Embracing its ironic title, Ellen Goldschmidt's new exhibition, Pardon My Paradoxes beckons viewers into a colorful world of contradictions. Among the exhibition's paradoxes are pictures that invite multiple reads. In one painting, for example, suggestions of an underground root system may equally be read as a towering highway. In another, granite-toned rock formations vie with flesh-colored strata that suggest viscera, producing a paradoxical conflation of the outer and inner. This push and pull of overlapping interpretations is heightened by the artist's seductive use of color, which provides a gateway into her complex, richly-layered abstractions.

Goldschmidt builds her images out of acrylic paint, collage and acrylic marker in a process of improvisational abstraction that favors discovery over planning. This open-ended approach culminates in images that display a delicate balance of disparate parts, and compositions that find unity in asymmetry. Taken together, her exhibition reveals that the tension produced by paradox can enhance a viewer's enjoyment of looking and perhaps lead to a greater acceptance of the incongruities of a bewildering world.