“Gifts of The Soil”
Opening : 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm. Saturday. July, 19th.
Public Viewing: July 19th to August 16th, 2025
Address: 2220 Commerce Street #D, Houston, TX 77002
Mitochondria Gallery is pleased to present Gifts of the Soil, a group exhibition that brings together works by Shara Mays, Victor Olaoye, John Reno Jackson, Madjeen Isaac, Nedia Were, Izere Antoine, Laju Sholola, and Nathalie Djakou Kassi.
Gifts of the Soil is a group exhibition that explores how local ecosystems shape both personal consciousness and collective cultural identity. By emphasizing the deep ties between land and lived experience, the exhibition highlights the environmental roots of memory, belonging, and place.
Featuring a range of paintings and sculptures, the show brings together artists whose practices are informed by heritage, adaptation, and cultural transmission. Here, land is not just physical terrain but a generative force that informs identity and community.
The soil emerges as both material and metaphor, origin and archive, offering a site for ancestral knowledge and evolving cultural expression. Gifts of the Soil invites reflection on the environment as a living repository of meaning, and positions artistic practice as a form of ecological and cultural inquiry.
EXHIBITED WORKS
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Shara Mays contributes large-scale gestural abstractions that emerge from the interplay of landscape, instinctual figuration, and personal identity. Utilizing layered oil paint, her compositions resonate with narratives tied to land and communal belonging.
John Reno Jackson’s small-scale geometric abstractions are rooted in the cultural iconography of the Cayman Islands, incorporating motifs inspired by silver thatch weaving, natural elements, and found materials.
Madjeen Isaac continues her exploration of diasporic belonging through hybridized landscapes that merge her Haitian heritage with the urban environment of Brooklyn, New York.
Victor Olaoye’s gestural abstraction paintings delve into themes of life cycles and decay to interrogate the fragility and resilience of our environment. He blends elements of organic, surreal, and bodily forms in an earthy palette reminiscent of the agricultural terrains of Western Nigeria, as he creates ambiguity in a space where collapse and regeneration coexist.
Izere Antoine presents impressionistic landscapes drawn from the verdant topography of Rwanda, evoking a quiet intimacy with the land. Laju Sholola debuts works from her new “Dark” series, which uses mixed media to reflect on uncertainty, introspection, and resilience through a palette of muted tones and shadowy figures.
Nedia Were’s large-scale figurative paintings pay homage to the Kenyan countryside and the layered construction of identity. Nathalie Djakou Kassi contributes wooden sculptures that reinterpret traditional Cameroonian forms such as the palaver chair and stool, invoking themes of dialogue, heritage, and communal gathering.