Works by Sophia Belkin, Megan Greene, Esther Ruiz, Elise Thompson
Tinney Contemporary in Nashville, TN
July 5th – August 16th, 2025

Exhibition Statement:

It’s as if the long, hot summer of the southern gothics somehow manifests its own antidote, an oasis as reprieve from the heat. Picture the swimming hole of your youth. Barefoot, clambering up worn roots of the bur oaks on the banks, carefully avoiding shattered Miller bottles and cigarette butts, up to the highest ledge. A place of inversion: the surface mirrors the sky, the branches overhead—suddenly, the illusion is shattered by the front-flip bravado of high divers, the occasional riotous bellyflop. Weightless in free-fall, violently breaking the surface, weightless again in the brisk water. Breathless, nose plugged, cheeks puffed, peering up at the surface from among the reeds. Nowhere else can hold this commingling of sanctuary and transgression—bildungsroman baptismal, the smell of dark and damp earth, dirt-weed psychedelia. Hallucinatory sun-poisoning, cool mud and water remedy—everything shimmering in heat waves, ultraviolet and super-saturated. The works in the exhibition investigate organic forms and imagined environments through various modes of abstraction. Pools and plants, waves and wells, stones and splashes are revealed through each artists’ expressive mark-making, acute attention to detail, and innovative use of materials. Collectively, the works accomplish a sort of thaumaturgy, evoking an impossible landscape, a mirage that doesn’t dissipate as you draw closer.