ExhibitionsRevisited
Gallery 495 is pleased to present Seasons, a group exhibition featuring works by Karina Sharif, Aineki Traverso, and Kate Steciw. The exhibition brings together three artists whose practices explore lineage, landscape, and the unseen threads that bind the living to memory and spirit.
Kate Steciw approaches image-making as both excavation and reconstruction. “In a world saturated with images, my work is a way of cutting through the noise—literally,” she notes. Each collage begins with found or personal photographs drawn from stock libraries, social media, and her own archive. She prints these images on canvas and collages them onto large wood panels, using no more than three images and only one or two cuts per piece. The result is a stripped-down, physical encounter with digital content.
Steciw’s works resist the complexity and density often associated with collage. Instead, they hinge on restraint—allowing large fragments and minimal gestures to generate unexpected relationships. The scale and surface give weight to images that might otherwise be fleeting or disposable, inviting viewers to consider how meaning shifts when images are removed from their original context and forced into dialogue. By limiting intervention, she highlights the friction, harmony, or absurdity that arises when disparate sources collide. The process is part editing, part improvisation—a way of rediscovering mystery in the most familiar of materials.
Karina Sharif’s sculptural practice centers on the divine multiplicity of Black Femme-hood, explored through natural materials that pulse with ancestral resonance. Her sculptures—crafted from ceramic, steel, paper, ink, and family-found objects—offer a tactile and luminous meditation on lineage, legacy, and the unseen bonds between women across realms.
Inspired by oral histories of her maternal ancestors from 19th- and 20th-century rural Jamaica, Sharif transforms memory into sculptural form, bridging spiritual and physical worlds. Stones gathered with her mother by the sea during childhood travels become embedded in lamps, incense holders, wall sculptures, and beaded totems. These works function as transmissions, offering a visual language for intergenerational care and guidance.
Sharif references the Lukasa board of the Luba people of the Democratic Republic of Congo—a mnemonic device used to preserve genealogies and cultural history through touch. Similarly, her works invite viewers into active communion rather than passive observation. “In this body of work, I wanted to articulate the sacred lines of communication between realms—how they inspire groundedness, joy, love, and expansion,” says Sharif.
In the paintings of Aineki Traverso, the lines between figure and landscape soften. Drawing from personal geographies—childhood memories in Patagonia and the northeastern United States—Traverso dissolves the self into nature. Foliage and flesh coalesce; spirit animals glimmer through translucent washes of color. The body, in Traverso’s vision, is not solitary but porous—shaped by community, memory, and ancestral presence.
Together, Steciw, Sharif, and Traverso conjure a shared language of remembrance and renewal. Seasons becomes an act of return: to land, to spirit, to the intimacies that sustain us across generations.
Shiri Mordechay, Between Thoughts, 2022
Shiri Mordechay, Between Thoughts (Detail), 2022
Shiri Mordechay, Untitled, 2022
Kate Steciw, Vessel, 2024
Kirby Crone, Coral Sunset, 2024