THE VEIL BETWEEN
Anthony Olubunmi Akimbola, Miya Ando, Jasko Begovic, Ashwini Bhat, Jessica Jane Charleston, Mary Fernando Conrad, Solee Darrell, Justine Di Fiore, Nicki Green, Nasim Hantehzadeh, Kajahl, Adrian Pally, Anna Sidana, and Ruxue Zhang
January 16 - March 14, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, January 16, 6-8 PM
CULT Aimee Friberg | 1401 16th Street, San Francisco
CULT Aimee Friberg is pleased to announce The Veil Between, a group exhibition marking the gallery’s twelfth anniversary and reflecting back to its inaugural November 2013 exhibition, Unseen. The exhibition opens on January 19, 2026 at CULT Aimee Friberg (1401 16th Street, San Francisco) and remains on view through March 14, 2026.
The Veil Between brings together a constellation of fourteen artists whose practices dwell in liminal space—between the material and the immaterial, body and spirit, memory and myth. Across painting, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, and installation, material is approached not as fixed substance but as a threshold: a site where perception shifts and the unseen takes form. Drawing from ritual, embodiment, phenomenological experience, and storytelling, the works propose alternative ways of knowing—rooted as much in intuition and devotion as in observation and form. Featured artists include: Anthony Akimbola, Miya Ando, Jasko Begovic, Ashwini Bhat, Jessica Jane Charleston, Mary Fernando Conrad, Solee Darrell, Justine Di Fiore, Nicki Green, Nasim Hantehzadeh, Kajahl, Adrian Pally, Anna Sidana, and Ruxue Zhang.
Attuned to cycles of time, land, labor, and care, the artists reimagine obscured histories and explore porous boundaries between the visible and invisible. Through elemental processes, spiritual symbolism, and acts of making that echo ritual and repair, the exhibition reflects a shared understanding that meaning is shaped through attention—through how we touch, tend, observe, and imagine. Together, these works invite viewers to linger in the space where transformation becomes possible.
In The Veil Between, each artist approaches the space between worlds as a site of inquiry—where belief, memory, labor, and imagination take form. Anthony Olubuni Akinbola reconfigures everyday materials such as durags, palm oil, and hair tools into charged surfaces that hold cultural, spiritual, and diasporic meaning. Miya Ando translates fleeting natural phenomena—light, fire, and time—into precise material systems using charred wood, indigo, metal, and paper to register impermanence and duration. Ashwini Bhat works through clay as an extension of the body, merging feminine form, land stewardship, and ritual into sculptures that honor nature as sacred and position material as a conduit for transformation and regeneration. Nicki Green, working primarily in clay, employs ornamentation and transness as lenses through which to question history, spirituality, and aesthetics of otherness, crafting objects that operate simultaneously as vessels, relics, and speculative futures. Soleé Darrell’s intuition-driven paintings bridge inner and outer worlds, using layered media, gesture, and color to map unseen emotional and spiritual terrain with quiet optimism.
Questions of embodiment, care, and becoming run through the practices of Justine Di Fiore and Nasim Hantehzadeh. Di Fiore’s paintings emerge from the intimate labor of caregiving, where touch and gesture mirror the vulnerability of bodies held and tended. Hantehzadeh’s expansive, gestural compositions draw from pre-colonial mythologies and queer histories, channeling the body as a site of resistance, pleasure, and psychic release.
Mythmaking and speculative narrative are central to the works of Kajahl, Jessica Jane Charleston, Ruxue Zhang, Adrian Pally, and Anna Sidana. Kajahl constructs imagined courts and sovereign figures drawn from overlooked histories and ancient sources, positioning painting as a portal through which time and mythology collapse. Charleston’s works on paper explore the female form as a site of interior life, where figures dissolve, merge, and entwine in quiet, mythic scenes that hold care, vulnerability, and psychological transformation. Zhang approaches perception itself as subject matter, using repetition, memory, and alienation to examine the space between observer and world—between the terrestrial and the cosmic. Pally’s ceramic Spires, playful yet devotional, draw from horticulture and ritual objects, grounding wonder in the tactile language of clay. Sidana’s lush works on paper depict cotton and flora as carriers of memory and cultural inheritance, weaving personal and collective histories into dreamlike landscapes where beauty and brutality coexist.
Jasko Begovic presents drawings from his Refugees R Us body of work, where gesture, repetition, and intuitive mark-making explore belonging, displacement, and collective connection. Rooted in play, movement, and collaboration, the drawings are in dialogue with his wearable sculptures presented in his Kiosko installation as a featured artist at FOG Art Fair, positioning the body as a site where memory, survival, and optimism quietly coexist.
Across diverse practices and materials, the artists in The Veil Between offer distinct yet interconnected approaches to the unseen forces that shape lived experience. The veil between worlds—spiritual and physical, ancestral and contemporary, personal and collective—is not a boundary to be crossed, but a space to inhabit. In attending to this threshold, the exhibition proposes creation itself as an act of belief, care, and quiet optimism.
