On July 18th, Andrew Reed Gallery opens the second part of Holding Time, featuring two large-scale paintings and a watercolor by Maine-based artist Kate Bickmore. In Part II, Bickmore shifts the focus to Socotra, the isolated Yemeni island often referred to as the “Galapagos of the Middle East" to which the artist traveled for two weeks in spring 2025. Bickmore has spent the subsequent time reflecting upon her experiences amongst the endemic species of the island, incorporating her reference material into an immersive diorama (seen in Part I), watercolors, and their corresponding paintings. The two paintings in Part II are a study in near and far, with the tactile specificity of Crystalline Light Settles on Nocturnal Breath juxtaposed with the spatial grandeur of the Socotra landscape in A Blush of Apparitions Opens at the Edge of Recognition.

In A Blush of Apparitions Opens at the Edge of Recognition, Kate Bickmore transforms the endemic flora of Socotra into an immersive field of atmosphere, body, and relation. The work expands Bickmore’s ongoing investigation into relational aliveness: the felt sense that flowers, bodies, atmospheres, and landscapes are not separate entities, but responsive presences within a shared field. Translucent petals, misted mountain passages, and atmospheric washes allow forms to pass into one another. Flowers do not sit on top of the landscape; they emerge from it, hover within it, and seem to alter the light around them. The sublime here is not achieved through distance or domination, but through intimacy: the sensation of being drawn close enough to feel the landscape breathing back.

At the center of the work is the Adenium socotranum, commonly known as the Socotra desert rose or desert rose tree. With its swollen, curving trunk and bright pink blossoms, the tree appears at once vegetal, bodily, ancient, and strangely sentient. In Bickmore’s painting, its soft, luminous flowers open into the air while its bulbous, corporeal trunk anchors the landscape below. This tension between delicacy and flesh, bloom and body, exposure and concealment becomes one of the painting’s central emotional structures.

Bickmore’s approach also enters into conversation with the legacy of the Hudson River School, whose artists often synthesized travel, sketching, and firsthand encounters to create vast landscapes in their studios. Frederic Edwin Church, for example, traveled to South America and synthesized sketches into monumental paintings such as The Heart of the Andes. Bickmore reimagines that expeditionary tradition from the position of a contemporary woman artist, replacing the heroic, surveying, male gaze with an intimate, embodied one. Rather than presenting Socotra as a conquered view, she paints it as a place of mutual encounter: mysterious, animate, and resistant to possession.

A Blush of Apparitions Opens at the Edge of Recognition is shaped by Bickmore’s experience of Socotra as both astonishingly alive and profoundly alien. The island’s surreal trees seemed otherworldly to her — but so did her own presence there, as a queer white woman moving through a conservative Muslim culture. The work holds that double estrangement: the feeling of looking at a landscape that does not fully reveal itself, while also feeling oneself to be visible, foreign, and not entirely legible. Across the painting, what is seen and unseen — botanically, atmospherically, culturally, and emotionally — becomes part of the same charged ecology.

Meanwhile, in Crystalline Light Settles on Nocturnal Breath, succulent bodies emerge from darkness through an atmosphere of dew, shadow, and luminosity. Influenced in part by Dutch still-life painting and Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro, the work reimagines the still life not as a fixed arrangement of objects but as a living ecology shaped through relation. Light does not simply illuminate the plants: it appears to move between them, allowing the forms to breathe, touch, and unfold into one another.

The work features echeveria, mangave, and aloe species, many of which use Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM), a photosynthetic rhythm in which plants open their pores and breathe at night, so that they can conserve water during the day. This reversal creates a kind of nocturnal respiration — an inward cycle of inhalation and release. Since Covid, the artist has often experienced anxiety around her breath: moments where she feels the need to control it to protect her body, unable to fully settle into it. Yet, sleep, darkness, and connection to the living world often restore her sense of ease: as though breath becomes less forced when she can trust the larger rhythms surrounding it. The darkness here is therefore not inert, but active: a site of respiration, regeneration, and exchange. The title emerged from this condition, imagining dew and reflected light as crystalline traces settling onto the plants’ nighttime breath.

Bickmore was also drawn to the cosmic quality of these species — their spiraling geometries, reflective surfaces, and slow, queer cycles of propagation through both sexual and asexual reproduction. They embody a form of becoming rooted not in linear progress, but in recurrence, adaptation, and continual renewal. Dew becomes a connective atmosphere between their bodies, holding the plants in suspension: balancing intimacy and vastness, microcosm and cosmos.

The last painting in the cycle will be exhibited in Other Realities, a group show at the gallery opening during Art Basel Miami Beach later this year.