Ley Lines

5 MACDONOUGH ST | MAY 2 - MAY 31, 2026

REDHEAD is pleased to present Ley Lines, a multi-disciplinary show highlighting the work of contemporary artists Sarah Grass and Sam Harmon. The project space will host an opening reception on Saturday, May 2, from 2-5 PM.

There is a theory that ancient civilizations erected sacred sites on unseeable straight lines, now referred to as ley lines. Alfred Watkins, photographer and antiquarian, posited the straight lines that connected historic structures were trade routes. Although this idea is considered pseudoscience, it doesn’t mean the linear pattern doesn’t exist.

Popular interest in ley lines grew and so did the need to ascribe meaning. Some claim ley lines are magical energy currents infused with spiritual significance and mystical power. The need to understand what is not understandable is a point anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski makes: “... that magical beliefs and superstitious behaviors allow people to reduce the tension created by uncertainty and help fill the void of the unknown” (Kuhn).

Art is complicated. How an artwork comes to fruition is not necessarily linear. The spark of an idea, the energy of labor. Currents. Magic. When Barbara Kingsolver stayed at Bleak House, she sat at Dickens’s desk and asked him how she could tell a story about the opioid epidemic that was ravaging Appalachia. His answer was, “Let the kid tell the story. No one doubts the child” (Green) and Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize novel Demon Copperhead was born. Perhaps she tapped into a ley line.

What compels an artist’s return to their studio, to a converted tiny bedroom, the kitchen table after a husband is fed, children are asleep, the paid and unpaid work complete.

To believe in art is to believe in ghosts. In aliens. In love.

In magic.

In Ley Lines, artists Sarah Grass and Sam Harmon explore themes of power and assertiveness. They reimagine familiar narratives in surreal landscapes with psychically charged images and objects that speak to the resilience of women while exploring the fluidity of gender, sex, and agency.

Sarah Grass is a Chilean-American artist and educator working in New York, NY. She uses visual metaphor to render complexities of the psyche in drawing. Disarming symbols carry the weight of personal/collective anxieties related to trauma and grief, displaced identity in diaspora lineage, masculine/feminine polarity, non-binary states of being, and the weakened feminine principle in systems of masculine dominance. Grass holds a BFA in Fine Arts and MFA in Art Practice from The School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited across the U.S. and internationally, at Deanna Evans Projects, New York, NY; 550 Gallery, Queens, NY; Quappi Projects, Louisville, KY; Satellite Art Club, Brooklyn, NY; Eve Leibe Gallery, London, UK; Field Projects Gallery, New York; Leftfield Gallery, Los Osos, CA; Spring Break Art Fair, New York, NY; Art on Paper Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Doppelgänger Projects, Ridgewood, NY; The Ferry Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand; JustMAD Art Fair, Madrid, Spain; The New School for Social Research, New York, NY; and the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX.

Sam Harmon is a visual artist based in Syracuse, NY working across sculpture, video, performance, and drawing. She creates moments and worlds where humor and darkness, beauty and brutality, and control and powerlessness dance in familiar yet strange landscapes. She centers good girls, bad girls, sad girls, mothers, exploring the experience and performance of womanhood and motherhood, creating works that are both acts and illustrations of survival. She draws from classical archetypes, daydreams, mythology, Catholic iconography, feminist film history, literature, and most of all, play.  She received a BFA from Syracuse University and an MFA/MA from SUNY Purchase College.