Material Voices
Material Voices
JANUARY 22, 2026 - MARCH 6, 2026
Philadelphia
Wexler Gallery is pleased to announce Material Voices, an upcoming three-person exhibition bringing together the work of Jennifer Trask, Sofia Karakatsanis, and Erin Sullivan. The exhibition unites three distinct practices through a shared inquiry into material memory, transformation, and the enduring dialogue between nature and human intervention.
Material Voices will open on Thursday, January 22, and remain on view through Friday, March 6.
Sofia Karakatsanis approaches wood as a responsive, living entity. Working intuitively with both power tools and hand carving, she allows grain, tension, and movement to guide each form. Her practice embraces extremes, chemically bleaching sycamore to a bone-white finish and scorching ash to a deep black surface. These processes reveal the internal architecture of the wood while evoking its former life as a tree. The resulting works feel excavated rather than constructed, shaped by a direct dialogue between maker and material.
Jennifer Trask works with materials already steeped in history, including antlers, vertebrae, teeth, and antique fragments, assembling intricate sculptures that examine humanity’s impulse to preserve and curate nature. Informed by biology, archaeology, and vanitas painting traditions, her work navigates the tension between abundance and decay, artifice and organic life. Each composition balances delicacy and density, challenging notions of permanence while acknowledging inevitable transformation.
Erin Sullivan’s sculptural furniture and ritual objects inhabit a mythic space between art and design. Drawing on archetypal symbols, her work transforms natural impressions into functional forms such as tables, stools, and lighting. Working primarily in bronze, an ancient medium capable of capturing a moment in time and preserving it in perpetuity, Sullivan employs a meticulous sculpting process and lost-wax casting to create a symbolic language that honors cycles of life and death, matter and spirit. Her works position functional objects as sites of reflection, ritual, and reverence.
Together, Karakatsanis, Sullivan, and Trask present a compelling meditation on material as memory. The exhibition invites viewers to consider how objects can function as witnesses, holding traces of growth, erosion, ritual, and care, while reimagining the boundary between the natural world and human authorship.
