AWKWARD TRANSACTIONS
Apr 2 - May 28, 2026

Tempus Projects is pleased to announce the opening of Awkward Transactions, a collaborative exhibition by Lisa McCarthy and Wallace Wilson.

Their joint project begins with a premise both theoretical and theatrical: What happens if a painter and a photographer stage their collaboration as a visual call-and-response? The structure reveals dialogue, tension, and improvisation. 

This exhibition remains on display through May 28.

In Awkward Transactions, a creative exchange unfolds between photographer Wilson and painter McCarthy, with Wilson’s photos serving as the “call,” and McCarthy’s interventions in paint as the “response.”

Wilson’s source material is resolutely ordinary—zoos, aquariums, storefronts. Filtered through visual noise, familiar environments are pushed into near-abstraction. The resulting photos offer images already slipping loose from straightforward description. With large-scale prints of these on paper, McCarthy begins her counterpoint, tracing and interrupting rather than neatly “completing” the photos. Her gestures read more as incursion than embellishment. The collaboration plays out as a charged visual exchange, wherein each artist risks being overtaken by the other’s language.

Wallace Wilson received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is Director Emeritus of the USF School of Art & Art History. Featuring diffused subjects resisting conceptual clarity, his photographs have been collected by public and private institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Lisa McCarthy is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily as a painter. She builds up layers of material to produce a body of work, allowing chance to guide narrative compositions. McCarthy holds an MFA from the University of South Florida and a BFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.