Considering vessels, containers, and the spaces we inhabit, Derek Sullivan and Ella Gonzales present works made over the last year that respond to the gallery, and to a shared, if indirect, familiarity with it.

Both artists occupied this space for 3 years, though two decades apart. They also worked in the same studio building, again years apart. These overlaps – coincidental yet persistent – form a loose framework for the exhibition: a relationship to site that holds both separation and alignment, with the artists’ works seeming as heteronyms to one another, reflecting, translating, and accentuating the space occupied. Through ongoing written and verbal exchange, their ideas return to actions of intertwined memory, intuition, and chance, each shaping how the work is proportioned and placed within the space of the gallery.

Sullivan’s three principal drawings continue his ongoing “press sheet” works – renderings of speculative book publications caught in an in-between stage of production. The “press sheet” becomes the starting structure for each drawing, and each thing added is a page in an imagined book, monumentalized and ossified: depicted as specimens. These drawings show 4 “pages”, each holding a reproduction of a vase or vessel that is in the artists’ home. The vessel becomes a kind of intermediary object: complete in itself through function/use, yet defined by an implied purpose that remains unfilled. Here, these objects are removed from their original contexts and re-situated within Sullivan’s personal environment, where they operate as both image and structure, held in suspension between function and display. The bell sculptures, shown in relation, intend to explore sounding as a sculptural material filling the volume of the gallery – an object placed within a new context, offering it a differing possibility of functionality.

Gonzales’ paintings approach the gallery by taking its architecture as logic. Scaled in relation to each wall and installed at its centre, the works act as quiet anchors within the space. Built through layered recollections of interiors - beginning often at a threshold or point of entry - these paintings move through remembered environments, including the gallery itself. Working between painting and digital modelling, Gonzales treats the diagram not as a fixed plan, but as a structure that holds shifting information. Memory, observation, and movement pass through, allowing each work to remain open and in flux.

Across both practices, the works consider how forms hold and are held: by space, by use, and by time. Vessels, diagrams, and rooms each function as containers - shaped as much by what passes through them as by what they contain.