What does color feel like? In the hands of the artists gathered for Color Play, it feels like memory, motion, celebration, and wonder. Kim Storage Gallery is proud to present this vibrant group exhibition featuring the work of Poppy Dodge, Megan Woodard Johnson, Kathleen Waterloo, and Gretchen Warsen—four artists united by an unapologetic devotion to color as a primary language of expression.
Across wildly different materials and methods, each artist approaches color not as decoration but as the very subject of their work. Poppy Dodge, a self-described Color Maximalist working in Sonoma County, California, builds richly layered abstractions inspired by improvisational quilting and collage—stacking shapes and hues into what she calls “playful color conversations” that stitch together a life’s worth of experience. Megan
Woodard Johnson, a Milwaukee-based mixed media painter, layers paint and expressive drawn line with found ephemera—vintage ledgers, packaging, handwritten records—to map the beautiful, layered complexity of everyday moments. Her work captures how small, ordinary joys quietly accumulate into a life, and how color can carry the full weight of memory and mood. Kathleen Waterloo brings a uniquely architectural sensibility to the group: a former interior architect turned encaustic painter, she transforms aerial views, street maps, and structural blueprints into luminous abstract compositions rendered in molten wax and pigment. And Gretchen Warsen, working on a large scale in her studio, builds paintings through accumulation and intuition—layering opaque acrylic color, drawn line, and translucent fields while drawing inspiration from interior design, children’s illustration, and the eternal freshness of flowers. Her titles, arrived at through reflection and conversation with her daughters, serve as gentle invitations into each work’s emotional world.
Together, these four artists make a compelling case that color is never neutral—it carries feeling, triggers memory, and opens dialogue between artist and viewer. Color Play invites visitors to slow down, look closely, and let color do what it does best: surprise, delight, and connect us to one another
