ON VIEW SEPT 19 - NOV 21
Trust the Universe
TRUST THE UNIVERSEAbout the Exhibition
Artworks by Jennifer Zackin and Scrap Wrenn on Consciousness, Transformation, and Trust
The nature of consciousness underlies the spiritual exploration of this exhibition. Trust the Universe builds that exploration in stages: trusting a process, in materials and small deliberate choices; trusting a life, in the slow unfolding of who a person becomes; trusting nature, where transformation and interdependence are not exceptions to the natural order but its clearest expression; and trusting the universe itself, where we are not separate from it but held within it.
Jennifer Zackin's material practice and Scrap Wrenn's collage work operate the same way: patience over command, an outcome shaped rather than forced. Wrenn's process, informed by Buddhist practice and meditation, aims to collapse the distinction between subject and object, between self and other. Materials find their own place, and invisible, ineffable spiritual energy takes visible pattern, creating worlds within worlds. Zackin's materials undergo their own transformation, the familiar remade into the unexpected. Her practice, informed by deep meditation and the nexus between physical and spiritual, works across collage, painting, sculpture, and installation to make visible the relationships that shape the living world. Neither artist claims full authorship; both let something larger take the lead.
Trust the Universe names that shared discipline directly: trusting the process becomes trusting a life, and becoming cannot be forced or rushed. Wrenn's journey of discovery is ever ongoing, and Zackin's practice moves the same way, unfinished by design.
This body of work is evidence of trust, not only in the materials but in the choice to show them: two people who learned to stop forcing an outcome, then trusted others with what they made. To witness that here is its own practice. The same trust that let their materials find their own place now asks the same of you: to trust your own practice, your own becoming. To trust the universe, in the end, is to trust yourself, since you were never separate from it to begin with.
This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.
On view September 19 through November 21, 2026
Opening reception: Saturday, Sept 19, 4-6pm
Closing reception: Saturday, November 21, 4 to 6 PM
Apuzzo Hall Gallery, Hudson Valley LGBTQ+ Community Center, 300 Wall St, Kingston
Free and open to all
Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday 11 AM to 7 PM, Sunday 2 to 4 PM
Meet The Artists
Jennifer Zackin is a transdisciplinary artist and educator working between the Hudson Valley and the Sacred Valley of the Inca, Cusco, Peru. Her close engagement with materials enacts its own alchemy, transforming the familiar into the unexpected. Her practice begins in the studio and expands into the community, nurturing relationships and supporting regenerative methods. Working across sculpture, installation, collage, drawing, painting, and social sculpture, she explores abstraction as a gateway to understanding complex ecosystems. That practice honors the performance of art-life: upcycling burlap coffee bags into trellises for medicinal plants and building absorbent tentacles from salvaged materials to help clean up toxic oil spills. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Zachęta National Art Gallery in Warsaw, with commissions from Socrates Sculpture Park and MASS MoCA.
Scrap Wrenn is a multidisciplinary visual artist known for large-scale photographic collages, hand-constructed through a distinctive paper-layering technique. Working under the pseudonym scrapworm, Wrenn treats the creative process as a devotional inquiry into the nature of reality. Explicit Buddhist iconography entered the work in 2013, when a photo enlargement of a Quan Yin image became the focal point of a mystical breakthrough during a residency at the Vermont Studio Center.
That encounter, and long-term engagement with Zen Mountain Monastery, now shape the work from first image to final construction. Wrenn's 2018 solo show, living visual koans: you are what you seek, distilled this directly: each collage functions like a koan, a question to sit with rather than a statement.