PRELUDE TO LIGHT
Works by Eva Bovenzi, Sheila Ghidini, Archana Horsting, Theodora Varnay Jones, and Jessica Snow
opening: Saturday, January 10, from 3 to 6 | The exhibition will run through March 4 by appointment
If you’re unable to attend the opening, please contact me at pastineprojects@gmail.com to schedule an appointment. We will also have a series of events at the gallery for in-person viewing.
Pastine Projects is please to present our winter show featuring works by Eva Bovenzi, Jessica Snow, Archana Horsting, Theodora Varnay Jones, and Sheila Ghidini. The works in this exhibition attend to a seasonal and psychic threshold: the moment when darkness loosens its grip and light begins to reassert itself—not triumphantly, but tentatively, with hesitation and grace. There is a sense of awareness of changing atmospheres, lengthening days, and the barely perceptible recalibration of perception that accompanies emergence.
Jessica Snow’s works dwell in nocturnal space where night storms buffet ever shifting tides. Dark does not exist without light and it is the captured tessellation of white that thrills in these images. Eva Bovenzi’s paintings hold light in suspension: their surfaces hesitate, treating illumination not as a given but as a possibility—something earned through patience. Like the subtle shift between dark and light, they register on us slowly, but the rewards are lasting, quietly transformative, and deeply felt. Archana Horsting's Central Valley Vista offers a landscape where a central tree throws a stretched shadow over fields and irrigation ponds. It is an image about time, revealed through 'light’ moving through the landscape---- the extended shadow recording the sun's return as an event both ordinary and momentous. Sheila Ghidini's drawings and sculpture occupy a twilight register-- a silvery sheen that hovers between visibility and disappearance. The light in these works lingers like the liminal space of twilight-- both fragile and sublime. Perception anchors Theodora Varnay Jones’s work—how seeing becomes a form of inquiry. In Humboldt VIII, this attentiveness registers subtle seasonal shifts of light that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Taken together, these works propose emergence as a quiet discipline rather than a spectacle. They ask for patience, reward close looking,and reminds us that transitions-- seasonal or psychic-- rarely announce themselves. More often, they arrive sideways, almost unnoticed, until suddenly we realize we are seeing differently.
work.
