January 2026 / Crystalline Lens

Crystalline Lens

Meagan Smith
Christopher Squier
Allyce Wood

January 23 – February 28, 2026
Opening Reception February 5, 2026
from 5pm - 8pm

Meagan Smith, Christopher Squier, and Allyce Wood are visual artists hailing from the Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific Northwest respectively who connected over their shared experiences making artwork in Norway. Each spent time in Scandinavia weaving, drawing, and composing textile works, using digital technologies and their own hands to create rippling visual expressions.

“Crystalline lens,” a term used to describe the focusing lens of the eye, also references a mystical quality, a glass parabola, or a clear viewpoint. The artists use the term as a guide, compiling artworks made under the influence of the coastal landscape of the fjordlands—glitches, patterns, and shifting perceptions give way to an ethereal quality of liquidity and expansion. 

The labor and repetition each artist embodies function as a visual mediation as each object is being made. Each work expands outwards, building upon itself as the piece is constructed pencil line by pencil line, thread by thread, intricacies macrotizing into something complete and ethereal.

Smith, Squier, and Wood met on residencies and are presenting work collectively for the first time. Through their exhibition at SOIL, they intend to connect viewers in the gallery to a larger coastal context of vision and atmosphere, activating their senses in Seattle’s context of mists, undulating water, and sea air.

Meagan Smith

Statement:

I am a Chicago based visual artist whose weaving practice explores the intersections of craft, design, and technology. Working across handwoven and digitally woven textiles, I translate sensory and physical experiences into pattern, structure, and color. My background as a competitive swimmer informs the foundations of my work, the rhythm of breathing, the distortion of vision beneath water, and the fluidity of movement shaped my early interest in motion and perception, expressed through undulating weaves and flowing linear patterns.

My current work is guided by my sensory differences and heightened responsiveness to sound and movement from stimuli occurring in the environment, which I often experience as waves of energy or vibration. I channel these sensations into atmospheric color fields and rhythmic patterns that shimmer, oscillate, or fracture visually, inviting viewers to engage with intensified perception. By combining digital patterning with hand-based woven techniques, I explore the unseen forces and fluctuations that shape our interaction with the environment. The resulting weaving occupies a space between sensation and structure, materiality and design.

Warp painting is central to my process, allowing for spontaneous shifts in color that become unpredictable responses within complex woven systems. Working between hand drawings, weave drafts, painting, and digital looms, I create intricate patterns and color transitions that capture motion and energy. The digital loom functions as both a tool and conceptual space, balancing mechanical precision with human perception, resulting in textiles that exist between tactile craft and digitally driven systems.

Bio:

Meagan Smith earned her BFA in Painting from The University of Akron in 2015 and her MFA in Textiles from Kent State University in 2021. She recently exhibited at Eastern Kentucky University and will participate in an upcoming two-person show at Eastern Washington University. Smith’s work has appeared in the YTAT Biennial at the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, Poland, and she has presented solo exhibitions at Akron Soul Train, Capacity Contemporary, and Kink Contemporary, and Ohio State University (two-person). Her practice has been supported by international artist residencies at Studio Kura in Japan, Kunstnarhuset Messen and Tekstil Lab in Norway, and Textílmiðstöð Íslands in Iceland. Her work is included in the collections of Summa Behavioral Health, Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C), the GAR Foundation, and numerous private collectors.

Website: https://meagansmithstudio.com/

Christopher Squier

Statement: I am a New York-based visual artist. My practice explores optics and the role of light in contemporary visual culture, engaging with research around luminescence, transparency, and invisibility to position vision as a historically-altered and politically-contentious experience. I work across media, including drawing, sculpture, site-specific installation, and textile.

My series of colored pencil drawings Disturbances expands on the ripple tank experiments of American photographer Berenice Abbott. These experiments were produced within the larger oeuvre of her photographs titled Documenting Science (1939–1958), and involved photographic exposures of light waves in water, captured with an aquarium-like photographic setup. My drawings repurpose this photographic scenario to make visible the vibrations of energy found in all matter, combining rhythm and motion on the surface of the sheet of paper. In the series Obscura and Rainbow (Redacted), I enclose graphite drawings of these same overlapping moiré patterns beneath dark, tinted glass in a reiteration of Édouard Glissant’s concept of “the right to opacity.” 

Many of my recent projects engage variously with contested histories of light, whether it be the false opposition of wave and particle, a larger interest in quantum wave theory, colonial-era histories of science and superstition, the maritime empires built upon the technology of the Fresnel lens, or the imagery of Cold War-era physics textbooks. The result is a broad investigation of visual phenomena and indeterminacy within and beyond the rational, controlled space of the laboratory and the white cube.

Bio: Christopher Squier received his master’s degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and a bachelor’s in fine art from Grinnell College. He has participated in numerous artist residencies, including the Headlands Center for the Arts, Kunstnarhuset Messen, La Fragua Artist Residency, Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder, Playa Residency, and Untitled Space. In 2021, he received an Artists Corps Grant from the city of New York. His work has been exhibited at BABEL Visningsrom for Kunst, California College of the Arts, the De Young Museum, the Expatriate Archive Centre, the Hubbell Street Galleries, and the ZIBA Prague Glass Experience Museum, among others. For the recurring sculpture festival Play/Ground, Squier presented a monumental tapestry in collaboration with the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Re:Source Art, and Explore & More Children's Museum. Squier exhibits regularly with Amos Enos Gallery, an alternative, nonprofit platform for professional artists and one of New York City’s longest operating artist-run gallery spaces. He is a founding member of the arts writing collective Dissolve and also writes criticism for his newsletter The Placebo Post.

Website: https://www.squier.co/studio

Allyce Wood

Statement: I explore the feminist history of craft and perception through the medium of weaving. Images of skies, portals, and ribbons recur in my work to depict fluidity, timelessness, and interconnection. Motifs of interlocking loops or layered coins reference the golden chain of knowledge each weaver adds to craft tradition through their determination and experimentation.

I use a range of weaving techniques, historic thread patterns, hand-dying, and inlay to create pieces that are imbued with coded repetition and watery imagery. I weave as women have throughout history, but with my artist's hand interrupting the rigid choreography of the process to build image and ephemera into the soft, pliable grid.

An avid collector of tools and threads, I alternate between using wooden self-powered floor-looms and computerized digital jacquard looms to create my pieces. I hand-draw thread patterns or construct detailed drafts digitally. Both allow for different levels of complexity, which I use to create artworks that are made up of alternating layers, shifting patterns, and purposeful color ways. Weaving is a process of building structure, and once the stable web is established, I control the matrix of fibers that create both the ground of the piece and my images. A length of shining cotton, trapped between a few select vertical warps, is formed into a glyph, a symbol. I am fascinated to see how yarns and patterns give way to language and icon.

Bio: Allyce Wood is a visual artist and weaver based in Seattle, WA. She earned a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts and an MA in Medium and Material-Based Art from Kunshøgskolen i Oslo. She has received grants from 4Culture, Bildende Kunstneres Hjelpefond, Arts Council Norway, Artist Trust, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. Wood has participated in residencies in the USA and Scandinavia, including at the Peters Valley School of Craft, the Mary Olson Farm, the Praxis Fiber Workshop, and the Icelandic Textile Center. She has completed public projects with institutions such as Sound Transit, Seattle Restored, the City of Edmonds, and the City of Burien. Her work has been exhibited at Gallery 4Culture, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Common Area Maintenance, the Tacoma Art Museum, and many others.

Website: https://www.allycewood.com/