Let's Escape the Ordinary

Let’s Escape the Ordinary

ARTIST NAME

Deb Achak is a visual artist and storyteller whose large-scale photographs explore the metaphysical and emotional link between the human and natural world. After stepping away from a 15-year career as a mental health social worker, Achak began her photography practice, employing a visual medium to continue her exploration of the interior lives of herself and others. Curious to examine the notion of our internal selves, she leans into the elasticity of photography by employing several genres within the medium. Achak’s practice includes swimming with her camera throughout the world, personal narratives created near her home, and painterly abstract florals inspired by baroque paintings. Each body of work is made with the singular ideal, to wrestle with what is under the surface in each of us.

Deb Achak’s work has been exhibited widely national and internationally, in institutions such as The National Museum of Anthropology in Tabasco, Mexico, The Lishui Museum of Art in Lishui, China, and The Sofia Photography Festival in Sophia, Bulgaria, The Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, the Southeast Center for Photography, Greenville SC, among many others. Her work has been featured in publications including Fraction, All About Photo, Lenscratch, Destig, Luxe Interiors, Dodho, and Domino.

Let’s Escape the Ordinary

Curated by Natasha Schlesinger

July 22nd - August 28th, 2026

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” — Twyla Tharp

Summer months traditionally invite travel and exploration, experimentation and letting go of rigid structures. But the wanderlust that seems to take over like a magic spell doesn’t need to take on a physical form. Is there such a thing as art wanderlust? Can art serve as a portal into other and unexplored worlds? Can we escape and travel along with artists to see what lies beyond the scope of our physical space?

Let’s Escape the Ordinary invites us to step outside the mundane and the ordinary through the artistic portal into landscapes and spaces of dreams, possibilities and the extraordinary.

Featured art works in Let’s Escape the Ordinary range in materials, processes and concepts yet the artists here all follow down a path to create art that in the words of Pablo Picasso “…washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”

Annette Cords is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, weaving, installation, and sculpture. By sampling, layering, and reconfiguring materials, Cords explores how visual and textual languages intersect.

Nevil Dwek’s work explores emotional experience and perception through layered mixed media works that function as constructed windows and images that shift with light, angle, and surface, changing as the viewer moves through them.

ARTIST NAME

e Lucia Engstrom works across photography, textile, and sculpture. Her practice reconsiders photography as a material rather than a medium - one shaped as much by light, space, and perception as by the camera itself.

Deb Achak is a visual artist and storyteller whose large-scale photographs explore the metaphysical and emotional link between the human and natural world. After stepping away from a 15-year career as a mental health social worker, Achak began her photography practice, employing a visual medium to continue her exploration of the interior lives of herself and others. Curious to examine the notion of our internal selves, she leans into the elasticity of photography by employing several genres within the medium. Achak’s practice includes swimming with her camera throughout the world, personal narratives created near her home, and painterly abstract florals inspired by baroque paintings. Each body of work is made with the singular ideal, to wrestle with what is under the surface in each of us.

Megan Gabrielle Harris, a New York based painter, working at the intersection of memory, escapism, and self-discovery. Her paintings place Black feminine figures at their center, serene and contemplative amid lush, surrealist landscapes.

The work of Heather Hutchison is an inquiry into light and transparency. She is captivated by the movement of natural light and its play on surfaces. Her hand built, shadowboxed works are considered light sculptures or paintings.

Amanda Case Millis works between her studio in Waltham, MA, and seasonally in South Yarmouth, MA. Working with oil on canvas, panel and linen, her works are largely inspired from life and are deeply engaged with light and place.

Deb Achak’s work has been exhibited widely national and internationally, in institutions such as The National Museum of Anthropology in Tabasco, Mexico, The Lishui Museum of Art in Lishui, China, and The Sofia Photography Festival in Sophia, Bulgaria, The Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, the Southeast Center for Photography, Greenville SC, among many others. Her work has been featured in publications including Fraction, All About Photo, Lenscratch, Destig, Luxe Interiors, Dodho, and Domino.

Amanda Case Millis works between her studio in Waltham, MA, and seasonally in South Yarmouth, MA. Working with oil on canvas, panel and linen, her works are largely inspired from life and are deeply engaged with light and place.

Tanya Minhas’ work investigates unseen elemental forces and the ephemeral nature of the world around us. Primarily working with paint, ink, and textile materials, she maps the relationships between nature, memory, and states of being.

Ethan Murrow’s multidisciplinary practice—which spans drawings, paintings, murals, sculptures, and publications—delves into narrative explorations of landscape, environment, agriculture, and the subjective nature of history.

Kelsey Shwetz is inspired by abstraction that naturally emerges in the observed world. Motivated by how painting can register the experience of occupying multiple spaces at once, the work begins from conditions in which the visible world splits or doubles.

Working fluidly between figuration and abstraction, Eric Uhlir has developed a dynamic visual language that allows disparate references. Mythology, landscape, popular culture, ecological systems often coexist within a single canvas.

Margeaux Walter uses photography and performance to portray issues related to climate change, consumption, and waste. Her work features playful interactions with the land that speak to the balance between the environment and human life.

Natasha Schlesinger is an award-winning art historian, art advisor and curator who has worked in the art field for over 25 years. Schlesinger began her career working at art galleries in New York and London. After earning her Masters degree from the Bard Graduate Center, she worked as a specialist in European Furniture and Decorative arts at Christie’s auction house in New York. She has lectured both at Christie’s and Sotheby’s and taught at the graduate program for the Study of Decorative Arts, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and New School.

In 2003 Schlesinger founded Artmuse to provide art guidance, curation and advisory services to private and corporate clients as well as collaborations with brands. She served as the Art Curator of The Surrey Hotel where she conceived and curated successful exhibitions connecting the Surrey’s own permanent art collection to the most relevant themes in contemporary art today. Since 2018 Schlesinger has curated numerous group exhibitions and charity auctions at various galleries, the Baryshnikov Arts Center and Core Club and most recently, in 2025, she co-curated an exhibition at the South Hampton Arts Center. In 2020 she co-founded a curatorial platform Space2Curate. In 2024, along with her husband, Adam Schlesinger, who is a filmmaker, she launched Artmuse The Series on YouTube that takes its audience to artist studios and select exhibitions. Schlesinger is currently on the advisory board for the Mack Art Foundation, a residency program geared towards emerging artist who get the opportunity to spend time and create art in New York City.

59 3/4 x 59 3/4 inches

High flow acrylic on panel

60 x 60 inches

Mixed media, reclaimed Plexiglas, plywood box

23 1/2 x 25 1/2 x 3 5/8 inches

Mixed media, reclaimed Plexiglas, birch plywood box

16 x 54 x 3 3/4 inches (Triptych)

Mixed media, reclaimed Plexiglas, plywood box

12 x 13 x 3 5/8 inches

C-print with UV laminate

Available in various sizes

C-print with UV laminate

Available in various sizes

5 3/16 x 5 1/8

5 x 5 x 1 1/2 inches

Nevil Dwek

Stillness, 2026

Giclée print, clear film, aluminum and acrylic, walnut artist frame

Available in various sizes

Available in various sizes

Nevil Dwek

Day by Day, 2026

Giclée print, clear film, aluminum and acrylic, walnut artist frame

Available in various sizes

Window, Undefined, 2024

Let’s Escape the Ordinary

July 22nd - August 28th

Winston Wächter Fine Art

530 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001

(212) 255-2718

nygallery@winstonwachter.com

Publication ©2026 Winston Wächter Fine Art

All rights reserved

Catalog Design by Nóra Reynolds

Cover: Kelsey Shwetz, Seed of Desire, 2022