5-50 Gallery is pleased to present WHILE AWAY, a two-person exhibition featuring Hannah Antalek and Amelia Carley. Bringing together two painters engaged with the idea of the post-human landscape, this exhibition considers worlds transformed by environmental crisis, adaptation, and material change. Central to both artists’ practices is the use of handmade dioramas as the basis for their paintings, constructed from sustainable, found, and single-use materials. Through vivid color and speculative form, Antalek and Carley each imagine altered environments shaped by instability, resilience, and transformation.
Hannah Antalek’s paintings envision speculative ecosystems marked by mutation, survival, and interconnection. Her recurring characters include engorged daisies that appear more mycological than floral and suggest subterranean systems of communication and a broader network of life operating beneath the visible surface. Mysteriously backlit in vivid tones, these hybrid organisms seem illuminated by unknown forces: a second sun, a chemical glow, or the residual atmosphere of a changed world. Drawing inspiration from the remarkable endurance of fungi, including their ability to survive in radioactive and otherwise inhospitable conditions, Antalek imagines plant forms emerging from extreme environments shaped by toxicity, waste, and adaptation.
Central to Antalek’s practice is a process of careful model-making and world-building. She constructs handmade dioramas to develop the composition and lighting of each work, often reusing and reconfiguring elements from previous scenes so that each new painting maintains a material relationship to the last. This iterative process produces an immersive and expanding alternative world, one in which transformation is continuous and survival is inseparable from change. Through these speculative landscapes, Antalek reflects on both the consequences of human impact on nature and the resilient capacity of life to adapt, regenerate, and evolve.
Amelia Carley’s paintings likewise begin with the construction of handmade dioramas, assembled from found and reused materials that are melted, manipulated, and transformed into imagined terrain. Working with single-use plastics from her household as well as gathered debris such as sea glass, Carley creates sculptural models that she lights with colored illumination and photographs as references for her paintings. Influenced in part by her experience traveling through the deserts of the American West, she builds landscapes that feel both seductive and destabilized. These are places where beauty, toxicity, and artifice converge.
Rendered in hyper-saturated hues, Carley’s paintings explore ecological anxiety, loss, and the increasingly unstable boundary between the natural and the synthetic. By reclaiming discarded materials and incorporating the residue of everyday consumption into her process, she considers how contemporary encounters with landscape are mediated through waste, memory, and environmental damage. Her fabricated terrains become sites of both escapism and critical reflection, where color, light, and form are used to examine the altered conditions of the Anthropocene.
Together, Antalek and Carley present distinct yet resonant approaches to imagining the post-human landscape. The two speculate on forms of adaptation that may exist beyond our current understanding. Their imagined environments suggest that life may continue to evolve in ways we have not yet discovered, and that transformation, however strange or unfamiliar, may hold its own logic of resilience. This exhibition offers a shared vision of landscape not as something fixed or lost, but as something continuously remade. In WHILE AWAY, the future is not pictured as an end point, but as an unfolding condition whose forms are still being invented.
