Seattle, WA – Gallery 110 is pleased to present INBETWEEN, a solo exhibition by H.R. Emi that encapsulates the passage of time through striking, large-scale paintings. INBETWEEN invites viewers to experience moments suspended between memory and embellishment.
As time passes, we naturally reshape our recollections, choosing which elements to highlight or let fade. INBETWEEN seeks to recreate this liminal space, where significance and transience coexist. “I want to recreate that inbetween of what’s important and fleeting,” says Emi. “This show displays landscapes of my life—scenes taken out of my memory that are embellished with outlined brief moments.”
Emi’s work is deeply influenced by the duality of her Mexican-American heritage and personal experiences navigating both cultures as the firstborn child of Mexican immigrants in America.
Matthew Behrend’s latest exhibition at Gallery 110, Twin Stars, invites viewers to explore the concept of interconnectedness across time and space. Drawing inspiration from shared dreams and the timeless bonds between individuals, Behrend uses patinas on brass to create mysterious, iridescent artworks that evoke a sense of wonder and nostalgia.
Behrend’s process is as unique as the final works themselves. Using a technique he refers to as “electric patina,” Behrend applies electric fields to brass underwater, allowing the interaction between energy and matter to create intricate, organic patterns on the metal’s surface. This process is inspired by his background in engineering and his interest in the multidimensional aspects of reality.
A dynamic contrast of colors—golds, blues, and teals intertwined with striking reds and purples—imbue the pieces with an otherworldly energy as form and impulse converge. Each piece is born from a meditative, intuitive vision. As he sculpts the electric fields in a three-dimensional water bath, these visions translate into two-dimensional imprints on metal. The resulting artworks are not just visual experiences but are records of an intimate interaction with the elemental forces of the universe.
At the heart of Twin Stars is the idea that our human connections transcend the physical boundaries of time and space., “an exploration of presence across time and space, where dreams are shared and people know each other as if songs woven through time.”
Guess What?, a solo exhibition of bright acrylic paintings from emerging artist Amara Eke, revolves around the other age-old question: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” To Eke, the whole egg represents unhatched ideas—and a way to organize the overwhelming flood of thoughts and possibilities she experiences daily.
Eke’s cheerful exploration of the egg goes beyond its physical form—it becomes a symbol for the human experience, reflecting language, nature, and the universe itself. The egg, she believes, connects humanity through shared potentials rather than differences, offering a reminder of what unites us all. “The egg symbolizes unrealized potential, a blank, round object containing an entire world, ecosystem, or spirit.”
While the uncracked egg is central to Eke’s work, she also incorporates the image of a fried egg, its yellow-orange yolk surrounded by a pool of white. This image serves as a unifying symbol—a circle within a circle—allowing Eke to explore both the natural world and conceptual ideas. Chickens take on a similar significance as bearers of potential. As the birds lay billions of eggs annually, each egg holds the possibility for new life—some providing sustenance, others hatching into new beings. This multiplicity of potential reflects the complexity of life and the interconnectedness of all things.
Guess What? encourages viewers to recognize their own inherent potential. Through the symbol of the egg, Eke invites us to reflect on the possibilities within ourselves and the importance of nourishing our inner spirit. By doing so, we can unlock the potential to enrich and transform our lives.
Patterns of Identity, a new body of work by A-M Petersons, embraces geometric shapes and vibrant color palettes in a bold, new approach for the artist. Incorporating watercolor techniques on larger canvases, the series represents an evolution in both form and concept.
Rooted in personal history, Patterns of Identity delves into the lifelong process of self-discovery. Raised in Toronto, Canada, Petersons grew up immersed in stories of her family’s past in Latvia. An active participant in North American Latvian cultural events, the artist recalls wearing a traditional folk costume—an experience imbued with both “pride and heaviness”.
The exhibition is inspired by Petersons’ recent research, uncovering narratives that both align with and challenge the stories of her upbringing, and the study of traditional Latvian folk costumes, historically worn during festivals and significant events. Each region of Latvia boasts its own unique designs, reconstructed today using ethnographic research. The varying degrees of historical accuracy in these reconstructions mirror the evolving truths within family histories.
Through a dynamic interplay of color, form, and cultural symbolism, this series reflects the artist’s ongoing journey of reading, processing, and understanding her ancestry. The works serve as a visual dialogue between past and present, tradition and reinterpretation, truth and memory.
Is blindness, in its broadest sense, the rule or the exception? This March, Gallery 110 presents Hysterical Blindness: Paintings and Mixed Media Collage by Ingrid Sojit. Although the diagnostic label is no longer in use, the term hysterical blindness once referred to a condition in which patients suffer visual impairment in the absence of any known medical cause.
These paintings and collages explore the relationship between eyesight, the physical ability for the eye to see, and vision, the ability of the brain to process what it sees. The term vision has several literal and metaphorical meanings—from a person’s ideological foundation, to their imagined plans for the future, to imagination itself, or even to a supernatural apparition.
