Benjamin Staker: The Moon is a Mirror

November 14, 2025—January 3, 2026

Opening November 14, 2025

The Empty Circle is pleased to present The Moon is a Mirror, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Benjamin Staker, marking the gallery’s inaugural exhibition at its new permanent Tribeca location. The exhibition brings together a new body of work, which includes paintings and monotypes, that meditate on light, longing, and the liminal states between trauma and transcendence. Drawing on poetry and metaphor, Staker’s paintings use natural imagery—moons, tides, forests, skies—to explore how reflection itself can become a generative act.

For Staker, the moon is not a passive object but a source of quiet radiance—a companion in darkness that burns in its own right. The works in The Moon is a Mirror ask what happens when light becomes reflective, when illumination returns our gaze and shows us the way forward. Each painting is a threshold between the earthly and the celestial, an invitation to wander through the forest that is not a forest, the sky that is not a sky. Through this cycle of seeking and surrender, Staker renders devotion not as faith in resolution, but as an ongoing pursuit of meaning.

Ranging in scale from small, intimate works on panel to expansive canvases alive with iridescent surfaces, Staker’s compositions blur the line between figuration and abstraction. Layered veils of oil stick and oil paint create atmospheric fields where flickers of landscape emerge and dissolve—suggesting moonlight refracted through water or glimpsed through fog, as seen on “Devotion, the ties that bind us” (2025). Here, his palette oscillates between deep blues, luminous greens, and earthy ochres, echoing the phases of the moon that guide his process.

Staker’s paintings are maps of restless faith—of blisters and moonlight, of questions that refuse closure. They trace a personal mythology of walking and watching, following light until it disappears into reflection. His imagery is both meditative and ecstatic, offering viewers a sense of quiet intensity that borders on prayer.

About the Artist

Benjamin Staker is a painter whose work is a meditation on light and longing, harnessing poetry and metaphor by using natural imagery to explore trauma and triumph, and the eternal journey between the two. He studied Art History at the University of Washington and spent years wandering through Europe and Asia in hostels and on couches before moving to New York, where he earned his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in May 2024. He was awarded the 2024–2025 CHUBB Post-Graduate Fellowship and has exhibited in A Group Show at George Adams Gallery (2024), with CHUBB at Miami Art Basel (2024), and in a two-person show at Auxier Kline.