Harper’s is pleased to announce Max Jansons + Joani Tremblay, a two-person exhibition featuring new paintings by each artist at Harper’s East Hampton. Bringing together landscape and still life, the presentation considers how these familiar genres can become vehicles for memory and interior experience, transforming images of nature into expansive psychological terrains. Max Jansons + Joani Tremblay opens with a public reception on Saturday, August 8, 6–8pm.
Across his new series, Max Jansons returns to the vase of flowers, a motif he first introduced over a decade ago and has since used as an armature for exploring what he calls “the beautiful language of painting.” Rendered in oil on linen, this body of work was shaped in part by Jansons’s time in Hawaii, where he watched the sunset each evening as his wife’s father approached the end of his life. Here, his floral arrangements appear to float against aerial backdrops far above the earth’s crust. Even when flat surfaces are depicted, the absence of cast shadows lends a feeling of buoyancy that defies gravity and material reality. Often functioning as paintings within paintings, the vases become miniature landscapes of their own, containing vibrant sunsets, ocean horizons, and drifting cumulus clouds that swell and dissolve in raking sunlight. Through this synthesis of genres, Jansons treats the floral arrangement as a vessel for loss, using its suspended horizons and radiant skies to reflect on impermanence and visions of the afterlife. Giving acute attention to the direction and texture of each brushstroke, the artist embraces the slow nature of the medium. In both form and subject matter, painting becomes a means of sublimation for Jansons, allowing the weight of personal experience to pass through its formal possibilities.
Like Jansons, Joani Tremblay’s new paintings are shaped by memories of places she has encountered and inhabited. Her reference points traverse the Hamptons, the Quebec coast where she grew up, and the California desert, yet these geographies gradually dissolve into one another through her soft-focus, ethereal landscapes. In works such as Blue Mountains Constantly Walking, enlarged flowers emerge from the lower quadrant of the canvas, their fibrous petals and lush colors rendered with gentle precision. As the artist notes, “The flowers aren’t botanical studies, and the landscapes aren’t descriptions of specific locations. They’re fragments of memory, observation, and imagination brought together into a space that feels simultaneously familiar and impossible.” An additional dimension of Tremblay’s practice emerges through the works’ respective titles. Borrowed from literary sources by writers such as Walt Whitman, Terry Tempest Williams, Robert Macfarlane, and Gary Snyder, the titles function as quiet companions, alluding to the relationship between landscape and consciousness that each author explored in distinct ways. Through the interplay of botanical detail and atmospheric dissolution, Tremblay allows technique itself to mirror her subject: the way memory sharpens certain forms while allowing places to blur, drift, and merge into one another.
Viewed together, the landscapes and still lifes of Jansons and Tremblay create a context in which beauty and uncertainty remain closely bound. In both practices, nature is treated less as scenery than as a means of giving visible shape to inner experience, generating a sense of reverence shadowed by loss. Rather than resolving these tensions, their paintings allow shifting emotional states to remain suspended, inviting viewers to reflect on such conflicting feelings.
Max Jansons (b. 1974, New York, NY) received a BFA from UCLA in 1996, and an MFA from Columbia University in 1998. Most recently, his work has been exhibited at Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco (2026, 2024, 2020 and 2019); Harper’s, Los Angeles and East Hampton (2023 and 2022); Berkshire Botanical Garden, Stockbridge, MA (2022); Louise Alexander Gallery/AF Projects, Porto Cervo and Los Angeles (2021 and 2020); KARMA, New York (2020); Galerie Lefebvre et Fils, Paris (2018); and 5 Car Garage, Santa Monica (2017 and 2016). Jansons’s work has been acquired by institutions including The Capital Group, Los Angeles; Honolulu Museum of Art, HI; and Progressive Corporation, Mayfield, OH. Reviews of his work have appeared in Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. Jansons currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Joani Tremblay (b. 1984, Montreal, QC) received an MFA from Concordia University in 2017. Tremblay’s work has been exhibited at venues across North America and internationally including Acquavella Galleries, Palm Beach (2025); The Pit, Los Angeles and Glendale, CA (2024, 2022, and 2021); Harper’s, New York, East Hampton, and Los Angeles (2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020); James Cohan Gallery, New York (2024); Bradley Ertaskrian, Montreal (2023); Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2022); Marie-Laure Fleisch Gallery, Brussels (2020); Interstate, Brooklyn (2019); Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto (2019 and 2018); and Pony Sugar, Stockholm (2017). Her work has been acquired by numerous public collections, including The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Montreal Municipal Art Collection, Montreal; RBC Corporate Collection, Toronto; and Vancouver Center of International Contemporary Art, BC. Tremblay lives and works in Montreal and Joshua Tree, CA.