Mary Didoardo: Short Story presents oil paintings on panel built through a process of accumulation and excavation. After multiple painted passages, Didoardo covers the surface with packaging tape, draws a looping gestural line, then cuts it slowly with an X-Acto knife — the tape lifting to reveal earlier colors sealed beneath and expose the painting's full history. Bold fields of color are activated by lines that read as instinctive but are in fact repeatedly adjusted and painstakingly incised. The resulting tension between intuition and labor, gesture and incision, is held in the physical presence of the surface itself.