SOMA

Main Gallery

This exhibition explores the supernatural and ethereal states of somatic responses. Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, where soma was a fictional drug used to pacify civilians in a state of existential bliss and disassociation. Exploring the socialized perceptions of figures occupying space, Soma takes on confronting perceived utopia and dysmorphia in this exhibition.

In the works, moments of adolescent innocence are paired with surrealist and folkloric expressions of figuration. Satirically, this speaks to resisting and transcending moments that are out of alignment as people grow; without physically being dismissed.

Featured artists:

Jo Archuleta (Kansas City, Missouri)

Tommy Lomeli (Helena, Montana)

Katherine Looney (Kansas City, Missouri)

October Sharify (Chicago)

Isaac Tapia (Kansas City, Missouri)

Cesar Velez (Kansas City, Missouri)

Guest Curator: Yashi Davalos
Davalos is an Afro-Puerto Rican-Mexican, Atlanta Native, based in New Orleans. Her practice began in the Americana Deep South. She attended HBCU, Savannah State University, where she studied Vocal Performance. Yashi’s curatorial research centers socio-cultural epistemology, the south and the global south, through an interdisciplinary arts praxis.

Davalos was the 2023-2025 curatorial fellow and interim grants and awards coordinator at The Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. She was previously a member of collective run gallery The Front New Orleans. Davalos has designed and facilitated programming in collaboration with various institutions including Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Prospect New Orleans, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, UMKC Music Conservatory, and MDW Artist Coalition. Her art has been exhibited throughout New Orleans, ATL, KCMO, and at MECA Art Fair in the Dominican Republic. Yashi’s writing has been published via Sixty Inches From Center, Burnaway, and Intervenxions at Latinx Project NYU.

Artist Bios:

Jo Archuleta (b. Taos, New Mexico 2000) is an artist living and working in Kansas City, Missouri. Her work explores the complexity of identity and mythology of womanhood found within leisure, desire, pleasure and the specificity as a state of being. By acknowledging rules within the landscape of femininity, gender roles and their societal expectations. Archuleta has found that there are multiple approaches to transgressive and transformative definitions of these identities. Her specific approach to this critique has been to use humor, jokes, and satire. Archuleta is interested in exploring how the figure is perceived and how she sees herself, a constant battle between self-awareness and self sabotage. The figures seduce and confront complexities within the vapidness of beauty, vanity, and ego while also using self-consciousness as repulsion. The women in her work wear masks, perform softness, weakness, shallowness, and confidence; all while cowering within their own insecurities.

Tommy Lomeli (b.1993) is an emerging ceramic artist born in Stockton, California. Lomeli holds a BA from CSU Sacramento and an MFA from the University of Kansas. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the International Sculpture Center’s 2024 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture award, and first place at NCECA’s 2023 National Juried Student Exhibition. He was a 2024 Charlotte Street Foundation Artist in Residence. He is currently a 2025 Taunt Fellow at the Archie Bray Foundation.

Katherine Looney (b.1989 (she/her)) is a Black and Native American visual artist living in Kansas City, Missouri. She usually works with oil paints when creating colorful portraits. Many of her works are based on photos she has taken of her friends and family. She was a part of Charlotte Street Foundation’s 2023 Artist INC cohort. She was also a 2024 recipient of Charlotte Street Foundation’s Artboards Award. Katherine has a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

October Sharify (b.1999) is an oil painter based in Chicago, Illinois. Their longtime interest in history and theology blends in their work with feminine aesthetics and spiritual imagery. October has a developmental disability and believes that this is both a detriment to their work and integral to their process. October has an African American and Persian cultural background, and often turns to the visual language of their respective cultures’ past for inspiration. “I enjoy working with a limited palette, and I mix my own custom colors to use consistently across my work. Blue to me is a very atmospheric color and my favorite time of day has always been twilight. World-building and paintings that evoke a feeling are very important to me and this exists in every piece that I make.”

Isaac Tapia was born in Mexico, where he lived until moving to the U.S. when he was nine. Isaac focuses on portraits that elevate important, yet often underrepresented, members of his community and celebrate the complex narratives of contemporary migration. He blends photography, audio interviews, and traditional oil portraiture techniques to convey rich, multilayered stories and create opportunities for identification and connection. Isaac’s paintings have been exhibited throughout Kansas City — including at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art — and his work has traveled in shows across the Midwest with the Mexican Consulate and La Onda and the M.A.S.A. Collective. He had a residency and exhibition at Casa Lu Sur en Mexico City in December of 2024. Isaac is a founding member of the M.A.S.A. Collective, and is one of the resident artists at the Charlotte Street Foundation. He is also one-half of the mural duo IT-RA Icons, which has painted murals across the country.

Cesar Velez is a self-taught painter and first-generation immigrant from Mexico based in Kansas City, Missouri. Velez’s work draws from his personal experience growing up in the South and Midwest United States as an undocumented immigrant (now DACA Recipient) living amongst American peers.

This exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Efroymson Family Fund.

IMAGE: Big Fish, Cesar Velez, oil on canvas, 24×30, 2022