May 2025 / Sofya Belinskaya

In the Back Space /

it becomes a mountain by Sofya Belinskaya

May 01 - 31, 2025

Opening Reception, Thursday, May 01, 5-8pm

See Mor

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

Typically what cannot be seen/ is what we most like to see - Pope.L

What does a hole hold? Fear, lust, loss, darkness, knowledge, opportunity; holes are thresholds for fantasy. A precipice for something just out of reach: an unspoken word, a passage, a lost memento. ‘it becomes a mountain’ examines holes as portals for fear and desire, and how these experiences often occupy the same space. Through painting, Sofya Belinskaya explores personal anxieties and hopes living in an uncertain time.

Works featured in this exhibition weave together figurative and landscape images to reflect on internal and external experience. Many of the figurative paintings started with a performance: the artist and her collaborators, Emma Kates Shaw and Olivia Zakes Green dug themselves into the beach on the Pacific coast. The act of digging evokes layered meanings: children’s games, the urge to search, and to bring your physical body close to the land. These paintings are paired with meditations on holes like open pit mines, glacial crevices, nests, and intimate body parts.

As with any hole, the missing matter isn’t missing but rather transferred. Paying homage to artists Ana Medieta and Gordon Matta Clark, ‘it becomes a mountain’ meditates these metaphors as existential reminders of the opaqueness of the future and dream of possibility.

Sofya Belinskaya is a Ukrainian-American painter making art about the fragmented nature of memory and our relationships to place. Her work explores the boundary between dream and reality, presence and absence. Based in Seattle, her work has been exhibited regionally, including shows at Gallery 4Culture, Linda Hodges Gallery, and King Street Station Gallery. She’s the recipient of multiple awards, including a 2022 4Culture Art Projects Grant and she was a 2024 Neddy Painting Finalist. She holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, 2011. She was a founding member of Lion’s Main Queer art collective (2013-17), where she co-curated exhibitions including for Henry Art Gallery Open House, and Seattle Art Museum’s Art in the Park series.