By Annie Lee | March 2026 Official Press Release
Some exhibitions arrive loudly. Others ask for a slower kind of attention. Soft Shadows, curated by Daphney Estrada at Bushwick Gallery, belongs to the latter. It is an exhibition built not on spectacle, but on subtlety, where illumination does not overpower and transformation does not declare itself all at once. Instead, the show unfolds through restraint, atmosphere, and emotional precision.
Across thirteen artists, Soft Shadows gathers painting, photography, printmaking, and installation into a thoughtful meditation on how change is often experienced: quietly, inwardly, almost imperceptibly at first. These are works concerned with memory, vulnerability, environment, embodiment, ritual, and perception. What binds them is not sameness of style, but a shared trust in nuance.
Quiet Power, Lasting Presence
At the center of the exhibition are three artists whose works establish its emotional and conceptual framework.
Gina Keatley’s Latitude: Oku anchors the exhibition with a commanding stillness. Spanning three monumental panels, the work is built from saturated black fields interrupted by a muted bronze register that feels less like decoration than distant internal light. Keatley’s rain-textured surface and controlled scraping create a dimensional field that rewards duration. The painting does not open outward through dramatic gesture. It deepens. It asks the viewer to remain long enough for space to emerge.
Rachel Herring’s 53 Days extends the exhibition’s inquiry into time and perception through installation. Her work transforms reclaimed attention into visual form, using slow moving projected light to turn the gallery into a kind of human scale sundial. Herring’s practice has long interrogated the way smartphones and contemporary technologies compress time and fragment awareness. Here, she offers a quiet counterproposal: that attention itself can be restored through slowness, light, and embodied looking.
Yulissa Cortinas contributes a striking suite of intimate paintings in her Leap Series, where the body appears suspended between hesitation and motion. Working in a restrained palette of black and white, Cortinas captures figures at the threshold between fear and action. These small panels carry unusual emotional force. They are studies in vulnerability, courage, and the charged stillness that exists just before a life changes direction.
A Constellation of Interior Worlds
Around these anchoring works, the exhibition expands into a rich and varied constellation of voices.
Aubrienne Bergeron brings a talismanic softness to the show through Peony in Ink I and Peony in Ink II, works rooted in memory, symbolism, and the private rituals of inheritance. Their delicacy is deceptive. Beneath the fluid watercolor and ink lies a deeply personal language of remembrance and protection.
Eva Mesa’s Crucifix offers one of the exhibition’s most materially direct meditations on memory and belief. By embossing an actual crucifix into stretched cotton before painting over it, Mesa transforms family history and inherited faith into a physical imprint. The work is quiet, but it lingers, treating spiritual identity not as doctrine but as residue.
Helen Zhang’s hand carved prints, Homecoming and Comfort in the Discomfort, use line, contrast, and compression to translate emotional states into image. Her practice merges cultural inheritance with psychological clarity, and these works hold intimacy and tension in equal measure.
Johanna Arganbright’s Full Yet? explores anxiety through a contemplative figurative language shaped by solitude, surreal interruption, and emotional self observation. Her work understands that internal struggle often appears most vividly in quiet moments.
Kevin Jackson’s after the storm turns toward the natural world with unusual sensitivity, capturing the fragile calm that follows disruption. In a show so attuned to soft transformation, his photograph feels especially resonant, attentive to the way peace can arrive only after intensity has passed.
Moira Kelly’s painting Annunciation, introduce a more unstable visual atmosphere. Her luminous oil surfaces feel cinematic and unresolved, images caught in states of becoming. The work does not settle. It shimmer at the edge of legibility.
Ronnie Williams brings grit, texture, and immediacy through CLAY and THE EDGE. His tactile surfaces and improvisational language push the exhibition toward a rawer emotional register, where tension and resilience become inseparable.
Sandra Tan’s photographs, particularly Wildlife Underpass and Interwoven, shift the exhibition’s attention outward toward the quiet negotiation between built and natural environments. Her work observes how ecosystems reclaim, adapt, and persist, offering a visual meditation on coexistence and repair.
Spencer Patrick’s Pray frames spirituality within a distinctly contemporary condition. A figure kneels in urgent prayer within an artificial domestic setting, turning a bathroom into a site of vulnerability, desperation, and reflection. The painting is a meditation on how faith persists even within the manufactured environments of modern life.
Valentina Benaglio’s Ephemeral Dream and Fading Fragments move through portraiture as emotional weather. Her blurred figures hover between memory and dissolution, revealing identity as something fluid, unstable, and always in process.
The Discipline of Restraint
What makes Soft Shadows compelling is its refusal to oversell itself. The exhibition trusts the viewer. It leaves room for slowness, for ambiguity, for works that do not resolve immediately. In doing so, it becomes more than a collection of discrete artworks. It becomes a shared atmosphere.
This is a show about what happens when light does not expose everything, when emotion remains partially veiled, when meaning arrives through accumulation rather than impact. It is about the forms transformation takes when it is lived rather than performed.
In Soft Shadows, Bushwick Gallery offers an exhibition that is thoughtful, polished, and emotionally intelligent. Its strength lies not in volume, but in calibration. These artists do not compete for attention. They hold it.
Exhibition Information
Title: Soft Shadows
Location: Bushwick Gallery, 22 Fayette Street, Brooklyn, NY
Dates: March 19 to March 26, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 19, 6 PM to 8 PM
Curated by: Daphney Estrada
Participating Artists:
Aubrienne Bergeron
Eva Mesa
Gina Keatley
Helen Zhang
Johanna Arganbright
Kevin Jackson
Moira Kelly
Rachel Herring
Ronnie Williams
Sandra Tan
Spencer Patrick
Valentina Benaglio
Yulissa Cortinas
Featured Artists – Soft Shadows
Gina Keatley — In Latitude: Oku, layered black surfaces and restrained bronze light create an abstract field of depth, stillness, and quiet expansion.
Rachel Herring — 53 Days transforms reclaimed attention into a contemplative installation where light, time, and rest become the central materials.
Yulissa Cortinas — The Leap Series captures the body at the threshold of motion, revealing fear, courage, and transformation in compressed, gestural form.
Aubrienne Bergeron — Botanical imagery and layered materials become intimate talismans shaped by memory, dream space, and inherited symbolism.
Eva Mesa — Through embossing, abstraction, and material memory, Crucifix reflects on faith as an enduring imprint rather than a visible declaration.
Helen Zhang — Hand carved prints translate emotional and cultural tension into a precise visual language of line, contrast, and resilience.
Johanna Arganbright — Figurative painting and surreal forms reveal quiet inner struggle, solitude, and the emotional complexity of self observation.
Kevin Jackson — Photography captures fleeting states of calm and atmosphere, locating subtle beauty in the aftermath of disruption.
Moira Kelly — Luminous oil paintings hover between revelation and obscurity, unfolding as unstable emotional thresholds rather than fixed scenes.
Ronnie Williams — Texture, improvisation, and raw surface energy make visible the tension between vulnerability, grit, and resilience.
Sandra Tan — Photographs of reclaimed and contested landscapes reflect on the delicate relationship between ecological systems and human intervention.
Spencer Patrick — Contemporary figurative painting examines spirituality, artificial environments, and the search for stillness within modern life.
Valentina Benaglio — Blurred portraits hold memory, fragility, and transformation in suspended emotional states that resist fixed definition.