Artist couples are always interesting, and so it was with great pleasure that I recently visited the studios of Farrell Brickhouse and Beverly Peterson. On the surface their work is entirely different, with Farrell’s thick, painterly oils of vaguely human figures within obscure environments and equally enigmatic sculptures made of collaged debris and paint scraps, and Beverly’s installation videos that play with, among other things, virtual reality and AI. But below the surface are the important overlaps. Both artists display expert craftsmanship, work instinctively, express a humanity of deep emotional resonance, and perhaps most interestingly, incorporate images from their personal lives, which not surprisingly often include each other. In fact, Beverly’s sprawling installation, now grown to occupy most of her large studio, is a 3 and 4-dimensional (with the 4th dimension being time) loving testimonial to Farrell’s and her shared lives in Montauk, Tribeca, Staten Island and upstate NY. Packing boxes, once used to carry the couple’s possessions as they moved from place to place, are displayed sculpturally, and now hold memories in their empty spaces of air, while photo and video images of those memories glide across their cardboard surfaces, much as the hidden histories of our lives inform our current experiences of the world. Room lighting, spatial dislocations and somewhat otherworldly digital manipulations of the images create a meditative and dreamy sense of universal nostalgia and warmth. Similarly, but through layers of pure paint, discarded remnants of personal stories found in and around his property, and even prints digitally edited from paintings, Farrell’s elusive oils and metaphoric sculptures repurpose memories and – in the case of his sculptures, trash as well – into mysteries from within his life, and journey into the sometimes whimsical but always vulnerable freedom of imagination that is his art. Fundamentally, both artists create work that begins within their entwined familial worlds and transcends into expressions of universal human experience, transforming one material into another, speaking their individual languages, while also nodding to and subtly mirroring one another’s histories.