dimensional imagery with dimensional forms, allowing cast shadows to function as intermediaries between surface and structure. Using smoke on paper Intermingled with wire and cut paper, her work meditates on the quiet resilience of the land beneath what collapses. These pieces operate as both mourning and invitation, asking viewers to clear space, to release, and to begin again. Beneath ruin lies something enduring, not failure but foundation.
St. Laurent and Kozak’s immersive video installation echoes this tension between collapse and continuity, confronting climate anxiety while honoring the persistence of the natural world. Through layered sound and image, the work holds emotional contradiction, including grief and wonder, sorrow and escape. Improvised electronic sound introduces unpredictability, while sculptural elements interact with projected footage of nature and ink in motion. Developed through collaborative call and response, the installation affirms that even in isolation, connection and creation endure. Fire, smoke, and land serve as visual throughlines that link directly to Martonis’s material language.
Together, the works suggest that beauty and ruin are not opposites. Foundations remain. Memory held in soil, sound, or smoke carries forward. Collapse is not an ending but a turning. What endures is not merely salvageable but sacred.
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J. Diane Martonis (she/her) is a Colorado artist working primarily with paper and fabric, exploring cast shadows and textural space through cutting and shaping. Her work focuses on the sacredness of personal history through time and connection, where present musings and isolated memories mingle, un-interrupted. She received her Masters of Fine Arts Degree in Sculpture from the State University of New York at Albany and her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from the State University of New York at Fredonia. Born and raised in New York, she moved to Longmont, Colorado in 2003 where she currently resides. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and continues to create out of her studio at home.
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Kerry St. Laurent (she/her) is a visual artist from Massachusetts who lingers in the spaces between realism and abstraction, chaos and meticulous detail. Life-curious and death-casual, her mixed-media work references nature, mapping, microbiology, architecture and memory, deconstructing the subjective lens and presenting impermanence as the grand unifier. Kerry received a BFA from the University of Massachusetts and MFA from the University of Hartford, and she teaches 2D methods as a visual arts faculty member at Western New England University. Her work has been exhibited locally and nationally and she has served as Artist-in-Residence at Hot Springs and Isle Royale National Parks.
IG@masterkoda
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Adam Michael Kozak (he/him) is a musician and sound artist currently residing in Sunderland, MA. A working artist since 2001, Kozak has worked within genres as disparate as lullabies, doom metal, video game music, plunderphonic sound collage, and everything in between. Since 2018 he has released numerous albums under the moniker Burial Grid with recent projects focusing heavily on anxiety, bodily degradation/transcendence, grief, and the intersection of all three. His palette of choice includes synthesizers of all stripes, found sounds, low-quality acoustic instruments, and a predilection for emphasizing imperfection through the use of dictaphones, old cell phones, and reel-to-reel tape machines.
IG@burial_grid