In composing the still life setups, which serve as the basis for her paintings, Lee tries a range of possibilities, drawing from a cache of saved objects—everyday items and special ones alike. Many of these objects include things of intimate personal significance, such as old valentines, artworks by her mother, and baby blankets. Others simply catch Lee’s fancy, dazzling the eye with their striking or unusual colors and textures, like silk neckties and speckled shells or discarded bits of foil, cardboard, and paper. Color is a primary concern, becoming the predominant structuring component of her compositions, over which Lee meticulously builds up her imagery mark by mark. She is also drawn to unidentifiable objects, which conveyed in crayon and paint, become even more peculiar and abstract. Lee often paints the same items over and over, and with each iteration, they grow in mystery and significance.

With her celebrated series — Melting Ice Pops (1999–2006), Kiddie Rides (1995–2002), and Forever (2003–2005) — Meredith weaves together the playful and the tragic, the nostalgic and the political.

In Melting Ice Pops, Allen holds a frozen treat against the landscape, letting it drip and dissolve in her own hand — a transient act of joy, gesture of surrender, and visual metaphor for time. The brilliant colors, seductive and childlike, become unsettling as the popsicle morphs into what one critic described as “a dripping demon against the landscape.” These photographs, made at the height of the late Williamsburg scene, fuse personal and cultural memory into a single, melting image — the sweetness of pleasure, the certainty of loss.

Her Kiddie Rides series portrays the coin-operated mechanical animals that once populated sidewalks outside Brooklyn grocery stores, their cartoonish forms offering brief moments of delight to children in a pre-digital era. Allen’s lens reveals their strange anthropomorphic melancholy: rides that wave and smile, yet seem exhausted by the weight of repetition. These surreal portraits of playthings, shot in saturated color and shallow depth, suggest a quiet meditation on innocence and obsolescence.

The Forever series, created in 2005, turns more overtly introspective. Photographing Beanie Baby stuffed animals sealed inside transparent plastic bags, Allen created an archive of care and suffocation — a tender, anxious gesture of protection. The works were photographed against color fields corresponding to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s post-9/11 threat advisory system: for Low (Green); Guarded (Blue) ; Elevated (Yellow) ; High (Orange): high risk ; Severe (Red): severe risk.

In Allen’s world, the soft toys — borrowed from her mother’s collection of Beanie Babies — become metaphors for vulnerability and the illusion of safety. Sealed away to be “protected from dust,” they stand in for all that is fragile, beloved, and impermanent. As with the Melting Ice Pops, what appears innocent carries an undercurrent of unease: the domestic colliding with the political, memory with mortality.

Allen’s photographs appeared in Artforum, The New Yorker, and CEPA Quarterly, and are held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Harvard University, and the Wichita Art Museum, among others. She taught at Rutgers University and the New School, inspiring a generation of artists with her belief in photography as an act of generosity, curiosity, and care.After her diagnosis, she continued to photograph—turning her illness into a meditation on endurance, beauty, and the poetic necessity of looking.

The second gallery shifts inward, presenting Carol Saft’s deeply intimate photographic series About the Bed (2011). In the final three months of Meredith’s life, the two artists began photographing themselves together, using Allen’s camera set on a tripod and shot with a timer. “Let’s take a picture of us in bed,” Meredith had said, “since we spend so much time there.” Each day, the same camera set-up, shooting in the morning and at night, in the same room. Over time, these images became a ritual — a collaboration that transcended fear and found serenity in the act of looking. “The camera was not a filter of our experience,” Saft wrote, “but rather a third presence in the room.”

As the art historian Leah DeVun writes, “Saft’s photographs activate radical possibility, turning photography outward — toward expansive community-making and even world-making.” She connects Saft’s work to the lineage of queer artists who used the camera to create what Ann Cvetkovich calls “an archive of feelings,” preserving emotion, intimacy, and the quiet material traces of a shared life: the pill bottles, the bedside books, the dog resting at her feet, the soft light of a window. “Our collective photographic record of lesbian love,” DeVun continues, “is, at best, pretty limited… Saft’s photographs enlarge our vision, suggesting new ways of looking that affirm our loving and our lives.”

