Soft Landing brings together painter Marissa Purcell and sculptor Ashley Lyon, two artists whose practices explore the tension between material and perception, comfort and disquiet, the tangible and the imagined.
Across Purcell’s linen surfaces, thin acrylic veils accumulate in soft layers, building spaces that waver between the seen and the unseen. Each surface invites pause—a suspension of time and gravity—where color becomes both air and emotion. These luminous fields resist fixity; they shift with light and proximity, offering the viewer an entry point into an elsewhere that feels both intimate and infinite.
Alongside them, Lyon’s sculpted clay pillows rest in still formation, their surfaces cool and unyielding. What first reads as softness becomes a paradox—a solid weight masquerading as rest. Their irony grounds the exhibition’s title: the notion of a soft landing as both aspiration and illusion.
Together, Purcell and Lyon speak to a collective desire for refuge—for art as a place to fall gently when the world feels unsteady. Within their shared quietness lies the possibility of escape, not in denial of reality, but as a necessary exhale from it. Soft Landing becomes a meditation on tenderness in form and the spaces we construct, consciously or not, to find comfort when comfort feels out of reach.
