Between Swells Most Days I Know It’s Not True presents the work of Sohn Plenefisch, whose practice drifts between painting and sculpture, gesture and form, solemnity and play. Working with acrylic and mixed media, they create compositions guided as much by instinct as by intention. Their subtle palette and sure-handed sense of line draw the eye into spaces where the natural world—stones, seas, skies—merges with the inner terrain of memory, loss, and hope.
Some works remain on the canvas, while others swell outward, incorporating sculptural elements that challenge the boundary between object and image. At times, their juxtapositions verge on the surreal, yet always remain grounded, tethering us to lived experience.
The exhibition offers a rhythm of ebb and flow, inviting viewers to enter a shifting space where painting becomes sculpture, and where personal reflection resonates in the universal tide of human feeling.
Artist’s statement
Hidden beneath the solemnity is always a sense of naivety and play.
Using acrylic and mixed media, I work in a manner that toes the line between deliberate and playful, letting my paintings decide for themselves what they want to be. The rhythm of this process always pulls me towards the rhythm and movement of the natural world. I am drawn to imagery of stone, skies, and seas, and use them to explore deeper feelings around movement, time, loss, memory, and hope. I aim to make work that is absolutely personal to me, but also simultaneously resonant in its own varying ways to each and every viewer.
Curatorial Statement
In Between Swells Most Days I Know It’s Not True, Sohn Plenefisch cultivates a terrain where solemnity and play converge, where the rhythm of paint echoes the rhythm of tide, stone, and shifting sky. The works do not resolve into static declarations; rather, they hover between states of becoming, much like the sea itself—expansive, mutable, and restless.
Plenefisch’s use of acrylic and mixed media embodies a dialogue between intention and surrender. Gesture is guided yet unguarded, deliberate yet porous to chance. This delicate balancing act imbues the canvases with a sense of movement, as though each painting were caught mid-breath, swaying in time with unseen forces. Their instinctive sense for composition and line anchors these explorations, rising to the forefront through a subtle, restrained palette that gives the work both quietude and intensity.
At times, their juxtapositions verge on the surreal, though always in ways nuanced enough to keep us tethered to reality. This is most evident in the sculptural works and hybrid pieces, which complicate the line between painting and object. Some canvases swell beyond their surfaces, incorporating sculptural elements that insist on dimensionality and weight. Others take the form of free-standing structures that nevertheless retain the sensibility of painting—gestural, chromatic, lyrical. This fluid negotiation prompts a persistent question: when does a painting become a sculpture, and when does a sculpture still carry the pulse of painting? In Plenefisch’s practice, the boundary is never fixed but always in motion, like the tides they so often evoke.
What emerges across both mediums is a visual language that situates personal memory and loss within the larger pulse of the natural world. Stones, seas, and skies become conduits, bearing the weight of grief, hope, and renewal. They speak not only of the artist’s inner landscape but also of the universal tides of human experience—the inevitability of passage, the persistence of longing, the fragile poetics of endurance.
The exhibition invites viewers into this ebb and swell, encouraging each to find their own resonance within Plenefisch’s layered surfaces and dimensional forms. Just as no two tides crest the shore in identical form, each encounter with these works feels singular, shifting, and alive. In this way, Between Swells Most Days I Know It’s Not True is less a conclusion than a horizon—an ongoing meditation on what it means to move, to lose, and to hope again.
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