June 2025 / OASIS

OASIS

Dinah J
Flora Wilds
AshaAung Helmstetter
Jessica Marie Mercy

June 05 - July 06, 2025

Opening Reception, Thursday, June 05, 5-8pm
Closing Reception, Thursday, July 06, 5-8pm

Spring Gallery Hours:
Friday–Sunday, 12–5pm

This June, SOIL Gallery invites you to step inside OASIS —  a maximalist, immersive escape where femme ghosts, queer saints, and acid queens reign. Here, bodies are portals, materials remember, and identity shimmers in the heat haze. an immersive, multidisciplinary installation, The artists conjure a sensory landscape where identity, memory, and material histories entwine. Featuring the work of Dinah J, Flora Wilds, AshaAung Helmstetter, and Jessica Marie Mercy, Oasis is a psychedelic refuge for the body and spirit, where queer community, tactile storytelling, and radical self-expression take center stage.

The gallery mutates into a high-camp desert fantasia where visitors will encounter towering ceramic cacti, shimmering glass, hand-sewn textile relics, sand art, ethereal soundscapes, and monumental paintings — transforming the space into a dreamlike, otherworldly terrain. Each artist brings a deeply personal, politically charged, and community-rooted voice to the environment: exploring voyeurism and identity, femme disposability, deconstructed Americana, and the preservation of queer spaces.

OASIS isn’t just an exhibition — it’s a respite for the freaky, the fabulous, and the forgotten. A place to disappear, reappear, and bask in a shimmering acid dream of community. It is a site of both reverence and play — a liminal zone where visitors are invited to stay awhile, be seen, and imagine new futures.

ARTIST BIOS // STATEMENTS

Dinah J is a Florida-grown painter based in Seattle, Washington. They received a BA in Art and Literature from New College of Florida. Their practice centers on large-scale nude portraits and trompe l’oeil paintings of urban infrastructure — such as sewer grates, signage, and electrical fixtures — treating these everyday elements with intimacy and precision. Dinah is a co-founder of Cobra Baby Art Collective LLC, which provides business support and tax preparation services for artists and creative professionals. As a licensed tax professional, they are committed to helping fellow artists navigate the financial challenges of creative work under capitalism.

Dinah J paints elements of the built environment — sewer covers, sidewalk text, street signage — altering the language they carry to foreground desire, confusion, and absurdity. These works mimic public infrastructure but quietly interrupt it, inserting slippage and mischief into functional systems and projecting a turbulent inner reality onto mundane urban artifacts.  Dinah is interested in the aesthetics of utility, the codes we inherit, and the ways we quietly rewrite them.

@dinahstea

AshaAung Helmstetter (she/her) is a painter, mixed-media, and performing artist from Seattle’s Central District, where she is still based today. Through her work, she amplifies community-connection and finding freedom from within; which she also explores through teaching and participating in community spaces.

AshaAung’s is the teaching artist in residence with Wing Luke Museum and International Community Health Services, creating intergenerational-community-art installations. AshaAung has been Artist in Residence (AiR) with: SOIL Gallery (Young AiR 2021), PrideFest’s Artist Retreat at Rockland Residency (2023), Wa Na Wari (the 2021-2023 cycle), and Common Area Maintenance (2nd Ave Sign Project AiR 2023). Recent funding includes the 2024 Living Artist Grant, and 4Culture’s 2024 Cultural Producers Recovery Fund. Her work’s been featured on King 5 News, Fox 13, and more.

You can also find Asha around town under her burlesque and go-go persona, Ms. Kitschy Kupid!

Flora Wilds’ practice is committed to a collaboration with found materials, including previously worn clothing, various forms of plastic, detritus from urban construction sites, and other cheap commodities. Wilds works with objects that have disparate and gendered histories, objects that reflect the pace and pressures of capital, and objects infamous for their contemporary excesses. Deconstruction, reconstruction, and glitch are primary entry points for Wilds’ process, which is often aided by a vast photo archive gleaned from eBay as well as photos made on the streets of NYC and Los Angeles. Wilds’ sculpture and performance pieces place a playful and critical gaze upon the mundane materials of post-modernity, a gaze that is guided by an attunement towards physical drama, synchronicity, and a hope that the future can be slowly un-cancelled. 

Flora Wilds (b. 1993) is a conceptual artist with a BA in Art History from Suffolk University and an MFA in Visual Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. Wilds has shown work all over the United States, including with Shelter Gallery (Manhattan), NARS Foundation Gallery (Brooklyn), and the SF Museum of Craft and Design. She was recently a resident at PADA Studios in Lisbon, and has an upcoming solo show at Colorado Mesa University. Wilds lives in Los Angeles, and her work is continually informed by her youth spent in Southern California and well as her many years living in NYC.

She documents her practice on instagram @abundant_commodities 

Jessica Marie Mercy, known for her obsession with queer spaces, social justice, and her aggressive LGBTQIA advocacy, is recognized for her exceptional abilities within the medium of printmaking,  ceramics, and performance. Jessica Marie Mercy’s work reflects their ability to spin a visual narrative while simultaneously initiating dialogues. Mercy’s focus is creating work that immortalizes queer experiences while exploring safer spaces within their queer communities. She has brought visual art into all aspects of their life, including recreating moments from Seattle’s vibrant queer, kinky nightlife and professionally printing fabrics for a local small business, Bombsheller. With their Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington, Mercy has exhibited their work at the Museum of Museums, Soil gallery, The Factory, the International Center for Photography, the University of Wyoming, The University of Washington, Slide Gallery, Sole Repair, Phantom Realms, Magnuson Park Gallery, the Pratt Fine Arts Gallery, Gay City: Seattle’s LGBTQ Center, the Sky View Observatory at Columbia Center, North Seattle College Gallery, Alice Gallery, and Pottery Northwest Gallery.  Jessica Marie Mercy has been the featured artist in Public Display Art, the 5th issue of the Make Space Zine and has been highlighted in City Arts Magazine, the Seattle Times, and FIST. Her obsession with community doesn’t stop with queers; Mercy is an active member of Seattle Print Arts, SGC International, NCECA and the seattle arts community. She currently works and resides on occupied Duwamish land known as Seattle, WA.

My identities cannot exist in isolation; they are a reflection of the many spaces I inhabit. Through repeating imagery I examine femme invisibility and identity while challenging traditional visual stereotypes. I think of my investigation into queer spaces as a gesture of preservation and reverence, creating a dialogue around the complexities they hold. This exploration manifests itself across the print, digital and ceramic mediums, with each piece influenced by my dysphoria, radical queer political views, and identity performativity as well as how that performance is received. Creating accessible, relatable fine art for my communities is the driving force behind my continual making and is a wellspring of inspiration.