Shiels has returned to a subject that she has explored, with great success, in the past, but a wall label explains that she “pushes the concept into the ‘now’ with an enlivened palette and a greater complexity of surface.” It doesn’t take a wall label to “get” that the somewhat ordered yet still slapdash brushwork makes the surface more complex, and the palette with plenty of local color is lively. The turquoise zigzag on the back of one of the hounds leaping at a robin that has inexplicably flown too close to the pack in Kennel Wall is delicious.

One of the most successful—to my eye—of Shiels’ oil paintings in the challenging square format is Kennel Bound. The pack is still in the woods and eager to get home. They fill the foreground, and you only see the hindquarters and tails of a few who are dashing ahead. Shiels’ energetic crosshatchings convey their excitement as they head back to the kennel, anticipating a celebratory dinner after an exhausting yet exhilarating day on the hunt. This is what they were born to do.

All the energy of Shiels’ paintings is balanced by the stillness of Kevin T. Kelly’s precisionist landscapes. Nothing is happening in his farmland scenes. While there is some depth, the paintings could just as easily be hard edge-geometric abstractions—imagine them turned upside down as a painting instructor once advised me. The color is flat and static.