“The idea that vision loss can be a psychological phenomenon touches upon a set of questions that are interesting,” says Sojit. “What do we see when we have lost our ability to recognize what we are seeing? Are dream images, apparitions, and hallucinations an alternative way of seeing?” Human vision is also about our preconceived ideas of the world, our ability to detect patterns, and our need to organize reality in a way that is consistent with our worldview while highlighting irregularities that signal threats to our safety.
Sojit’s works exist between what we see and what we believe about what we are seeing, suggesting that vision itself is never exclusively literal or metaphorical. Pathological lack of vision, hysterical blindness, can be viewed as an inextricable feature of the human condition.
Rowan Eriksson’s works present a visual dialogue about the continuous scrutiny of gender performance through layered sketches, advertisements, and bodily remnants that resist easy interpretation. In this exhibition, materials such as hair, glass, oil, pastel, and acrylic serve not only as aesthetic elements but as active agents in the process of meaning-making.
This exhibition speaks directly to current events, where the rights of queer and women’s bodies are increasingly under attack. Embracing Surrealist techniques of automatism and collage, the artist constructs unconscious compositions that weave together family photographs, social media imagery, and cultural iconography. Shifting forms of the body emerge throughout the work, both familiar and strange, urging viewers to reflect on their own perceptions of self.
Amid the constant political and social scrutiny of marginalized bodies, Eriksson’s paintings become a space for questioning and redefining how bodies are perceived, represented, and understood in a politically charged environment.
Gallery 110 is delighted to showcase six new members in our East Gallery for the month of February. This group exhibition features a variety of 2D and 3D works added to our inventory in the past year—paintings, photography, and wire sculpture—from an exciting cohort of emerging and established PNW artists:
Layomi Akinrinade is a visual artist living in Seattle, WA. Raised in Ife, Nigeria, and later working as a software engineer, he channels both experiences into his artistic lens. Driven by instinctive abstraction, his paintings are forged from his wrestling with perception, memory, and resolution. Meanwhile, his photographs capture cultural resilience, urban solitude, and the ways African youth—on the continent and in the diaspora—reshape contemporary media and culture. Through these mediums, Layomi’s work explores the shifting nature of identity, heritage, and progress in a fragmented, globalized world.
Rowan Eriksson is a contemporary painter with an intersectional practice informed by their gender identity and auditory disorder. Their art explores how the current political landscape in America—characterized by a surge in attacks targeting queer and women’s bodies—influences our vision of ourselves. Eriksson’s own body finds itself under constant scrutiny, its performance of gender continually assessed and tested, which has affected their paintings’ imagery. Now there exists within them a shifting mass of bodies, asking the viewer questions about perceived identity.
Photographer Devin Elle Gaan was raised in Hong Kong before their family immigrated to Seattle in 1992. An art school dropout that turned to business, their passion for art was rekindled while attending courses at their local community college. As a trans/non-binary person of color growing up in the MTV generation, mainstream society rarely offered anything that they saw in themselves, and they found an affinity for creating art that gives voice to under-appreciated aspects of the world while reinventing conventional processes to achieve unique results.
Lin-Lin Mao Mollitor is a Chinese-American painter and installation artist living in Seattle. Through making art, she explores the nature of the human condition, which we try to control, and the nature of the universe, which we cannot. Her works are informed by her experience as an immigrant who arrived in the US as a young child with her parents from Taiwan. Themes in her work include: the celebration of women, questions about aggression and war, and contemplations on the nature of reality. She adapts symbols and metaphors from both traditional Chinese and contemporary culture to communicate ideas.
Alethea Robbins is a trans-disciplinary artist born in Mississippi in 1984. She received her BFA in photography in 2008, then an MFA in interdisciplinary studio arts from Maine College of Art in 2010. She works in diverse media such as clothing construction, quilting, embroidery, photography, painting, and installation. Her work is rooted in research-based methods including concepts of health, spirituality, economics, and accessibility. Her photographs and installations have been showcased in galleries, museums, and alternative spaces across the
nation.
Rebecca Woodhouse is a Seattle-based abstract artist exploring the connections that bind us. Working primarily in collage and mixed media, her art reflects an evolution prompted by the introspective nature of recent times. Her work has been featured in publications like Spectrum (NW Art Alliance) and PMA Magazine. When you see her work, especially in person, you are struck by the texture and depth—the layers reveal colors from the multitude of steps taken, and you can spot almost every color in each piece.
