Imagination as Resistance
A Group Multimedia Exhibition Featuring: Sharon Barnes, Marie-José Njoku-Obi, uraeus, Jillian Thompson, Seh-reum Tom, and Beth Waldman
Curated by Nicole Shostak-Sabourian
On view
October 9th - November 20th, 2025
Curator's Note
Alongside the enduring grief and unease we all feel with ICE terrorism persisting in our communities, SNAP benefits under threat, and as our government’s complicity in genocide continues, many of us this week are nevertheless feeling flints of hope and cautious optimism. This was largely because of the success of the movement of Zohran Mamdani, the 34 year old Muslim immigrant Democratic Socialist, who was just elected as mayor of NYC, plus voters came out across the country against Trump and his conspirators. No matter where we go from here, spaces like Sovern are here as community vessels to do the work of dismantling oppressive systems that act as barriers to hope, liberation, and collective healing. Imagination as Resistance is a timely reflection of our collective moment. The work in this show affirms that we are who we’ve been waiting for.
In the call for this show, we invited works that act as radical acts of resistance, works that hold us tenderly amidst capitalistic and government-fueled disasters, cruelties, and injustice seen and experienced, and works that resist dominant narratives to imagine post-extractive futures for ourselves and our communities.
The body of work that coalesced into Imagination as Resistance is about processing and world building. Incisively, the artists brought works that firstly, hold spaciousness for grief and reckoning, because how can we create our futures without engaging with what the collective has been through and continues to endure? Free of toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing, and alongside this acknowledgement of and engagement with our grief, our artists then share with us works that affirm worthiness and belonging with visions of resistance and a stepping into freedom.
-Nicole Shostak-Sabourian, November 7, 2025
Featured Artists
Sharon Barnes
My work considers the layered and often complicated intersections of identity, history and aesthetics that can be simultaneously abstract and real.
Marie José Njoku-Obi
Marie-Josè's artistic practice explores the complexities and contradictions of the Black femme experience, particularly as a first-generation American. Drawing from their Nigerian and American Southern heritage, personal history, and historical research, they create allegorical imagery that blends emotion, memory, placemaking, and identity. Through an Afro-Surrealist lens, she reimagines the past and envision liberatory futures, challenging limitations placed on Black and femme bodies.
Their multidisciplinary work spans painting, collage, stained glass, tile mosaic, and textile arts. Each material allows for a tactile process of layering, fragmentation, and reconstruction—mirroring the resilient, multifaceted nature of identity. Recurring motifs like Black figures, cloudscapes, and natural elements act as metaphors for memory and emotion, grounding the fantastical in lived reality.
Ultimately, their work aims to create spaces where the Black femme experience is seen, celebrated, and redefined by inviting viewers to reflect on their own histories while imagining new possibilities beyond imposed narratives.
Jillian Thompson
Jillian Thompson (b. Detroit, MI) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the contemporary Black women's experience through a diverse range of materials. Using metalwork, silkscreen, fibers, photo collage, and found objects, she examines narratives of culture and self-expression through both wearable pieces and imagery. Her work has been exhibited at Emerge Gallery, MCLA Gallery 51, Angels Gate Cultural Center and the Alt Summit Conference in Palm Springs. Thompson earned her Master of Fine Arts in Jewelry & Metalsmithing from California State University Long Beach and currently teaches at California State University Long Beach and Long Beach City College.
Jillian Thompson’s work explores Black girlhood through the lens of personal memory and cultural imagery. Through a merging of materials and imagery, Thompson creates a dialogue between nostalgia, identity, and the aesthetics of Black girlhood. Her work honors both personal and collective histories while imagining new possibilities for self-expression.
seh-reum Tom
seh-reum tom (they/them, we/us) is a nonbinary, genderfluid multidisciplinary practitioner of healing, performance, aquatic, visual, martial and ritual arts. a care worker who works with bodies, energy, water, sound, and plants; a facilitator, organizer, land defender, NADA (ear acupuncture) practitioner and an ever-growing and deepening student in their training as a deathworker, crisis worker, street medic, farmer, beekeeper, ancestral freediver, aquatic dancer & bodyworker, and trauma-informed surf therapy facilitator. their maternal lineages are from Jeju Island and paternal lineages are refugee settlers in California from Southern Coastal China (Pearl River Delta). they also honor their Japanese and Mongolian ancestors through complex histories of colonization, migration and imperialism and give deep reverence and thanks to the Ohlone lands and waters where they were born and that have raised, shaped and given them life. seh-reum's artistic practice emerges at the crossroads and liminal spaces of ancestral, mental and spiritual health, water, and responding to the polycrises of our time. Their work seeks to catalyze transformative experiences that bridge the personal, ancestral, and ecological realms through ritual, sculpture, weaving, textile, natural dyes and plant pigments, embodied movement storytelling, song, film, photography, printmaking, poetry and immersive installation environments/altars.
Beth Waldman
Beth Davila Waldman is a cross-disciplinary artist using photography, painting, assemblage and installation. Her work explores the impact of socio-political trends on cultural landscapes, often through imagery laden with indicators of economic and social status, presented in a manner that emulates the sheer stress of imposed change. Waldman’s constructed vistas re-conceive the notion of sanctuary amidst the realities of colonization, and invite meditations on civil access. Waldman imbues her work with a unique materiality by printing or transferring photographs on a plethora of materials—from tarp to sails, canvas to paper. She then often makes interventions into her work with paint and other substances. Her curatorial projects and writing are extensions of this practice.
View full catalog here.