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.

Adina Andrus creates small ceramic guardians rooted in the ancient Roman Lares, household deities kept in domestic altars to protect family and home. Rendered in ceramic, gold leaf, and plastic, her Lares become contemporary effigies of kinship and connection: fluid, amorphous figures whose small scale belies their presence. Like the deities that inspire them, they seem to hold an unspoken protective power over their surroundings. Drawing on their own visual associations, viewers encounter these figures as intimate objects carrying something larger — the bonds, histories, and relationships we carry with us.

Britt Harrison's work explores water, sky, and shifting light as thresholds between the physical and intangible. In They Drank From the Sky With a Holy Cup, ceramic raindrops descend across a luminous painted surface toward flower-shaped vessels that collect and hold real water. Referencing holy-water containers, the work transforms rainfall into a quiet ritual of receiving, reflecting Harrison's interest in the spiritual pull of the sky and the questions it provokes about what might exist beyond what we can see. Across her shaped paintings, clouds, reflections, and fading horizons become markers of time and transition, with sunsets serving as fleeting thresholds — daily reminders of time passing that briefly transform the familiar world through color and light.

Rebecca N. Johnson's paintings explore memory, grief, renewal, and transformation through semi-abstracted figures inhabiting natural and otherworldly landscapes. Her weathered, dreamlike surfaces allow bodies, animals, and their surroundings to bleed into one another, while creature companions emerge as suggestive archetypes of transformation and spirit. In Seawater in Our Veins, Johnson considers how our bodies carry an elemental echo of the sea — water and salts held in a delicate balance — collapsing the perceived boundary between body and landscape. Across her work, figures, creatures, and nature form a symbolic language through which emotional and spiritual states are sensed before they are fully understood.

Norah Stone's mixed-media ceramic sculptures trace communications between species, environments, and what has been lost. In Altar for the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, wood-fired stoneware frames footage of the last known male bird singing a mating call into a forest that no longer held an answer — a signal sent to no receiver. In Ash Bereavement Cycle, soda-fired porcelain houses trimmings from ash trees at her childhood home, killed by the Emerald Ash Borer and saturated with manuka oil, a scent used to lure the beetle into traps. Stone transforms these traces of disappearance into objects that feel ceremonial and strange — dark treasures found on the forest floor, preserving what is vanishing by giving it ritual form.

A small guardian keeps quiet watch; a luminous sky marks the passing of time; a body carries an elemental memory of the sea; a scent travels through a forest in warning. soft signals gathers these gestures into a space where meaning is carried through objects, images, sounds, scents, and the natural world itself. What initially appears quiet or familiar shifts through closer attention, revealing something that was there all along.