"I so desperately want these things to be visual," says Lauri Chambers, warning that she doesn't like to talk about her paintings, doesn't want to answer why she's been driven to make black-and-white abstractions for as long as she can remember, at least since grade school when a teacher had to tell her to put away the black and pick up any other color, or why the paintings, six decades later, are always squares—or why they're here at all. Like abstractionists before her, Chambers wouldn't use paint if she intended words. She attached only one word to her 10 new paintings and smattering of drawings at Francine Seders Gallery: Selah, the exhibition title, a word that appears 74 times in the Hebrew Bible but whose exact meaning and history are unknown. A word that creates a gap where multiple theories can rush in but none will be a precise exchange for the lost thing itself. Given all this, it's generous and interesting that she agrees to talk with me.

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