See & Experience

The Shape of Thought brings together six women artists with Bay Area roots—Jay DeFeo, Deborah Lohrke, Sandra Ono, Veronica Ryan, Tressa Pack, and Nicole Phungrasamee Fein—whose diverse practices reflect both the pleasures and rigor of meticulous skill and sustained attention.

The exhibition title, like the works from which it’s built, poses a question, inviting viewers into quietly urgent contemplation: In a world hurtling forward uncertainly but at a breakneck pace with an often cacophonous soundtrack, what indeed, is the shape of thought? This thought or that? Today’s or that of yesterday? And what are the stimuli that shape them?

Curators Alexandra Bowes and Catherine Wagner, both visual artists with decades-long careers, selected artists whose works across multiple disciplines are, by contrast to the news cycle, deliciously quiet, spare, and thoughtful. Taken together, these abstract works are a contemplative symphony of material gestures, confident and at once intimate and expansive.

Nicole Phungrasamee Fein’s works, created layer upon layer and woven into radiating landscapes, might conjure the minute, captured under an electron microscope, or a black hole, whose scale and depth is for most of us unknowable. Similarly, Deborah Lohrke’s abstract patterns can be viewed as crystalline structures or luminous maps of the stars, while Tressa Pack’s Wanderers in a Sea of Fog take viewers on a journey into an atmospheric, hazy landscape where viewers can barely make out figures or lines, and near and far become meaningless descriptors.

The works of Jay DeFeo, Sandra Ono, and Veronica Ryan, abstractions in both two and three dimensions, layer the familiar, gestural, and sometimes organic in works whose materiality invites us to begin with the intimate and bodily before expanding outward. In this exhibition the flotsam of everyday life is explored with the languages of studio practice, bridging memory, immediacy, and future possibility in a mysterious, calm world in which you whisper.