Second Glance

SYDNEY KLEINROCK, NICK LENKER, MOLLY BURT WESTVIG

Runs / Oct 3 – Oct 26, 2025

Reception / Friday, Oct 3, 6-9 PM

Hours: Sat-Sun from 2-6 PM

This October, Grizzly Grizzly presents Second Glance, a three-person exhibition by Sydney Kleinrock, Nick Lenkner, and Molly Burt Westvig. This show brings together artists who explore how we see, remember, and make sense of the world through the objects and materials around us. Through quilted paintings, ceramic sculptures, and objects made from asphalt, the artists transform fragments of memory, digital life, and everyday materials into new forms that challenge how we understand identity, time, and connection. Working with handmade processes and salvaged materials, these works highlight the complexity of contemporary object-making and respond to the digital, social, and ecological realities of our time.

 Sydney Kleinrock constructs, stuffs, and quilts canvas structures as the foundation for her paintings. She draws on the feminist history of quilting to explore themes of queer domesticity, embodied memory, and the tension between nature and urban life. Her fragmented, fabric-like compositions use non-linear storytelling to evoke the cyclical passage of time, capturing moments of growth and decay, chaos and calm, while reflecting on our entangled relationship with the natural world. 

 Nick Lenker includes hand-built clay-slab sculptures from his "IRL Object" series, where simplified, polygonal forms are wrapped in “skins” made from online photographs. Their works merge clay’s physical weight with the flattened imagery of digital space, collapsing the divide between virtual and material worlds. Influenced by gaming and avatar culture, Lenker's sculptures shift between object and illusion, form and surface, raising questions about authenticity, desire, and how digital life seeps into physical experience (and vice versa).

 Through painting Molly Burt Westvig reveals the cosmic and geological histories embedded in overlooked urban materials. Asphalt, often dismissed as mundane city infrastructure, is in fact composed of ancient organic matter, bitumen, gravel, sand, and stone formed through cosmic processes over millions of years. Shaped by the heat and pressure of supernovas and molded into urban artifacts, asphalt carries the physical legacy of celestial events, placing echoes of the universe firmly beneath our feet.

 Together, these artists propose alternative ways of seeing—fragmented, layered, and nonlinear—revealing how meaning emerges from the tension between what is visible, what is felt, and what is imagined. The artists in Second Glance consider how objects hold memory, mediate perception, and become vessels for reflection, resistance, and reimagination.

Artist Bios:

Sydney Hunter Kleinrock (Brooklyn, NY) received a Bachelor's degree at Hampshire College and has since shown work in multiple group shows in New York City, Richmond, and New Haven, as well as in a solo show at Club George in Northampton, MA. She participated in a residency at Vermont Studio Center in 2018, ChaNorth in 2024, and showed work at Upstate Art Weekend in 2025. Her work was featured in the latest issue of New American Paintings.

Nick Lenker (Philadelphia, PA) has an MFA from Tyler School of Art and a BFA from The University of the Arts with a ceramic focus. He recently completed a residency at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia from 2016-2021. In 2020, Lenker had a solo exhibition at the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum. In 2021, he was included in the international exhibition of ceramic art for Art Macau, in Macau, China as well as in the Korean International Ceramics Biennale. Lenker is in collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Alfred Ceramic Art Museum as well as numerous private collections.

Molly Burt Westvig (Philadelphia, PA) received her MFA in 2024 from the Tyler School of Art and was featured in New American Paintings #165 the same year. In 2025 she received the American Austrian Foundation Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts. She has been awarded international and national residencies, including at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA, and PILOTENKUECHE in Leipzig, Germany. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and project spaces across the U.S. and abroad including Temple Contemporary, James Oliver Gallery, Vox Populi, Co-Re Haus Der Statistik, Alte Hannelschule, and The Figge Art Museum.