In the Wake of Reflection

A solo exhibition by Jennifer Basile
October 3 – 31, 2025

Over the last few decades, Jennifer Basile has developed an extensive body of work depicting the elemental marvels found within America’s natural spaces. In doing so, she has cultivated an intimate familiarity with her subjects—from grand wading birds in profile, executed with a quiet elegance reminiscent of Renaissance portraiture, to dense mangrove marshes traced with the intimacy of memory, as though following the lines of a palm. Her representations bear a truth rooted in honesty and colored with appreciation. In this latest chapter of her practice, reflection takes on a defining role rather than a supporting one. Executed in bold color, In the Wake of Reflection brings us Basile’s familiar landscapes accompanied by their ghostly counterparts mirrored beneath each horizon line, urging us to see these delicate yet enduring spaces through the lenses of ecological loss, preservation, and reverence.

Through her depictions of Florida’s fragile natural spaces—cypress domes, marshy bogs, and mangrove shorelines—Basile asks us to reflect on what society stands to lose as these habitats vanish. Each horizon line is doubled by its watery reflection—an image at once serene and unstable, always vulnerable to disruption: a passing breeze, an insect landing, or an alligator surfacing. The reflections Basile renders are not exact replications, but abstractions tethered to likeness. This duality preserves the fleeting character of the wetlands while heightening their fragility through formal variation. Her work moves between exacting detail and loosened abstraction, a purposeful shift that enriches mood and meaning alike. 

With In the Wake of Reflection, Basile deepens her ongoing dialogue with the Florida wetlands. By foregrounding reflection, she merges natural observation with abstraction, offering images that are at once faithful and fleeting. Basile offers not only a meditation on nature’s fragility but also a quiet call to safeguard what still remains.