The Island by Jillian Solotes

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Jillian Solotes

The Island

June 20 — August 1, 2025

In her first solo exhibition, Jillian Solotes constructs a metaphorical visual world where people, animals, and objects exist in a state of quiet reverence—isolated yet interconnected. These images, devoid of written language, communicate through presence, composition, and light and shadow. Still lifes of fruit, animals, and symbolic objects are shown with portraits of humans rendered statuesque, their stillness evoking something both eternal and fleeting.

For the past decade, Solotes has been developing this body of work and a personal visual language—one that is deeply connected and attuned to the unseen forces that shape our understanding of reality. Her work moves between grief and transformation, between the material world and the symbolic realm, opening a portal where meaning emerges in silence.

In these paintings and drawings, truth is both revealed and obscured. They invite the viewer to connect, to sink in, to reach beyond the frame into something archetypal—something that lingers in the collective unconscious. The symbolic weight of each composition allows space for interpretation, holding within it the psychological resonance of memory, dreams, and self-understanding.

By isolating her subjects, Solotes amplifies their presence, heightening their poetic and alchemical charge. Every image is a threshold: a moment of pause where the seen and unseen, the light and dark, converge. Through this work, she asks—what can an image hold? What does it call forth? And how do we, as viewers, step inside it?


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