VEIL & VOID

An exhibition exploring the power of ambiguity, misdirection, and the act of concealment as a strategy for symbolic reasoning. This exhibition will bring together works that challenge perception; offering multiple perspectives, defying easy categorisation, and inviting deeper interrogation. In Veil & Void, opacity is not a limit, but a method: a refusal of legibility as a condition of value and a reclaiming of ambiguity as a space of agency. This exhibition brings together four artists who embrace concealment, distortion and fragmentation as vital strategies of image-making and interpreted experiences. Through varied material approaches, the exhibition explores how the acts of veiling or withholding become forms of both resistance and invitation. At surface level, things are not always what they seem. Across history, those who exist outside rigid structures of power have developed strategies of opacity, misdirection, and layered storytelling; both as a means of survival and as a tool for subversion. This exhibition seeks to engage with these ideas through works that blur, distort, or obfuscate meaning, challenging the viewer’s instinct to categorize, simplify, or resolve. In an age of oversimplified narratives and rapid consumption of images, choosing opacity is a conscious act. This exhibition aims to highlight artists who reject easy legibility, instead embracing complexity, contradiction, and the subversion to be easily pinned down. Whether through hidden messages, unexpected material juxtapositions, or an aesthetic of elusiveness, the participating artists assert the right to control how (or if) their work is ‘read.’ Veil & Void takes this as a curatorial entry point, asking: What becomes possible when clarity is denied? What kind of encounter is created when meaning slips, forms oscillate or interpretation must be worked for - if not altogether deferred? Casilda Oppe’s sculptural works embody transformation as a poetic and political act. In her series Mares Womb, a digitally multiplied ceramic form of a mare becomes a site of self-reproduction, vulnerability and dissolution. Referencing Paul B. Preciado’s writing on animalism and feminism, Oppe destabilises the symbolic function of the horse: once a figure of nobility, now fragmented and hollowed, its body rendered mutable and unknowable. Oscillating between digital and physical space, the mare’s evacuated form becomes an echo chamber of desire, loss, and self-encounter. Jen DeLuna’s oil paintings mine the territory of intimacy and visual memory. Drawing from personal and found photographic archives her works reframe images of femininity, nostalgia, and domesticity. In Ache, a dog’s image is not simply companionate but fraught, positioned as both symbol of care and containment. Blessed conjures the soft blur of vintage pin-up photography yet denies full-allure, placing the subject in a suspended state between revelation and retreat. DeLuna’s work speaks to the instability of memory, the slippage between surface and affect, the tension between tenderness and surveillance. Karice Mitchell’s photo-based installations examine how Black femme bodies have been inscribed, stylised, and commodified in visual culture. Moving into the early-2000s archive, Mitchell’s Romanticism series foregrounds tattoos, graphic type, and vernacular adornments, using etching, layering and reflection as formal interventions. Her use of sandblasted text draws from hip hop aesthetics and personal narrative, creating a fragmented poetics of self-inscription. These marks act not as decoration, but as evidence of agency, care and embodied authorship. Unyimeabasi Udoh’s signs stage a quiet rebellion against functionality. In the work Passing Place and three Barrier Boards, standard materials of road infrastructure such as aluminium, retroreflective glass and plywood are transformed into contemplative, ambiguous forms. Text and symbols are rendered unstable. The sign no longer instructs, but hovers between object, painting and print. Udoh’s preoccupation with legibility and its limitations plays out through minimalist gestures that ask us to consider what structures language upholds and what slips through its cracks. In this exhibition, materials speak in codes. Surfaces shimmer, fracture and dissolve; meanings emerge slowly - if at all. Rather than seeking resolution, Veil & Void holds open a space for multiplicity, contradiction and the right not to be fully known.