MORGAN STOKES
JUN 05 - JUNE 22, 2025

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“Transcending our earthly bodies, our data bodies spread forth and multiply weightlessly in the cloud. Reproductions of paintings—populating our feeds and our Photos app—do the same. In an evaporating world, our flesh sits stubbornly… This show, Virgin, is a meditation on painting not as representation but as body in its own right. A figure formed from its own naked materiality; exploring how matter can become active, autonomous, and exposed.” - Morgan Stokes

While the term Virgin may invoke a number of standout pop culture references ranging from Madonna to Clueless and now Lorde, it is a word that has always been synonymous with the perceived value, representation and autonomy of bodies - in both a physical and spiritual sense. Emerging from material and historical enquiries into practices of painting and sculpture, Morgan Stokes’ compelling work examines the framing of the artistic process as a negotiation between object and image, highlighting the agency of materials in creating work that realises a state of embodiment. His new show Virgin explores this tension between the bodily and the existential, considering the value and aesthetic potential of painting and sculpture beyond modes of representation - particularly in this post-internet age characterised by artifice, immateriality and ever evolving notions of ‘realism’.

Beyond the prospect of our slide into virtual reality, Stokes also draws a line towards the religious history of art; merging concepts of the body as a vessel of meaning and purity as well as something vital, driven by presence and sensation. Layered and contained like skin and bone, his works celebrate the raw beauty and ‘purity’ of materials traced with veins and marks of meaning, somehow both muscular and meditative. 


Words by Zachary Calleja

SOZOU Studios
Jun 26 - Jul 13, 2025

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"Almost Disappearing"
Exhibition 

Engulfing the immaterial, SOZOU Studio’s works linger between the normative horizontal planes of our daily lives like a beacon of nostalgic warmth. Almost Disappearing celebrates the transience of our cosmopolitan human nature through vague impressions on our senses. More often than not we glimpse at moments in consciousness as they already pass — fleeting and beautiful, this encompasses a delicate approach within Kohtaroh & Stefano’s collaborative works.

We see an aesthetic vulnerability through the application of Australian blackwood, Japanese paper and patinated brass; an honest acceptance of our natural world in its raw conception. Alongside diverse counterparts, the familiarity of materials connects to everyone on levels unbeknown to our ocular prejudice.

What is to be perceived is a balanced impression of unbiased lighting, holding space and place in a poetic juxtaposition to the fluorescent norm. Smouldering pendants and intimately crafted paper, among humble plinths of wood, gently exudes an illuminated dissonance in SOZOU’s collection. We have found a desire, not only to remember, but to embrace the freedom in forgetting.

Words by;
Xavier Bruggeman