soft signals

The natural world is a system of concealments. Trees warn each other of danger through chemical signals we cannot smell. Water reflects the world back to us while hiding entire ecosystems beneath its surface. Grief and hope live folded inside the ordinary rooms and gardens of a life, imperceptible until something — an image, a scent, a song repeated — draws them upward. soft signals brings together four artists — Adina Andrus, Britt Harrison, Rebecca N. Johnson, and Norah Stone — whose works operate as quiet transmissions: meanings hidden in plain sight, waiting for a viewer attuned enough to receive them.

The works in this exhibition often arrive gently — a pastel sky, a ceramic bloom, a golden statuette, a wash of warm color — while holding deeper subjects beneath their surfaces: extinction, transformation, spirituality, memory, devotion, and kinship. In the spirit of HIDE N SEEK, these artists allow meaning to emerge slowly, inviting quiet exploration and the discovery of what might otherwise go unnoticed.

Across sculpture, painting, and installation, Adina Andrus explores memory, belonging, ritual, and cultural preservation through an evolving language of symbols. Drawing from histories of domestic ritual and protection, she reconsiders ancient forms through a contemporary lens, creating objects that seem to occupy a space between artifact, talisman, and living presence. Her work considers how meaning can be carried forward through objects and how symbols accumulate significance as they move between people, places, and generations. Ideas of protection and kinship become forms of communication in themselves: quiet assertions of what we choose to hold close, preserve, and carry with us.

Britt Harrison looks to water, sky, shifting light, and the passage of time as thresholds between the physical and intangible. Reflections, clouds, rain, and changing horizons recur throughout her paintings and sculptural installations, drawing attention to natural phenomena that are both ordinary and difficult to fully grasp. Water can reveal and obscure; the sky can be immediately present while suggesting something unreachable. Harrison is interested in this tension, and in the spiritual questions that can emerge through sustained attention to the natural world. Familiar landscapes become spaces of contemplation, where fleeting changes in color, light, and perspective suggest something just beyond what can be seen.

In the paintings of Rebecca N. Johnson, boundaries between the body and its surroundings become similarly unstable. Semi-abstracted figures inhabit natural and otherworldly environments where bodies, animals, plants, and landscapes bleed into one another. Working through memory, grief, renewal, and transformation, Johnson creates weathered, dreamlike surfaces in which interior experience becomes entangled with the natural and imagined world. Creature companions appear throughout her paintings as archetypal presences, while human forms seem capable of dissolving into their environments. Rather than presenting nature as a backdrop, Johnson allows it to become inseparable from the emotional lives of her figures.

Norah Stone approaches communication through the ecological systems that connect species, environments, and generations. Working primarily in mixed-media ceramic sculpture, she draws from biological processes that frequently occur beyond the limits of human perception: scent, mating calls, chemical signals, adaptation, and the complex relationships between plants, animals, and their environments. Her work is particularly attentive to what happens when these systems are disrupted — when a signal goes unanswered, a species disappears, or an organism alters an ecosystem. By bringing traces of these processes into sculptural form, Stone gives material presence to exchanges we might otherwise never witness, while considering our desire to preserve what is precious and fleeting.

Throughout soft signals, communication is rarely direct. It moves between object and viewer, body and landscape, species and species, past and present, earth and sky. A protective object can carry histories of devotion across centuries; a reflection can make the physical world momentarily uncertain; a body can become indistinguishable from the landscape around it; a scent can carry information through a forest without ever being perceived by us.

These signals ask for attention rather than announce themselves. Together, the artists suggest that what is hidden is not necessarily absent. Meaning can exist beneath a surface, within an object, between living things, or at the edge of perception. soft signals creates space for those quieter forms of exchange, asking what might become visible when we look more closely — and what may have been communicating with us all along.