Holding Up The Sky

Curated by Ruby Osorio

Daniela Campins, Patricia Fernandez Carcedo Yaron Michael Hakim, Nery Gabriel Lemus Manuel Lopez, Isabel Nuño de Buen, Maria Rendón

Exhibition: Oct 28 – Dec 4, 2025

Reception: Tuesday, October 28, 6 – 8 pm.

Gallery Hours: Mon – Thur 11:00 am – 4:00 pm or by appt.

Admission is free

This exhibition brings together six artists who, through various approaches, examine the dynamic relationship between a physical place and spiritual transformation. The title, Holding Up the Sky, imagines an expansive space embedded within the horizon line where earth meets the heavens, where memory, time, and space transform experience into cultural form.

By bringing together diverse artistic perspectives, the exhibition invites viewers to consider how our sense of place and belonging is always in flux, continuously informing our shifting identities.

Working on Dacron sailcloth, Yaron Michael Hakim explores his personal history as an adoptee and an immigrant through vividly-colored works depicting figures that both hide and reveal themselves through their environments. In recent paintings, a female figure shape shifts amid lush variations of fruit and coffee plants that the artist imagines collectively as an archetypal mother. Amid these invented landscapes, the search for lineage and familial roots becomes an imaginary expanse of possibility and desire.

Nery Gabriel Lemus’ richly detailed watercolor paintings focus poetically on everyday symbols and the struggles of migration. In Camine Ese Camino, a pair of weathered sandals placed in a bathroom sink become the focal point, gesturing at the profound vulnerability of departing one’s birthplace and arriving at a new destination. The nature of home is redefined through the journey rather than the destination.

Our perceptions and experiences of place undergo shifts in perspective through the acts of remembering, forgetting, and speculating. Maria Rendón’s tectonic landscapes evolve through a process of searching through photographs collected and handed down to her from her upbringing in Mexico City. The photographic image, once specific to a time and place, is transformed into fields Flashe-painted color and rain water that hover over memories of sites she’s never seen except from the images handed down through the generations.

Daniela Campins draws on specific childhood experiences in Venezuela to make paintings loaded with traces of personal recollections that double commentary. The interplay of fragmented language and cultural displacement becomes a palimpsest of text and gestures, where reworked dialogue extracted from Venezuelan soap operas are excavated, erased, and abstracted. In one work, the phrase se fue sin avisar’, or to leave without notice, is etched in the painting’s surface with a sort of push and pull in each word fragment. The resulting rhythmic visual syncopation reflects on the consequences of presence and absence.

Isabel Nuño de Buen creates a unique cosmology of assemblages that resist easy categorization, but suggest a sense of a past without place. The relationship between fragile yet resilient materials such as muslin, chord, ceramic, form evocative objects of a civilization just on the verge of excavation and discovery. The relationship between the artist’s interest in materials runs parallel to an innate curiosity about our collective origins which transcend physical barriers and limits.

Our traversal of place as we move through life comes into focus through keen observation in the works of Manuel Lopez.

By using formal elements and immersive perspective, viewers are invited to experience the impactful kinetic nature of urban environments. The ever shifting landscape of Los Angeles is documented through dynamic interplays of color, brushwork, and shape reminding us that place is a constant unfolding tapestry of experience.

The careful documentation and interpretation of inhabited spaces is elucidated in the intimately arranged paintings of Patricia Fernandez Carcedo. In her series Houses: Sandness 1, Sandness 2, the structure of home takes shape through objects created through autobiographical play between the artist and her daughter, and then painted as record of time captured, time passed. The formal device of the frame within a frame within a frame emphasizes our sense that these objects emanate with the aura of powerful memories – originating in the bonds between mother and child.

The intersecting metamorphoses within this exhibition present newly imagined spaces that illuminate how we relate to changing environments, how our collective psyche adapts to shifting landscapes, and how artists reimagine these transformations beyond physical and mental limitations.

The Harris Gallery is located across from the Abraham Campus Center at 2000 Second Street on the University of La Verne campus.

For more information, please visit https://artsci.laverne.edu/art/exhibition or contact Dion Johnson djohnson@laverne.edu

University of La Verne | 1950 Third Street | La Verne, California | 91750