See Me, See You presents the work of Indianapolis-based artist Loren Snyk, bringing together several bodies of contemporary figurative painting alongside The Other Within, a collaborative series created with photographer, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary image-maker Ron Goldstein. Across these works, Snyk explores the ways identity is constructed and perceived, and the distance that can emerge between how a person appears and what that appearance may conceal.

​

Snyk’s paintings reinterpret the visual language of historical portraiture through a contemporary lens. Drawing on the structure, symbolism, and authority of Old Master painting, she places the figure within environments shaped by beauty, refinement, social expectation, and power. Yet her interest lies less in portraiture as straightforward representation than in what happens beneath its composed surface. Her figures often inhabit moments of quiet incongruity, when the ideals embodied by an image begin to diverge from lived experience.

​

Beauty is therefore rarely simply decorative in Snyk’s work. It can signal privilege, aspiration, protection, performance, or belonging, while simultaneously revealing the pressures and exclusions that accompany those ideals. In Evening Elegance, Structures of Power, and The Keep, Snyk examines different manifestations of this tension. Wealth and refinement become visual performances; composure becomes a form of psychological labor; spaces that appear protective can also suggest boundaries. The paintings invite the viewer to look beyond the carefully constructed image toward what it quietly reveals or withholds.

​

Her process reinforces these ideas. Snyk often begins with constructed photography, using images that have already been staged and mediated before they enter the painting. She then works across drawing, oil paint, and cold wax, building, scraping, obscuring, and reworking the surface. Fragments of earlier imagery remain embedded within the finished work, creating paintings in which the visible image and the history of its making coexist. The resulting surfaces can feel simultaneously polished and disrupted, familiar and elusive.

​

This relationship between constructed image and hidden reality extends into The Other Within, a series of six collaborative mixed-media works developed from Ron Goldstein’s short film Season of the Witch. The collaboration began with Goldstein’s cinematic and photographic material, its characters, atmosphere, psychological tension, and dark interior world. Working from this imagery, Snyk introduces painting, gesture, texture, and material intervention, transforming moments from the film into works that move between cinematic image, photography, and painting.

​

Ron Goldstein is an audiovisual author, director, photographer, and multidisciplinary image-maker working across photography, film, moving image, music, and neural synthesis. Drawing on more than two decades of photographic practice, his work creates psychologically charged visual worlds in which identity, memory, perception, and reality become unstable. Through precise composition, controlled atmosphere, constructed imagery, cinematic pacing, and visual tension, Goldstein creates images that move between beauty and unease. Rather than treating the image as straightforward representation, he is interested in the moment when its apparent reality begins to fracture, revealing what is concealed, displaced, doubled, remembered, or left unresolved.

​

In the gallery, Season of the Witch is presented alongside the six collaborative works from The Other Within. Together, the film and artworks extend the same visual and psychological world across different media. Goldstein’s cinematic imagery remains visible within the works, while Snyk’s painted elements, layered surfaces, gestures, and disruptions transform the images into new material forms.

​

In She Was Here, a woman's face remains partly recognizable while another part dissolves into shadow beneath the stark language of a missing-person notice. In Already Gone, two versions of the same woman occupy different points in the aftermath of a violent event. In In the Graves, a monumental portrait becomes intertwined with a landscape and another solitary figure, suggesting memories and realities that exist beyond what the viewer can immediately perceive. Across the six works, identity becomes unstable: figures are doubled, obscured, displaced, or accompanied by another presence that seems to exist just beyond the visible.

​

The collaboration does not stand apart from Snyk’s larger practice; rather, it extends concerns that have been present throughout her work. Whether she is examining wealth and social performance, the boundaries of belonging, the psychology of composure, or the unsettling possibility of another self within a familiar figure, Snyk repeatedly returns to the space between what we see and what we understand.

​

Snyk’s work has been exhibited internationally in London and Greece and throughout the United States, and has been featured in Sotheby’s Magazine, Tate Etc., and V&A Magazine. Combining technical refinement with conceptual precision, her practice demonstrates the continuing possibilities of contemporary portraiture as a way of considering not only the individual, but the larger forces and perceptions through which we come to see one another.

​

That act of seeing is at the heart of See Me, See You. The title suggests an exchange rather than a declaration. To ask to be seen is also to acknowledge the person who is looking. What we perceive in another person is shaped not only by what they reveal, but by our own expectations, experiences, and assumptions.

​

Snyk’s paintings slow that encounter down. They ask us to remain with the image long enough for its first impression to give way to something more complicated: to notice what is visible, what is obscured, and what may be present without immediately announcing itself.

​

See Me, See You is ultimately an invitation to look again.