COMMON GROUND | 312 2nd Ave S, Seattle 98104
PUBLIC OPENING: THURSDAY JUNE 5, 6 - 9 pm
QUEER FIGURE DRAWING: SATURDAY JUNE 21, 1 - 3 pm
JUNE 5 - 28, 2025 - CONTACT TO VIEW BY APPOINTMENT
VIEW ARTWORK BY GRACE ATHENA FLOTT
VIEW ARTWORK BY ALYSSA ZOE PUTNAM
VIEW ARTWORK BY SOFYA BELINSKAYA
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Seattle-based painters Sofya Belinskaya, Grace Athena Flott, and Alyssa Zoe Putnam present Grab.Hold.Release., an exhibition of recent works that explore narratives of sensuality, monstrosity and alienation through the lens of portrait and figure. Threaded together with dream-like surrealism, this group exhibition invites the viewer into the somatic experience of living in political uncertainty. Each artist represents sensing and feeling bodies, the material sites of societal instability. These are remixed with a range of personal, place-based or mythological symbols just outside of legible reality. Recognizing that instability creates a portal for change, these artists leverage uncanny and sometimes discomfiting imagery of touch, flesh, earth, and detritus to conflate desire and fear, pain and pleasure. In doing so, they reveal and dissolve boundaries between us – as bodies, as communities – in luscious color.
In Belinskaya’s painting from my vein to yours, two figures stretch and contort toward each other, their surfaces imbued with striations reminiscent of ore, the space between them emphasizing tension and longing. That tension becomes visceral in They hungered for more by Flott, intimate snapshots of a gleaming green body poked, bitten and grabbed as if on the verge of being torn apart. The flesh is sensitively painted, yet marred by texture and violent action. This is a turn toward darker themes within Flott’s broader exploration of body difference as a dynamic identity and aesthetic. In Putnam’s Selkie Two, a portrait of an ocean-wet woman has a split bow in her hair. The unraveling of feminine expectations echoes that of the Celtic selkie myth in which a woman, with the ability to transform into a seal, is forced to choose between her roles of mother and wife or her life as a wild animal.
Sofya Belinskaya is a Ukrainian-American painter making art about the fragmented nature of memory and our relationships to place. Her work has been exhibited regionally, including shows at Gallery 4Culture, Linda Hodges Gallery, Behnke Family Gallery at Cornish College of the Arts, and she is an artist-member of SOIL artist-run gallery.
Grace Athena Flott is an American painter and printmaker whose work responds to myths of normalcy at the intersection of health, gender, and beauty. Her work is held in public collection with the State of Washington and City of Seattle and has been exhibited internationally including with the Museum of Modern European Art (MEAM) Barcelona, Equity Gallery (NYC), and locally at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art..
Alyssa Zoe Putnam received a BFA in Mixed Media from Western Washington University in 2012. Through the iconography of folk tales, biblical fiction and modern day myths, she conjures the resonating essence that is within the underpinnings of these well known stories.
