Opening Reception: Being Held

Being Held brings together three Texas-based visual artists: Naomi Canale, Spencer Welch, and Ellen Mote, as they contemplate what it means to be held. Moving between abstraction and portraiture, each artist draws on deeply personal narratives to explore themes of structural barriers, domestic sanctuary, and maternal identity. Naomi Canale investigates the complexities of communication, language fragmentation, and human connection through painting, sculpture, and artist books. By deconstructing structural systems of text and form, her work gives tangible shape to memory, community, and the profound resilience of the human voice breaking through rigid institutional frameworks. As an intuitive empath and mother, Spencer Welch tenderly layers oil paints, acrylics, and embroidery on canvas, capturing impressionistic fragments of domestic intimacy to find harmony between artistic devotion and the protective warmth of family life. Meanwhile, Ellen Mote explores acts of care and ancestral identity. Utilizing cyanotypes, sculpture, light, and repetitive abstract forms on unprimed canvas, Mote conveys the deeply rooted ways we give and receive care. Together, this exhibition invites the viewer to step into Being Held as a philosophical sanctuary—a space to meditate on our shared experiences, feel anchored within the collective consciousness, and find solace in the understanding that our burdens are lighter when we recognize the profound, intricate ways we are bound together.