Celia Reisman
Common Ground
Curated by Celia Reisman
Featuring Claudia Rilling, Lou Schellenberg, Laura Vahlberg, and Sophie C. White
On View: September 18 - October 17, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 19, 1-4 PM
Location: Gross McCleaf Gallery, The Mill Studios, 123 Leverington Ave, Philadelphia, PA
Visitor parking is located in The Mill Studios lot, accessible from Leverington Avenue.
Gross McCleaf Gallery is proud to present Common Ground, a group exhibition curated by Celia Reisman featuring paintings by Claudia Rilling, Lou Schellenberg, Laura Vahlberg, and Sophie C. White. Conceived as a companion exhibition to Reisman’s concurrent solo exhibition Street Views, Common Ground brings together artists who share an interest in architecture within the landscape, revealing how individual decisions of composition, color, space, and form can transform the same subject into distinctly personal interpretations.
How do we each look at a location and reinterpret it? What decisions do we make to capture and reference a specific place? Common Ground begins with these questions. Each artist starts from a specific location in their immediate environment and expands from there, using composition, color, spatial construction, and other formal decisions to reshape what is observed. Seen together, the paintings create a compelling opportunity to compare and contrast the many ways artists translate place into personal expression.
Additional exhibition previews and selected works will be shared in the coming weeks.
Claudia Rilling in the studio
About the Artists
Claudia Rilling
"I see architectural forms as a way to organize the picture plane - strong horizontals, verticals, and rectangles that play against the organic forms of nature. I am drawn to the push and pull of this contrast, allowing me to emphasize underlying geometry and shape, one of my primary interests in painting." - Claudia Rilling
Claudia Rilling is a professional painter and educator based in Philadelphia. She holds a BFA in painting from Boston University and studied at The Academy of Art University in San Francisco, obtaining her MFA. Rilling spent many years as an adjunct professor in painting, at both the graduate and undergraduate level. She has exhibited her work regularly for over a decade and her pieces are housed in private collections across the U.S. and Europe. With a background in classical painting and drawing, she blends this foundation with a passion for contemporary art and ancient art history. Drawing inspiration from her travels in Italy and the flora and fauna in her native Pennsylvania, her paintings explore a variety of subjects.
Lou Schellenberg, Shelter, Oil on linen board, 14" x 18"
Lou Schellenberg
"My paintings depict land, buildings, and familiar places around me, many of which I have known for decades. Working from observation in oils or watercolors, I often create several versions of a place in a single session.I paint gesturally and spontaneously, aiming to capture the feeling of being in a space...I like the freedom to paint specificity, but the abstract arrangement of shape and color remains central." - Lou Schellenberg
Lou Schellenberg is a visual artist who divides her year between painting in Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia, Canada. Raised in New York and New England, she has a deep connection to the northeastern coast. Her experiences of both rural and urban life have shaped her work and perspective. For more than thirty years, Schellenberg’s landscape paintings have combined observation and invention, creating pared-down compositions of dwellings, structures, and surrounding landscapes. After earning an MFA from SUNY Albany, she moved to Pennsylvania, where she taught as an Associate Professor of Art for 20 years.
Lou Schellenberg, Kingsburg, Oil on panel, 6" x 12"
Schellenberg has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and Canada. Her paintings and public commissions are included in numerous collections, including Penn Medicine, Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, and L.L.Bean in Maine.
Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; a solo exhibition with Lancaster Galleries; and two-person exhibitions with Kiesendahl + Calhoun in Hawley, Pennsylvania, and Cerulean Arts in Philadelphia.
Laura Vahlberg painting en plein air
Laura Vahlberg
"When I paint en plein air, I look for order amid the visual overload of everyday life. Each scene becomes a puzzle: countless details collapse into simple, interlocking shapes on the canvas...
Laura Vahlberg, Grey Evening, Oil on canvas on board, 15" x 19"
...I distill every element through three core pillars—colour, composition, and feeling—and use them to create a calm, ordered space for the viewer." - Laura Vahlberg
Laura Vahlberg's work has been exhibited around the U.S. and internationally (Australia, Los Angeles, New York, Alabama, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Virginia). She has studied with artists including Israel Hershberg, Ken Kewley, Ken Szmagaj, and Susan Jane Walp.
She now lives in Roanoke, Virginia and received her Bachelors in Fine Arts at James Madison University. Her work can be seen in person at Reynold's Gallery (Richmond, VA) and Rhett Baruch Gallery (Los Angeles, CA).
Laura Vahlberg, Mall, Oil on linen on board, 9.25" x 14.5"
Gallerist Rhett Baruch writes, "Laura Vahlberg, based in Roanoke, Virginia, works from direct observation by painting everyday landscapes and scenes on site, yet her paintings quickly evolve into formally abstract compositions.
Beginning with a democratic approach to form, Vahlberg treats every element in the visual field as equal: a wall, a shadow, a piece of sky. Color, shape, and tonal relationships, guide the evolution of each piece, allowing narrative to emerge only secondarily, if at all.
Her restricted palette and broad atmospheric handling create paintings that are less about depiction than about perception itself and about how we process, filter, and reassemble the visual world."
Sophie C. White, photographed by Mae Belle Vargas, courtesy of CFEVA
Sophie C. White
"By making paintings of my transforming surroundings, I am able to spend time with and mourn the neighborhood as I once knew it, while anticipating what is to come. Each painting is made in the exact time and place in which the place existed as depicted and it is sort of an artifact of that moment as experienced by me. Painting the image by hand with only my natural vision to guide me, allows me to decide exactly what information before my eyes needs to be included in the image, and enables the particularities of my senses and movements to determine formal characteristics." - Sophie C. White
Born 1984 in New York, NY, Sophie Cooper White has lived and worked in Philadelphia, PA since 2009. Since adolescence in a rapidly transforming NYC at the turn of the Millennium, she has made small, representational paintings from life of familiar places at various stages of becoming unfamiliar. Colorful paper mache sculptures and experimental sound and performance work sometimes accompany her paintings, mimicking the environment in which they were made and inviting the viewer into the work. Sophie’s paintings focus on the uncanny details of a neighborhood disfigured by over-development, from the perspective of a resident feeling a bit lost.
Sophie holds an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art. In 2025 she was the subject of a solo exhibit at the Philadelphia International Airport, participated in 11 group exhibitions in Philadelphia and New York, was a nominee for the Pew Fellowship and a recipient of the Illuminate the Arts Grant. She has exhibited consistently since 2006.