The Millbrook Arts Project is pleased to present Lively Flourishes, the fourth exhibition of our inaugural season. Featuring the work of Ben Pederson and Joy Taylor, this exhibition brings together two multidisciplinary artists whose practices traverse a range of materials with playful rigor and precision. United by their use of lively forms and intricately rendered patterns, Pederson and Taylor evoke a sense of movement and vitality-each piece a flourish in form and spirit. 

In Joy Taylor's paintings, sparkling detail, daring composition, and luminous color reflect the power of natural forces. The paintings create a world that defies traditional still life, which seeks to isolate, tame, and order the flora of the world around us. In Joy's work, life is never still. It is exuberant, irrepressible, at times disconcerting, and even dangerous in its boldness. 

Ben Pederson's sculptural works conjure dreamlike, non-terrestrial realms populated by alien glyphs, devotional shrines, and biomorphic entities. Emerging through a deeply intuitive process, these forms channel both interior states and imagined cosmologies. With an emphasis on curiosity, Pederson's works resist resolution, instead inviting viewers into their unfolding mystery-spaces where the familiar slips into the unfamiliar, and where each flourish suggests life growing in new, otherworldly directions. 

Together, the works of Taylor and Pederson ignite a celebration of creative vitality-each piece a testament to the restless, generative power of artistic imagination. Lively Flourishes invites viewers to dwell in this exuberant space, where patterns pulse, forms awaken, and life—both earthly and alien-thrives in unpredictable bloom.