Ava McDonough: Eternal Dance of Circles
House of Seiko is pleased to present Eternal Dance of Circles, Ava McDonough’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, opening November 14 and remaining on view through December 19, 2026.
The exhibition takes its title from a passage in Rabindranath Tagore’s Fireflies: “The centre is still and silent in the heart / of an eternal dance of circles.” McDonough encountered the poem through its inclusion in a book devoted to the geometry of flowers. Tagore’s image of stillness held within continuous motion offers an entry into paintings shaped by repetition, intuition, and change.
McDonough begins with closely observed natural forms whose identities become elusive through abstraction. A leaf, flower, wing, or stretch of moss is enlarged until it begins to dissolve. In place of conventional appearance, she offers an intimate and decontextualized encounter in which color, light, and texture assume their own significance and a secret underlying structure is revealed.
Each painting is made with a single brush through the accumulation of tiny, partially overlapping strokes. Beginning in one corner, McDonough moves methodically across the surface until the canvas is completely covered. The image develops through an improvised sequence of decisions, the composition of marks grown radially from a center that remains elusive and gestures at the infinite. Up close, the paintings reveal tightly ordered, wave-like textures; from a distance, their individual marks merge into soft, fleeting images.
Across nearly a dozen intimately scaled works, pale greens, powdery blues, violets, and earthen tones gather into luminous fields. Shadows suggest leaves, clouds, submerged objects, or concentrations of light without settling into any single reading. The paintings oscillate between terrestrial and celestial registers, joining the material specificity of natural phenomena with the less tangible territories of spirit and imagination.
The subjects of Eternal Dance of Circles are not fixed objects so much as products of undulating states of perception. McDonough renders nature as something remembered, sensed, and reorganized. Her paintings occupy the threshold where recognition gives way to atmosphere: mist, reflected light, deep water, or the afterimage of something briefly glimpsed. This apparent softness is produced through an exacting and irreversible method, with each seemingly weightless field retaining the physical record of its making.
The circle of the exhibition’s title operates both formally and philosophically. It evokes the recurring movement of McDonough’s brush and the broader cycles of growth, erosion, death, and renewal. Within each painting, the individual mark remains visible even as it is absorbed into the whole, echoing the place of a single living form within a larger, unified ecology. Stillness becomes not the absence of motion, but a temporary equilibrium within it.
McDonough transforms fragments of the world into sites of reverence and imaginative possibility. Her paintings ask what might be revealed when looking becomes devotional, and when a fleeting gaze is held long enough to become mysterious again.
Ava McDonough (b. 1999, Charlottesville, Virginia) lives and works between Charlottesville and Los Angeles. She received a BS in Environment and Sustainability Sciences from Cornell University in 2021. Recent solo exhibitions include Master, Serene at 12.26 Gallery, Dallas (2025–2026); Revery at SHRINE, New York (2025); and All I Hear Is the Symphony at Lowell Ryan Projects, Los Angeles (2023).
Her work has also been presented in group exhibitions and art fairs, including Frieze Seoul with Make Room (2026); the White Columns Benefit Exhibition + Auction, New York (2025, 2026); Dallas Invitational with 12.26 Gallery (2025, 2026); The Armory Show with SHRINE, New York (2024, 2026); Blue Dream at SHRINE, Los Angeles (2024); and Rainforest Cafe at Guerrero Gallery, Los Angeles (2024).
