5-50 Gallery is pleased to present Becoming Otherwise, a group exhibition featuring new and recent paintings by Will Hutnick, Geist Topping, and Peter Schenck. The show will run from July 26 - August 31, 2025 with an opening reception on July 26th from 5 - 8pm. United by a shared interest in transformation and personal mythology, the artists explore what it means to inhabit a self that is always shifting—physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Each artist presents a unique vision of becoming: unruly, nonlinear, and charged with the tension of introspection.
Will Hutnick’s layered abstractions unfold like emotional landscapes—topographies of sensation, memory, and movement. Through vibrant patterning, spatial disruption, and rhythmic gesture, Hutnick builds what he calls “emotional excavation.” His surfaces feel alive with contradiction—controlled yet improvisational, structured yet fluid—mirroring the uncertain process of growth itself. In these works, painting becomes an active terrain of internal becoming.
Geist Topping uses painting as a site to examine the unstable boundaries of selfhood. Drawing from personal history, digital culture, and early childhood experiences with disability, Topping interrogates how identity is projected, fragmented, and mediated. Referencing “the confusion or inebriation often requisite in moments of becoming,” their works incorporate nostalgic imagery, flattened architectural space, and default digital forms—evoking the strange dissonance of existing both in and outside one’s body. In Topping’s hands, painting becomes a barrier and a conduit: a space where attempts to externalize interiority inevitably collapse into abstraction and metaphor.
In The Driftwood Series, Peter Schenck begins with a single found object—a piece of driftwood resembling a standing figure—and allows it to morph across canvas into new identities. Positioned like a central actor within painted frames, the form becomes a site of continual transformation: sometimes a body, sometimes a ruin, sometimes pure abstraction. Through repetition and reinvention, Schenck reflects on how meaning is shaped not just by what we see, but by how we hold and reinterpret it. These works sit at the heart of Becoming Otherwise—capturing the quiet, persistent instability of form, memory, and perception.
In Becoming Otherwise, painting becomes a vehicle for navigating the porous edge between what is felt and what can be shown. Growth here is not a straight line, but a tangled, unstable process—where identity is stretched, obscured, or made strange. These works do not resolve; instead, they offer spaces to dwell in the unsettled, the uncanny, the becoming.