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

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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.

• Diane Martonis

  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.

  FB@artist.dianemartonis

  IG@dianemartonis_art

• Kerry St. Laurent

  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

  www.kerrystlaurent.com

• Adam Michael Kozak

  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

March Barn Door Gallery 2026

I Got U

Ryan Murray and Sharona Color

March 6 - March 27

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Opening Reception on Arts Night Out

I Got U unites artistic collaborators Sharon Leshner and Ryan Murray—two distinct voices, each with their own style and way of moving through the world—who meet in the studio with a shared goal of togetherness.

The exhibition is grounded in a balance of optimism and reality—light and dark held side by side. It’s raw, open, and human—about the mess we all share and the beauty that comes from it. The work doesn't stand at a distance; it pulls you in, asking you to feel, reach out, and connect. The gritty texture of everyday life is expressed materially through torn layers of glued paper, textured paint, and freestyle brushstrokes.

Created in fascist times, I Got U centers common ground as a means of survival. The multimedia artworks include words drawn from intuition—subtle reminders and affirmations for getting through it. Mental health is not an abstract theme here, but a lived practice embedded in making, undoing, and remaking.

With figures moving and dancing, the work embodies togetherness as action rather than idea. In collaboration, in motion, and in care, I Got U offers connection as both resistance and refuge—an insistence that in creating together, we hold one another up.

• Ryan Murray

  Ryan Murray (he/him), spray paint stencil artist and muralist, received his Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014 and currently resides in western Massachusetts. He is currently represented by Art for the Soul Gallery. Through his work Ryan unearths and examines unsettling but important conversations about the stigma of mental illness, with the goal of normalizing the discussion and treatment of mental health in black communities. To examine Black mental health is to examine the effect of events in both the past and present, socioeconomic factors, how patterns of suffering repeat themselves, and the burden of certain societal expectations.

  Ryan utilizes repeated symbolism and autobiographical elements in order to address the reality and the reasons that people of color suffer in silence more than their white counterparts. Some of these works incorporate elements from photos taken during childhood, while others are derived from collages made during the artist’s therapy sessions.

  IG@rywandojones

  ryanamurray.com

• Sharona Color

  Sharon Leshner (aka Sharona Color, she/her) is an Easthampton, MA based artist and community activator. She uses mesmerizing colors to capture fleeting moments of awe from life. Sharon’s work begins with a process of deep listening, both to herself and her community. She dives into the confluence of our innermost thoughts and the playful nuances of our shared experiences in a way that challenges societal norms and makes way for healing. Sharon’s work draws from the spontaneity and improvisation of abstract expressionism. Like a symphony of poetic phrases and words, curved forms, and bold colors, her work evokes a sense of ever-present movement and a joyful acceptance of change for the viewer. Sharon is the Artistic Director and Founder at the non-profit mural organization, The Color Collaborative. Her murals can be found in cities around the country and internationally. 

  IG@sharona_color

  www.sharonacolor.com