The Flickering Tide

The Flickering Tide invites viewers into a world of shifting perception, atmosphere and memory. 

Curator, Lauren Skelly Bailey wrote, “Flickering Tide gathers paintings by Taya Naumovich that move within states of instability, where perception loosens and reforms. Working between figuration and abstraction, Naumovich builds each surface through layers of gesture and light, allowing forms to surface gradually—only to slip away again. Figures, animals, and landscapes hover at the edge of recognition, held briefly before dissolving back into the atmosphere.

Paint accumulates and erodes in equal measure, producing a quiet flicker—an image that never fully settles. What appears is partial, shifting, as though shaped by memory or weather in motion.

These paintings are not a fixed experience in place; they unfold before you. Emotional and natural forces converge in a shared rhythm of emergence and disappearance, inviting a slower kind of looking—one that lingers in uncertainty, where meaning is felt as it forms, and releases, over time. As you walk through the alcoves at Adelphi University each piece leaves you longing for more flickering episodes of Naumovich’s work wondering where she will take you next.”

• On View: April 15 through May 23, 2026
• Opening reception: Monday, April 27, from 4:00pm – 6:00pm

Taya Naumovich, Rose Current, 2026. Oil on canvas, 36 × 30 inches.

Learn more about Adelphi Art Exhibitions. The Performing Arts Center Gallery is open daily from 9:00am to 9:00pm. Follow us on Instagram @AUExhibitions.

For more information, please contact Eliz Alahverdian at alahverdian@adelphi.edu.

About the Artist

Taya Naumovich is a painter whose work explores gesture as a form of perception. Through layered brushwork and shifting fields of light, she constructs surfaces that register emotional experience as movement rather than image. Her paintings operate between figuration and abstraction, where forms emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure in response to memory, atmosphere and sensation.

Naumovich has exhibited nationally, including Forbidden Fruit (Piano Craft Gallery, Boston), Cosmologic (Curiouser & Curiouser, Kansas City), Gathered in the Stretching Now (Heaven Gallery, Chicago), and The Collective II (Visionary Projects, New York).

Artist Statement

Flickering Tides brings together a group of paintings that investigate instability as a visual condition. Across the works, light behaves as a shifting agent—breaking, diffusing, and re-forming—so that perception itself becomes uncertain. Rather than presenting fixed images, the paintings operate as fields of fluctuation. Forms hover at the edge of recognition, dissolving into gesture and re-emerging through color. This constant movement produces a sense of flicker: a visual rhythm of interruption, delay, and return. The exhibition focuses on how meaning is constructed through this instability. What is seen is never fully held; it appears in fragments, as if memory and atmosphere are actively reshaping the image. In this way, the work invites a slower mode of looking—one that mirrors the way experience unfolds over time.