Main Projects presents Holding Pattern, a two-person exhibition of new work by Leigh Suggs and Alex Hutton. The exhibition looks at suspension as a state of anticipation. These works hold together, even as their meaning, function, and future remain unsettled.
Both artists begin with familiar systems of order: the grid, the scaffold, the framework. They do not reject these structures. They test them. What appears stable starts to register pressure, adjustment, and strain. Each work occupies a moment where something is being built or uncovered, but not yet resolved.
Hutton’s paintings take up this condition directly. In works such as Cusp (2025) and Splay (2025), rollercoasters arc and loop with precision. The structures are complete, but they remain uninhabited, caught in a moment before use. The subject is not the ride itself, but the anticipation it generates. It is the pause before activation, when possibility is at its most intense.
From a distance, the paintings read as clear, coherent objects. Up close, that clarity begins to slip. The structures break into a network of marks and shifting color. Edges soften. Forms feel less fixed than they first appeared. In Doubling (2025), a dense lattice of framing builds into a system that refuses a single point of focus. In Flat Catch (2025), the structure opens just enough to suggest entry, or failure. What looks solid at first reveals itself as contingent, held together as much by perception as by paint.
Suggs approaches structure from within. Her works are built through cutting, layering, and opening surfaces, treating the picture plane as something to be excavated rather than composed. In As if We Didn’t Know Any Different (2026), a looping, tubular form folds inward, its gridded surface bending until distinctions between interior and exterior begin to blur. In Knocking Out of a Dream (2026), a dense network of interwoven segments expands across the surface, each element held in tension between cohesion and dispersal.
Across the Tightly Gathered works, this tension becomes cumulative. Hundreds of small, hand-cut units cluster into compressed fields that seem to pulse with internal pressure. These surfaces feel both deliberate and provisional, as if each adjustment has the potential to shift the entire composition. In Widely Scattered (2026), that pressure releases. The structure opens and extends outward, suggesting not an end point, but a transition into another state.
For both artists, removal becomes a generative act. Hutton builds his surfaces through wiping and reworking paint; Suggs cuts into hers, creating openings that allow light and space to enter. What is taken away produces what is seen. Absence operates not only as loss, but as a condition that makes new forms visible.
Underlying this shared approach is a quiet insistence that something exists beyond what is immediately apparent. In Suggs’ work, this emerges as a sustained search, where each gesture accumulates toward the possibility of discovery. In Hutton’s, it takes the form of a forward-looking energy, where skeletal structures carry the anticipation of inhabitation, even as they remain unresolved in their meaning.
The title Holding Pattern reflects this condition. Borrowed from aviation, it describes a controlled circling; a delay that is nonetheless purposeful. Here, that logic becomes material. Structures loop, gather, and extend without arriving, holding the viewer in a space where collapse and construction, absence and possibility, unfold simultaneously.
Rather than resolving these tensions, Holding Pattern sustains them. It is within this sustained moment - between what has fallen away and what has yet to arrive - that both artists locate a form of hope.
