A Gush of Water Cleared the Land closes one year for the Running Horse Gallery and opens another. The exhibit features four artists: Lebanse/Armenian painter Talar Aghbashian, Lebanese photographer Karen Kalou, and American artists Juan Fontanive and Laura Pharaon.

Talar Aghbashian’s impressionistic oil landscapes are often ghostly, focused on the uncertainty evinced by nature. Juan Fontanive’s meticulously constructed installation ‘Quickness,’ a flipbook of a bird transforming in flight, elaborates further on the theme in a more mechanical medium.

The audible sound from the flip of each image imitates the sound of swings. If Aghbashian’s natural world turns ambiguous on a closer look, Fontanive finds the natural world to collapse into the automated with the aid of optical illusion. Our eyes are not to be trusted.