Saft’s own diary from that period carries the rawness and beauty of witnessing: “She disappeared before my eyes. I was watching her as she was slowly slipping away until the spiral downward so fast, so sudden that I felt unprepared to meet it and say, “Goodbye.” She had a strong, athletic walk with a sliding side-to-side strut. I remember searching the beach horizon to look for her approach far in the distance. I spied a silhouette cut out in the distant glare. I took a mental snapshot of her gait and thought, I must remember this.”

In these photographs, remembrance becomes a daily practice — a visual litany of devotion, light, and breath, capturing the essence of their legacy: images as messages across time, gestures that refuse erasure.

Saft’s broader practice has always been grounded in a one-to-one connection. From her early video portraits of her late brother, Todd and bronze sculptural installations to the ongoing portrait series, The Cynnie Paintings of her current wife Cynthia, her work has centered intimacy as both method and message. About the Bed is her most personal and generous gesture — an act of witnessing that transforms private grief into collective empathy.

Together, the two rooms form a complete conversation: Meredith’s bright and playful photographs, luminous with color and life, flow into Carol’s quiet, contemplative images. The exhibition is, in essence, the last collaborative work they made — a closing piece composed across time and space, sealing their story and making it eternal.

Ice Pops Forever is an exhibition about the persistence of love — about what remains when words are gone, and how art can hold that space. It offers an alternative to the art world’s commercial and hierarchical logic, reminding us that creation itself is an act of care, a language of survival.

At Tappeto Volante Projects, this exhibition speaks directly to the gallery’s mission: to support artists whose voices have been overlooked, to honor non-commercial and horizontal trajectories of art-making, and to sustain a space where intimacy, resistance, and imagination coexist. In a socio-political moment shadowed by terror, censorship, and hate, this exhibition reaffirms the quiet power of love, tenderness, and art to keep us human. Ice Pops Forever is a reminder that legacy is not built through monuments or markets, but through images that breathe —proof that to love, to see, and to remember are still revolutionary acts.

Meredith Allen (1964–2011) was born and raised in Bangor, Maine. She studied at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut and earned her MFA in photography at the University of Buffalo. A central figure in the Williamsburg art scene of the 1990s, Allen exhibited widely, with solo shows at Edward Thorp Gallery, Gracie Mansion, Sarah Bowen Gallery, Flipside, Hudson Valley Community College, Byron Cohen Gallery, and g-Module in Paris. Her work has been featured in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, P.S.1/MoMA, the International Center of Photography, The Rotunda Gallery, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, and museums across the United States and Europe.

Allen is best known for her celebrated photographic series “Melting Ice Pops,” “Kiddie Rides,” “Forever,” and the later abstract “Trash” works. Her photographs have appeared in major publications such as The New Yorker, Artforum, Art Papers, Artnet, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. She received significant critical recognition, including awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Aaron Siskind Foundation. Her works are held in several public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Wichita Art Museum, Harvard University, Levi Strauss Inc., and Swiss Re Capital Partners. A devoted artist and chronicler of American visual culture, Allen left a lasting imprint on contemporary photography, remembered also for her enduring partnership with artist Carol Saft.

Carol Saft, born in Newark, New Jersey, attended The Pratt Institute New Forms program and received a full fellowship to complete her MFA at S.U.N.Y. Purchase. Saft is a 2024 recipient of a NYFA Fellowship in painting. Her new body of paintings was shown this past summer in a solo show at the Art Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton, New York. Other recent solo shows were at Fiendish Plots in Lincoln, NB, and at Canada Gallery in Tribeca, NYC. Saft's videos and sculptures have been shown nationally and internationally at film festivals, museums, and galleries. Her screenings include The Smithsonian Institute, Aurora Picture Show, the United Nations World Conference, the Islip Art Museum, The Guild Hall Museum, The Parrish Art Museum, Pierogi Gallery, Diverse Works, and CableVision’s 28sec project. She has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the International Film and Television Workshop, CableVision Systems, a New York Foundation for the Arts exhibition grant, and the New York Community Trust.