Company is proud to present soul breaker, featuring the works of Ivana Bašić, Christopher Bucklow, Giulia Cenci, Hayden Dunham, Samuel Guerrero, Maria Fragoso Jara, Julie Maurin, Sergio Miguel, Jesús Hilario-Reyes, Giancarlo Montes Santangelo, and Chiffon Thomas, curated by Ken Castaneda.

The exhibition soul breaker proposes a rupture: a cracking open that allows both release and reception. The eleven featured artists gather the fragments and explore how the soul is manifested and transformed through the act of making—rendering the intangible parts of human experience.

Each room in the gallery functions as a marker of time creating a stage to explore the self through a crystalized form. In painting and drawing, the soul is delicately illustrated and appears in the form of an urn, summoned during an out-of-body experience or as a sea creature washed ashore. Through photography, this transfiguration is frozen in real time and is captured in the shedding of skin or as thousands of suns piercing the silhouette of a figure. Withsculpture, the spirit becomes three-dimensional and articulated in materials that move between organic and industrial.

In Walt Whitman’s Starting from Paumanok (1860), he declares:

The soul,

Forever and forever—longer than soil is brown and solid—longer

than water ebbs and flows.

Whitman suggests that the soul cannot be separated from the material world. He binds the body to beasts, trees, rivers and sand, asking how the body might serve as the earth’s chosen vessel. Surely, he implies, it is the soul—embedded in everything around us—that offers the truest, most unguarded form of life.

It is physically impossible to break something intangible with your two hands. It is, however, untrue when it has to do with honor systems such as the shattering of trust or a relationship. The body recognizes it before language does, settling somewhere deep in the chest or low in the stomach. What we call heartbreak is not metaphorical, but a lived ache that follows rupture. We have come to understand it as a slow erosion of the self, the feeling that something integral has been taken away at a moment's notice.

Fragments of lived experience remain in places, in people, in gestures that linger long after the moment has passed. Perhaps it is this circulation, rather than permanence, that sustains us. This exhibition acknowledges the thin veil that connects humans and nature and the inescapability of that bond in death.