REVIEW: Rough Draft Atlanta on "NIGHT SWIM"
In Spruill Gallery’s ‘Night Swim,’ Hannah Ehrlich and Thomas Flynn II wade into memory
by Sherri Daye Scott March 11, 2026 | 8:00 am
There is something Shannon Morris has learned about pairing artists: the through line eventually comes. You just have to be patient enough to recognize it when it does.
For Morris, curator at Spruill Gallery, that moment arrived when she found herself standing in Thomas Flynn II’s Atlanta studio, looking at his layered, swamp-dense paintings, and thinking immediately of Hannah Ehrlich and the way both artists wrestle material into something psychological.
“I can just sometimes see people’s works together,” Morris said. “And then they really filled in all of the depth themselves.”
The result of that pairing is “Night Swim,” on view at Spruill Gallery in Dunwody from March 12 through April 24. Ehrlich, a textile artist, weaver, and sculptor, and Flynn, a painter whose multilayered canvases read almost as physical objects, look nothing alike on the surface and operate from the same place underneath.
How ‘Night Swim’ got its name
Flynn and Ehrlich talked at length before settling on a title. What they were after was something that could hold the interior quality of both bodies of work. Both make work that dives into and works through personal history. “Night Swim” captured that feeling of moving through something you can’t fully see, guided by just enough light to keep going.
“There is something exciting about not knowing where you’re going, but knowing that you’re actively searching for it,” Flynn said. “Illuminated by the moon.”
What delighted Ehrlich was that the title also turned out to describe the work visually. “Thomas’s paintings almost look like they’re being viewed from underwater,” she said. “And my work is more like a submerging into color and texture.”
Textile artist Hannah Ehrlich and painter Thomas Flynn II, whose work is on view together in ‘Night Swim’ at Spruill Gallery, March 12 – April 24, 2026. (Courtesy of Spruill Gallery)
Flynn’s landscapes and the psychology of color
Flynn came to Atlanta by way of Houston and Savannah, where he studied at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). His painted landscapes are dense with foliage, water, and the sense of something growing alongside something decaying. For “Night Swim,” he deepened that inward turn. Some paintings include figures — himself, his wife — moving through overgrown, imagined terrain.
“These paintings are about the growth and decay of light,” Flynn said. “Or the growth that comes after decay. Wading through this physical and also psychological space.”
Flynn also paints through chronic aura migraines, a condition he developed about a decade ago that reshuffled everything, including his palette. The complex shadow colors that ripple through his canvases, magentas and blues and greens folded inside darkness, come, in part, from that disorder.
Ehrlich’s weaving, cutting, and letting go
Ehrlich builds her practice around weaving, then deliberately undoing what she’s made. She cuts. She collages. She has moved from working with fine, precious thread to something bulkier, more tactile, less controlled. There is freedom in that shift, she says, and an acceptance that the work may continue to change.
For “Night Swim,” she introduces floor sculpture for the first time, building on an old tree stump she found in her yard, layering it with her materials and watching it accrete into something amorphous and alive. It is, she says, the most literal she has ever been: actual nature meeting all the meaning she has built up around it.
“My work is visual depictions of human emotions,” she said. “The journey of recovery. Healing from turmoil.”
A curator’s instinct, confirmed
Morris has tracked both artists for years. She first encountered Ehrlich’s work at Westobou Gallery in 2018, then followed Flynn’s paintings through studio visits. She describes the pairing as something she felt before she could explain. “The weight of what they do visually felt like it was in the same realm,” she said.
When asked what came to mind when she heard the title, Morris went straight to R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming,” a song about private memory and late-night ritual.
“It’s about that emotional depth and that weight,” Morris said, “but it’s not something that makes you sad. It’s just something that is tangible, ethereal, and conceptual all at once. And I think that’s what the best contemporary art does.”