Water is carried, traversed, held, and enveloped within numerous vessels: ships, vases, containers, and the human body. They are porous, mutable thresholds in constant circulation and transformation. Vessels, a group exhibition featuring paintings, drawings, and ceramics, expands our understanding of the term, proposing the vessel not simply as a functional object, but as an expansive mystery through which life and history pass.

What does it mean to carry, to hold, to envelop something? Among the earliest human technologies, ceramic vases were developed to store and transport water, establishing containment as a core cultural practice. In this sense, the vessel is defined by the space it holds and the substance it temporarily preserves, each shaping its form. Angel Rodriguez’s painting of a Coca-Cola bottle as a classical fountain playfully exaggerates both form and function, enlarging the bottle to monumental scale. Transformed into an impossible architecture, this vessel nevertheless continues to dispense soda. By contrast, the shifting scale of Ericka Lopez’s ceramic works draws attention to the exterior surface, emphasizing decoration, color, and shell, while Lex Sherbin’s ceramic representation of a torso suggests a deeper continuity between the vessel’s porous nature and the human body.

The body contains, releases, circulates, leaks, and remembers. In The Woman One by Daniel Padilla, a figure appears to exhale or breathe, emphasizing the constant exchange between inside and outside. As a counterpoint, Bill Marshall’s two works, Skelleton and My Soul, suggest that the body as vessel is never fixed. Instead, it moves between inner transcendence and exposed mortality, revealing just how permeable this human container can be.

If we carry ourselves within our own bodies, then sea-faring vessels echo this condition as objects imbued with duality. They contain and transport, yet they also float and drift across water, operating within networks of trade and empire, migration and travel. In Catherine Benita’s surreal and expressionistic works, ships appear inextricable from water, surrounded by blue and blurring the boundaries of surface, direction, and movement. In the impressionistic works of Vicente Siso, vessels approach an island, a bridge, and the darkness of night, suggesting the ship as a dream object moving across time and geography. Water as connector and threshold becomes especially resonant in The City of Montenegro and the Clouds, where Leul Asfaw depicts the shoreline itself as a kind of earthly vessel, holding the meeting point of land and water.

Ceramic forms, bodies, ships, and shorelines offer possibilities for how life is held temporarily and transformed in process. Taken together, the works in Vessels suggest that it is not just an object of containment but a cyclical force that flows within and without.