Review: Sonjie Feliciano Solomon at the Shirley Project Space

Sonjie Feliciano Solomon: A Meditative Sublime in the Arrays with a Vision

Chunbum Park

Brooklyn, NY

2025-06-24

In Other Words

Oil-based paint on paper, 30 x 22 inches, 2025

Sonjie Feliciano Solomon’s solo exhibition at the Shirley Project Space in Brooklyn is a mesmerizing and lucidly vivid vision of the higher dimensions, made of repeating waves that come into being and scatter away. The artist invokes the power of meditation and mother nature in her abstract compositions that could be read as luminous and mindful landscapes like the sea, mountains, or the clouds. The exhibition is mainly composed of two parts: the 2-dimensional paintings on paper and the 3-dimensional sculptural installations made of woven fabrics.

Exchange I

Oil-based paint on paper, 30 x 22 inches, 2024

In her 2D meditative landscapes, using spray paint and experimental techniques, Solomon paints what appears to be a cropped, local event in a never-ending stream of waves as a phenomenon. Zooming into the work, one can see the pixels or dots of paint that scatter from the spray gun: a duality of discrete point and continuous wave is present in her work. The discrete points make up and thread the wave, which is the overarching principle or image.

In this regard, Solomon’s 2D works are similar to Isaac Aden’s abstract landscapes concerning the sublime, which also employ spray guns and feature miniscule dots as pixels. They both contain a meditative quality, perhaps due to influences of Eastern philosophy (although Solomon was brought up in Missouri as a conservative Catholic). Where they drastically differ is the fact that Aden has a firmer conceptual bent with the idea governing the overall composition of the work (which could be described as a vacant, meditative composition of space and light), whereas Solomon is more of an image maker who elevates the graphical and illustrational motifs to the level of mindfulness.

Snow

Installation

Similarly, in her 3D installation titled, “Snow,” Solomon has stitched and woven interlocking layers of semi-transparent white fabric, which can be read literally as a snowy landscape with trails suggesting a jellyfish. When expanded, the mass of fabric appears as curvilinear architectural forms made of rectilinear units like honeycombs, and they are collapsible into a flat form, which mask the rectilinearity of the individual units and the curvilinearity of the overall composition simultaneously.

Solomon’s work, which is curvilinear in nature, defies the rectilinearity of computer logic and Euclidean geometry; this reflects the fact that the human mind is curved and organic, not straight and logical like a classical computer.

Going back to her 2D pieces, each piece has a unique psychology or mental state in which the waves move or vibrate: in “Exchange I” (2024), the curved masses appear to move or migrate en masse in a lost manner as if they were caught in a blizzard or a winter storm. By contrast, in “Exchange II” (2024), by contrast, the grouped units are jumping towards or clamoring for a particular direction, as if they are near the finish line. Much greater tranquility and calmness can be felt and experienced in “In Other Words” (2025), where the forms appear much less voluptuous and thereby more unified as part of an overall landscape rather than as individuals.

The potential for beauty in Solomon’s renderings lies within the ability of each point, particle, and being to connect with one another and form relationships as lines that change in terms of direction and acceleration. In all her works, it is the same use of points, lines with curves, and motifs of arranging and rearranging arrays of curves. However, the outcome in terms of the mental and psychological states are drastically different between “In Other Words” (2025) and “Exchange I” (2024), for example. Here we learn an invaluable lesson: the individuals are made stronger when they bond into a group with a cohesive overall vision. Without the overarching vision or ideology - whether that is the desire for freedom and equality or creative expression - the individual suffers as a result.

The finite and the infinite are intertwined, just like the point and the wave: the wave suggests infinite changes as in calculus, while the point is finite sum and particle that represents the individual. Per the laws of thermodynamics, the energy represented by each particle can never be created nor destroyed - in this sense, the being has always been and will always be. The particles are too, then, infinite in terms of their existence and within time. The units of waves are composed democratically because there is no separation between the mind and the body: the body has the potential to become the mind in the future lives, and vice versa. The democratic manner in which Solomon’s waves are composed suggests that the relationship (or the shape) of the waves can be broken and formulated again and again, endlessly.