On View: April 10 - July 3, 2025 | Opening Reception: Thursday, April 10, 2025 | 6pm - 9pm | RSVP HERE

In Our Hands showcases artworks that consider the role hands play in identity formation, self-expression, and worldbuilding. Within an art context, the artist’s hand boldly produces culture, often shaping intangible ideas into tangible art objects. Within a broader context, hands shape our daily lives; they construct, animate, and destroy worlds on a spectrum of scale and visibility. Alec Black, Brock Bowen, Odette Chavez-Mayo, Merik Goma, and Tazje Henry-Phillip mobilize this immense power,  engaging the hand as a narrative device in visual storytelling; for them, hands are both medium and message. They reveal clues about one’s rich inner life, while also communicating a great deal about how one navigates the exterior world. If eyes are windows to the soul, then hands—with their infinite actions and gestures–are windows to human agency, where mind and body meet through the will to act. 

Bowen, Chavez-Mayo, and Goma offer up their own bodies, their physical hands, as protagonists in their artworks; they too share an appreciation for the hand’s metaphorical ability to both reach back into the past for meaning and project new understandings forward into the future. Brock Bowen–the first local high school student to exhibit at Orchid Gallery–explores, “paper as a mode of self expression, illustrating how the medium can be used to morph a person's image, as a catalyst for creativity, and as a way to preserve memories and experiences.” Cast in red, blue, and green light, his A Touch of Creativity series depicts imaginative, staged scenes where paper and flesh meet, the paper carrying written messages and the hand carrying messages coded in its gestures. His expert manipulation of light and shadow produces highly-stylized visual narratives that depict his own hands with serious main character energy. 

Odette Chavez-Mayo is a photographer whose nostalgic, black-and-white images explore themes of memory, identity, and longing for her Mexican homeland. She, like Bowen, offers her own body as a conduit between past and present, however, her works also carry the artist’s hand in a different way–through the laborious practice of making and manipulating images in the darkroom. She states, “central to my photographic practice is working with processes that take time. I use analog film and enjoy the physicality of making pictures come to life by laboring in the dark(room).” In Inanna, Chavez-Mayo offers a striking self portrait, where the full depths of her photographic process and explorations of self are quite literally laid bare.

Merik Goma also takes a process-based approach to constructing his highly-cinematic photographs, which explore how we, both consciously and subconsciously, project our worldviews onto others. He states, “I construct sets that the work inhabits and transform the space to create new narratives. Although the end product of my work often takes the form of a photograph, the sets I build and installations serve as a foundation for my work. The symbols and theatrical sets are intended to engage the viewer in their own personal dialogues and histories.” Yet, the photographs of these intricate sets are far more than a still life, or artist-constructed composition that brings disparate objects together to communicate allegorical meaning. By inviting viewers to see themselves as main characters in the worlds he quite literally builds with his own two hands, Goma offers sharp observations of the psychological and social issues that affect us all. 

Tazje Henry-Phillip–a multimedia artist who primarily works through the medium of painting–also uses the still life as a means to bridge traditional modes of expression with contemporary ways of seeing. She states, “my work is both imaginative and abstract with classic influences. I create art that feels expressive; art that captures things that I enjoy, things that may come to mind, and the ways that I feel. My hope is to make distinctive and captivating works that evoke emotion and enhance environments.” While A Pear for Your Thoughts depicts a physical hand offering fruit in exchange for wisdom, Little Violin and Still Life #2 each ask the viewer to imagine the protagonist of the scene, whose hands would make music, sip coffee, or engage in other forms of leisure, self-care, and rest in the airy scenes she’s artfully composed. 

Alec Black is a multimedia artist whose work spans drawing, painting, printmaking, and zinemaking to examine, in his own words, “the prevailing ideas of ‘Asian culture’ in America and how Orientalism and pressures towards assimilation and Americanization flatten[s]/commodifies perceptions of East Asia.” In his works on view, hands often speak to the nature of one’s work, whether it be as a massage therapist, entertainer, or sex worker, stereotypes often imposed on Asian American women. Black subverts the aesthetics and language of commercial advertising to create politically-charged artworks that, “blend the traditions of ‘American portraiture’ with symbols of Orientalism,” to question the role of art and aesthetics in constructing social, cultural, and economic value.  

In Our Hands honors a generation of artists bravely reaching; whether its grasping back nostalgically into the annals of memory and history, or fumbling for meaning through the darkness of our political present, these artworks affirm the adage that the future is in our hands. Through the courage of its exhibiting artists, In Our Hands questions the limits of human memory, agency, and control, while also affirming who and what fall under our duty of collective care.