October is settling in and as the season shifts around us, this feels like the perfect time to start a new chapter. The atmosphere is unmistakable and as the cooler days here ask us to slow down… this weekend Haven Gallery invites us to wander into new exhibitions by Benz & Chang, “Incarnations”, Yuriko Shirou, “Farewells in Toyland”, Kyra Wilson, “Perewynth”, Shiori Matsumoto, Mini Collection 2026, and Lara Kluczynski, (Craft Glamour), Mini Collection!
From the beautifully strange and dreamlike to the darker corners of the shadows around us, each collection is brimming with inspiration and storytelling for us to discover.
Benz & Chang | Yuriko Shirou | Kyra Wilson | Shiori Matsumoto | Lara Kluczynski
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 10, 2026 | 6-8pm
Exhibition Dates: October 10 – November 8, 2026
Haven Gallery
50 Main St., Northport, NY 11768 | ph. (631) 757-0500
To inquire, please contact Erica via email info@havengallery.com
About the Gallery //
Haven Gallery is run by Erica Berkowitz and Joseph Weinreb. The gallery first opened in 2015 in the Carriage House of historic Northport, NY. Within two years, the gallery doubled in size and expanded into the entire Carriage House building. Through their successful in-house exhibitions and presentations at art fairs both domestic and international, Haven opened a secondary location at 90 Main St., in 2020, during the height of the Covid pandemic. It was at that point, that Erica and Joseph knew it was time to find a permanent location for their artists. In January of 2022, they bought the building at 50 Main st., and opened its doors as Haven Gallery’s perennial home.
Haven Gallery’s focus is on exhibiting emotionally, intellectually and imaginatively driven, representational artwork that connects the audience and artist with universal axioms and passions. We work with both emerging and established artists who transcend their medium and subjects by exploring the world around them as well as the one within themselves.
Benz & Chang, Incarnations
Artist Statement //
Benz & Chang believe that the arts make the world a better place through shared experience and mutual understanding. The Benz & Chang paintings are “fake vintage photos” rendered with watercolor and/or walnut ink. They are dreamlike and figurative. Most of the paintings appear to be photos from the early 20th century, and they reward a second or third look with details that can be easy to miss. Figures appear with twins, crowns, wings, ghost limbs, halos, odd lights and shadows.
Using this imagery, Benz and Chang explore transformative life experiences such as facing fear, making life-changing decisions, grieving losses, having mystical experiences, or confronting mortality. Says Benz, “I see myself as a channel. My job is to align myself with a larger creative impulse, and also with the painting itself. I must add that I rarely do this perfectly. During the various steps of making a painting, I will “see” something that belongs in the painting, and so I will add it. If the decision-making process breaks down, I consult a Magic 8-Ball for direction. The resulting paintings are dreamlike.”
About //
Highly inspired by Victorian photography trends and vintage imagery, Benz and Chang paints spiritual figures cohorting with the living, merging the planes of life and death. A deep connection is established between his sitters, adapting the paranormal into the normal. Levitation, anthropomorphic shadow and wrapped figures extend a supernatural bridge to the viewer, connecting us to secret spaces and transforming memories of the deceased into tangible presences. Benz and Chang’s paintings serve as a channel to extend emotions of comfort and acceptance towards the more challenging and darker aspects of life. His motifs of verisimilitude suggest an overlapping of timelines and planes of existence beckoning the viewer to reconsider their own perspectives and realities.
Benz began having experiences with spirits and hauntings at an early age. These experiences have continued throughout his life. They have fueled his interest in dreams, ghosts, and clairvoyance from all angles, including the fictional, real, fraudulent, or imagined. Benz grew up in the American Southwest, and now enjoys living in the (haunted) Pacific Northwest. He has an extensive collection of odd photos from the early 20th century. Benz has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado in Boulder. Chang is a fictional photography studio partner to Benz. He is a stuffed cat of the stuffed animal variety (not the taxidermy variety). Chang supplies the dark.
Yuriko Shirou, Farewells in Toyland
Yuriko Shirou is a self-taught Mexican illustrator. Her professional work has dabbled in Manga, American Comic and Figurative Art. She has done several international projects for various publishers such as Rittenhouse Archives, Cryptozoic Entretainment, Braiiinz! Publishing, Perna studios, among others. She has participated in international art and illustration exhibitions, among which the Creators of Legends / Homenaje a Hans Ruedi Giger; SuperficieArte, Mexico-Switzerland / 2016-2017. She has conducted workshops and conferences focused on Illustration as well as a large number of international commissioned works and various printed publications, including The Guide Artists Magazine / October 2017.
Lara Kluczynski, Mini Collection
Lara Kluczynski is a self-taught multimedia artist based in the UK.
She primarily creates joyful pieces that playfully fuse together fashion and sculpture. Her work explores innovative and experimental materials and techniques. Her pieces often probe at labels and perceived boundaries between art forms, frequently exploring the interplay between the viewer and the viewed.
Her style is theatrical, surreal and whimsical, with hints of antiquity and comedy sprinkled throughout. Her work sets out to incite feelings of curiosity and optimism from the viewer; recreating that feeling of childlike possibility.
Her inspirations are often drawn from vintage fashion, photography and theatre as well as architecture, nature, drag and pop-surrealism. Her work tends to blend decorative frieze style elements with serenely depicted animals, all whilst balancing the traditional with the obscenely kitsch.
Kyra Wilson, Perewynth
From anthropomorphism to abstract, Kyra’s vibrant paintings cover the full range with a surreal, classic, yet whimsical flavor. She has a deep love for nature, and combines that with a healthy appetite for mythology and fairy tales. Kyra likes to connect with her subject matter in her paintings, which is why the focus of her pieces can almost always be seen as “looking back” at you. Her work explores the lighter side, even when it feels a little dark, because Kyra is always looking for that little bit of a silver lining.
Kyra’s education includes an A.F.A in 1997, and a B.S. in Business in 2008. Her works are in private collections across the USA, Canada, the UK, Europe, and Australia. Kyra’s artworks have regularly been published in Thrice Fiction Magazine, newspapers, and shown in various online and physical venues, galleries and businesses.
Kyra currently resides in Vermont, with her husband.
Shiori Matsumoto, Mini Collection
I was born in the Kagawa-prefecture of Japan in 1973. I studied oil painting in The Kyoto Saga University of Arts. The paintings which I am going to express are dreamlike, melancholy and cryptic atmospheres with girls who play with imagination and try to change the world with their own ritual. “Here are children as fables, suspended in time, their breath still warm in their throats, the world around each figure a dream of perfect context, full of mystery and exquisite symbolic and surreal detail.
The artist’s extensive and complex treatise on the life of girls is as constant in its solemn weight as it is in its relentless seduction of the eye. These children are deep and aware. They are in every instance involved in a deep, two-way conversation with all that surrounds them.
Their fragile beauty is sometimes infused with resolve, and other times with an air of weary resignation. But in both cases one is sure that they somehow know that they themselves are the greatest mystery, that they will persevere and carry forward. While Shiori Matsumoto’s moving and lovely paintings pay an affectionate homage to European surrealist and symbolic painters they only begin with this influence.
The work floats further into a realm of subtle and nuanced sadness that has all the compelling pathos of sakura no saishū-bi. To my eye this transporting effect is somehow profoundly, beautifully and uniquely Japanese.” Jock Sturges Seattle 2014 – (ARTWORK SHIPS approx.. DECEMBER 16th).
