Happenstance
On view May 16 - July 10, 2026
Sat 5/16, 4-6 pm: Opening reception
Sat 5/30, 4-6 pm: Chance Meeting - a conversation with the artists
Sat 6/13, 4-6 pm: Outside|In - Go Fish! Celebrating the intrepid herring of the Mystic River with community art and poetry by Terry Carter and Steve Rapp
Sat 6/20, 12-6 pm: Arlington Porchfest
Above, top to bottom: Nicole Duennebier, detail from Swamp Structure with Machinery, oil on canvas; Damion Silver, detail from Roll Away, poplar, enamel and steel; Chen Peng, detail from Antares, oil on canvas; Dorothea Van Camp, detail from Wild Ink (3 Color), photopolymer etching on BFK Rives
13FOREST Gallery is pleased to present Happenstance, featuring new work by Nicole Duennebier, Chen Peng, Damion Silver and Dorothea Van Camp.
Over the years, the gallery has developed close working relationships with these four artists. Each has developed a style, artistic philosophy and area of focus that make their work distinct and recognizable. Happenstance brings these diverse bodies of work into conversation to provoke questions and spark intriguing connections.
Recently Duennebier has been searching for ways to disrupt her minutely detailed and precise compositions. Previous iterations of this idea have seen her painting on top of earlier works to create windows that juxtapose two eras of her career. In her latest experimentation, Duennebier adds a sculptural void to Kenopsia (1), using clay to create an undulating surface within a hollow in the panel. Painted with a matte ultra-black which swallows light, the surface counters the luminous detail of the rest of the composition. Duennebier imagines this sculptural intervention to be scooped out like “soft cream” and as a “growing welt;” it is both an absence and an imposition, interacting with the subject of the painting. This work adds an intriguing new element to her recent swamp paintings.
Peng’s latest paintings continue her exploration of her relationship with her dogs, Kara and Oke. The dreamy compositions center her dogs curled up and at rest, rendered lovingly with an ethereal pastel color palette. The portraits convey intimate care while also elevating the dogs to mythological figures, monumental in the way they fill the canvas and Peng’s life. In Antares, Oke’s fur is scattered with stars, taking on the appearance of the night sky and evoking the enduring and eternal nature of Peng’s relationship to her pets. Peng collaborated with her husband, Fan Wu, to create two sculptures of their dogs as well, their work serving as a testament to the richness of their connection to Kara and Oke.
In his sculptural practice, Silver aims to achieve perfectly finished and balanced forms; the harmony in his sculptures is an outgrowth of the meditative nature of his practice. His pursuit of balance is best encapsulated by his sculptures that incorporate ratchet straps; held together solely by the force of the strap, they must be expertly aligned to allow their components to cohere without additional supports. However Silver does occasionally allow some chaos to enter his practice. Inspired by some of his sculptures that had been damaged, Silver experimented with distressing the surface of his compositions, layering enamel paint and sanding it away to achieve a vibrant, variegated pattern that contrasts his tightly controlled forms.
Van Camp has long used vector drawings as the basis for her screen prints, printing her digitally created drawings onto transparencies before transferring them to her screens. Through a happy coincidence in her studio, Van Camp noticed these transparencies scattered on top of each other on her worktable; body parts, figures, and animal forms emerged from the layered drawings. Van Camp began exploring how to introduce these more organic structures to her work, contrasting the precise, hard lines of her vector drawings with plates made from handmade ink drawings printed in watery, translucent ink. By reincorporating the hand-mark into her prints, this visual language allowed Van Camp to express the visceral experience of being in her own body in a series she calls ShePeril.
Preview Happenstance
About the Artists
Nicole Duennebier was born in Hartford, Connecticut and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Maine College of Art. She is a 2016 and 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Painting Fellow and her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Duennebier’s work has been featured at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, the Shelburne Museum in Vermont and the Cahoon Museum of Modern Art on Cape Cod, as well as other national venues. In the summer of 2025, Duennebier was awarded a residency at the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts in New Berlin, New York.
Chen Peng is a Taiwanese artist currently based in Hoboken, New Jersey. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Boston University, a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from National Taiwan University. Peng was an artist-in-residence at The Studios at MASS MoCA and the Vermont Studio Center. Her paintings are included in several public collections including Cleveland Institute of Art, Metro Health, University Hospitals, and Fidelity Corporate Art Collection. She is a recipient of various grants and awards from the National Culture and Arts Foundation (Taipei, Taiwan), MASS MoCA, and the Ministry of Culture - Taiwan, among others.
Damion Silver was born in New Britain, Connecticut, and currently resides in New Hampshire. Silver is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work spans printmaking, assemblage and sculpture. Both his art and design work have been shown and published throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. Silver’s latest work explores the use of form through repetition, subtraction and abstraction. The combination of media and use of space between the works creates a dynamic and unifying dialog across his body of work.
Dorothea Van Camp has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design, and attended the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning for graduate studies in printmaking. She has shown extensively in the northeast, and most recently her work was included in The Boston Printmakers North American Biennial, Fresh Ink: Contemporary Explorations in Printmaking at The Umbrella Arts Center, and Singular and Serial: Expanding the Circle at Cove Street Arts. Van Camp’s work is included in numerous collections, including State Street Bank, Federal Reserve Bank, Bank of America, Wellesley College and Mellon Bank.