Gallery 263 is pleased to present Lonely Table, a curated three-artist exhibition featuring the work of Annika Earley, Camryn Connolly, and Julia Cheng. This exhibition brings together three New England–based artists who transform mythologies, domesticity, and contradictory emotions into fantastical portals for understanding the self.

In each painting and drawing, fantasy blurs the edges between nostalgia and introspection. Through densely patterned surfaces, and the vibrancy or absence of color, the artists conjure theatrical, dreamlike worlds that explore time and emotion.

Annika Earley considers the demands and joys of parenthood, as well as the intersections of sensuality, gender, and preteen nostalgia. Camryn Connolly reconstructs, reflecting the uncanny nature of memory as it bends and slips away. For her, drawing becomes a meditative process of reinvention, where the familiar home is revealed as both intimate and unsettled. Julia Cheng depicts various horses, symbols of the confusing emotions that arise when one is displaced from home, like desire, shame or guilt. Together, their works ask what it means to dwell within contradiction, and how these tensions can release new forms of life or self-understanding.

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About the artists

Annika Earley makes intimate works on paper about her alter-ego/fairy godmother/personal demon named Batshit. Earley grew up in rural Switzerland and moved to mid-coast Maine in 2000, often using German fairy and folk tales and Spice Girls lyrics as reference points. They have been supported by the St. Botolph Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Albert K, Murray Fund, SPACE Gallery’s American Rescue Plan Grant, and the Kittredge Fund. Their work is in the collections of the University of Southern Maine, College of the Atlantic, and was recently exhibited at Field Projects in New York and Moss Galleries in Maine. Earley holds an MFA from Maine College of Art and an M.Phil from College of the Atlantic. 

Camryn Connolly is an artist from Salem, Massachusetts whose work explores the home as a physical and psychological framework for our most intimate selves. She began her artistic education at the age of eight at the Acorn Gallery School of Art in Marblehead, MA. Connolly earned her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Boston University in 2021 and is currently pursuing her MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she is expected to graduate in 2026.

Julia Cheng is a Chinese-born, Canadian artist currently located in New York after receiving their BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). At RISD they have completed a concentration in Literary Arts and Studies, with a focus on Asian-American Theory. Their work explores themes of belonging and displacement in conversation with the larger Asian diaspora. They utilize art-making to bridge the gaps between lived and perceived realities, histories, and heritages.

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