Photo provided by the Crary Art Gallery Bedroom in Stow, an oil on canvas, is the work of Hannah Steele, whose work will be featured in a new exhibit at the Crary Art Gallery starting this weekend.

An upcoming exhibition at the Crary Art Gallery aims to study how light travels, builds new structures and activates spaces.

The artist is Hannah Steele and the exhibition — “Hannah Steele: Architecture of Light” — opens on Saturday and runs through July 17.

“In my work as an oil painter, I use the interiors I inhabit on a daily basis as subject matter,” Steele explained. “I am interested in how the interior holds both the tangible and the intangible; these spaces are occupied equally by material objects and bodies [and] by the immaterial dance of light.”

Steele graduated from Messiah University in 2019 and then started showing her oil paintings primarily in Harrisburg, Lancaster and Pittsburgh.

According to a statement from the Crary, Steele was named a finalist in the 14th International Art Renewal Center’s Salon Competition and was Artist in Residence at Nemacolin in Farmington, Pa.

Last year, she returned home to Massachusetts to pursue a Master of Fine Arts at Boston University.

“I am particularly interested in how, within the space of a painting, light becomes just as much a concrete form as anything else,” she explained. “It takes up and travels throughout space as a body would and creates new geometric structures within existing architectures.

“Along with this relationship between the material and immaterial, I aspire in my paintings to attain a harmonious relationship between flatness and depth. I create tightly-rendered areas of illusion that read as three-dimensional spaces and forms, along with cultivating areas that embrace the flatness and materiality of oil paint on canvas. The result is an image that oscillates between a portal pulling the viewer into deep space and a flat surface revealing process of construction and nature of materials used.”

The opening of the exhibit is set for Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. The Crary Art Gallery is open on Fridays and Saturdays from noon to 6 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m. Admission is always free.