BETWEEN LIGHT AND EARTH, is a two-person exhibition featuring the works of Christa Gomez and Phokus. Some relationships are built through similarity. Others are built through sustained difference. Between Light and Earth emerges from an ongoing dialogue between artists Christa Gomez and Phokus, whose practices have developed alongside one another through their participation in UMBRA—an artist collective rooted in conversation, challenge, experimentation, and mutual support.

While Gomez and Phokus work through distinctly different materials, forms, and visual languages, both approach making as a sustained act of inquiry—allowing material and process to determine what a work can become. Christa Gomez works in porcelain, approaching the vessel as both an object and proposition. Her forms are shaped, marked, compressed, and transformed through fire—retaining the physical evidence of touch and attention. Surfaces operate between drawing and notation while the vessel becomes a mediation on interiority, containment, embodiment, and what it means to hold. Phokus works across drawing, installation, sound, and image. Through materials including tar paper, graphite, ash, and charcoal, he constructs figures and environments through accumulation, erasure, and revision. Blackness functions within the work not as a background, but as material and conceptual fields—a space where memory, presence, imagination, and possibility can emerge. His figures are not portraits, they are propositions.

The exhibition takes its title from the tension between two elemental conditions. Earth suggests matter, weights, origin, and touch. Light suggests perception, visibility, recognition, and transformation. Between them exist a threshold, a space where form is still becoming and meaning remains open. Rather than resolving the differences between the two practices, [BETWEEN LIGHT AND EARTH] allows those differences to become the structure of the exhibition. Gomez moves inward through vessel and the intimacy of material transformation while Phokus moves outward through image, figure, sound, and the construction of worlds. Both artists understand process not simply as a means to an end, but as a form of knowledge. The works gathered in [BETWEEN LIGHT AND EARTH] consider what material can remember, what making can reveal, and what emerges when an artist remains attentive to the possibilities held within the process itself.

Closing Reception:  Saturday, Oct. 3rd, 6-10pm.

Artist Talk during closing reception: Saturday, Oct. 3rd, 8pm. Artists Christa Gomez and Phokus will be in coversation with moderator Devin Alejandro-Wilder reflecting on the exhibition. Come join in person or tune in online via Instagram Live @bolm_arts at 8pm CT.