Opening: Thursday, February 6th (Pioneer Sq. Art Walk), 5-8PM
Artist Talk & Reception: Saturday, February 8, 1-3PM
This dynamic exhibition of paintings by artist Carol Adelman marks a new chapter in her ongoing exploration of constructed identity, radical empathy, and a fragmented self. As Adelman’s work demonstrates, the boundaries between the self and the external world are anything but fixed. With a painterly approach that is both sensual and aggressive, she stretches traditional forms, challenging viewers to confront the instability of perception and the way images, symbols, and iconographies are deeply shaped by personal experience and cultural forces.
Matthew Kangas, art critic and curator, writes that the titular piece “encapsulates the artist’s unique conglomeration of autobiography, literature, and art history.” For example, Adelman engages directly with an iconic image—Madonna of the Chancellor Rolin by Jan van Eyck—and in her hands, as Kangas notes, “the Old Master picture is topsy-turvy, fair game for a wacky puzzle of shapes and symbols, all the better to enjoy deciphering and to simply behold its rich painterly execution and impeccable composition.”
Adelman’s use of paint as both a liquid and sculptural material speaks to the fluidity of human experience. The marks she makes on the canvas, constantly shifting and building upon one another, mirror the process of self-discovery and the search for meaning in an ever-changing world. In each piece, the act of painting itself becomes a practice of radical empathy, as Adelman “walks within the skin of a person, an object, a space, or a historical practice,” capturing the complexity of each individual moment that defines us.
“In the quantum world, to see something you must disturb it.
In the deep quantum world, to see something you must create it.”
–Frank Wilczek
Gallery 110 presents Cosmic Grids, a selection of mixed media works by guest artist Jessie Summa Russo, inspired by Nobel prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek’s conception of our universe as a “vibrant energy field” that he calls The Grid. Small oil paintings, collages, and monotypes support and contain Russo’s abstract maximalism to present a visual meditation on this concept.
Artist Talk with George Brandt: Sunday, January 12, 2-4PM
In her oil and cold wax collages, each square represents a life that arises from the blue-black void of space, and belongs there in equal measure with all the others whether or not it is human, complete, or coherent. The layers of collage and paint reveal and obscure fragments of faces, words, and organic shapes, allowing viewers to ascribe their own meanings to what they see, while the void itself is filled with asemic writing—illegible and unknowable ‘answers’ to universal questions. She creates her monotypes by imprinting various materials—from plastic trash to antique, hand-carved wooden printing blocks—onto paper from a gel plate, often enhancing the result with printed brushstrokes, colored pencils, or ink.
Jessie Summa Russo is a third-generation painter based in West Seattle. Raised in Somerville, Massachusetts, she studied studio arts, set design, and animation at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, later pursuing graduate-level illustration at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. A lifelong advocate for the arts with a diverse career in visual design, music, and venue management, Russo is currently the Director of Gallery 110.
Automatic drawing, also known as automatism, is an artistic technique developed by the surrealists in the early 1920s. It involves creating a work of art without conscious control or thought and with no preconceived subject or composition in mind. The goal is accessing material directly from the unconscious mind as part of the creative process, not unlike a medium channeling a spirit, the artist lets the pen or brush travel across the paper without rational control.
Automatism was an important part of the global Surrealist movement and as such was a major contribution to Modern as well as Contemporary art. The term is originally taken from physiology where it refers to unconscious bodily motions such as breathing or dreaming. In 1924, Andre Breton, in the Manifesto of Surrealism defined Surrealism as “psychic automation in its pure state”. Surrealists were among the first to explore this method in art and writing, which in the 1950s went on to influence Art Informel in Europe and Action Painting as well as Abstract Expressionism in the United States.
All of the automatic drawings in this exhibition were produced in the first seven months of 1981. My art practice at the time consisted of daily morning drawing sessions using a brush and india ink on paper. Depending on its complexity I made at least one or two drawings every day and once started, each drawing was finished in the same session. I consider each of these drawings to be a record of my state of mind at the time that I made it and in that sense, these drawings taken together, constitute something akin to a personal journal. With the exception of three framed pieces, all of the drawings in this show are being exhibited for the first time.
George Brandt is a painter, multidisciplinary artist, and curator born in Legnica, Poland in 1954. In 1969, Brandt’s family arrived in New York City carrying Italian passports as political refugees. His formative years were spent in Legnica, Poland, Dallas, TX, and Chicago, IL, where in 1977 he received a BA in plastic and graphic arts from the University of Illinois, Chicago. He currently lives and keeps a studio near Seattle, WA.
Brandt’s love of art started at a very young age; one of his earliest memories is sitting at a kitchen table making drawings as his mother prepared a family meal. In his long artistic career, Brandt has used an array of mediums including pen and ink, acrylic and oil paint, colored pencils, collage, and photography. In addition, his body of work includes sculpture as well as large scale, site-specific installations. The mature images that define Brandt’s work explore his interest in the human psyche, interpersonal dynamics, spirituality, and the nature of consciousness. Brandt has shown his work in numerous solo as well as group exhibitions in Chicago as well as Seattle.
