Where the World Breaks

Where the World Breaks examines the collapse of a shared reality and the fragmentation of the worlds human beings imagine themselves to inhabit.

Bringing together contemporary artists He Gong and Michel Angela Petersen alongside historic Pacific Northwest Mystic painters Thomas Wood, Tom Sherwood, Susan Bennerstrom, and John Cole, the exhibition traces a seam in consciousness that once held human experience together, and which now appears to be fracturing open at the horizons of knowing.

The exhibition recontextualizes the Pacific Northwest Mystic tradition through dialogue with contemporary global art practice. In the earlier works of the Northwest Mystics, nature appears as a unified spiritual field — a world experienced through continuity, metaphysical depth, and embodied presence. In the contemporary works of He Gong and Michel Angela Petersen, however, representation destabilizes. Narrative fragments, psychic space ruptures, bodies dissolve into movement, and reality itself becomes uncertain.

The exhibition is especially significant because internationally acclaimed Chinese contemporary artist He Gong will travel from China to attend the opening reception in person. He Gong’s work is currently being featured in both the Venice Biennale and the New York Biennale, positioning Where the World Breaks within an important international contemporary art dialogue.

The exhibition also carries deep historical resonance within the Pacific Northwest arts community. He Gong first met Pacific Northwest Mystic painter Tom Sherwood in China during the late 1980s, maintaining a close friendship and artistic dialogue with Sherwood throughout his life. Their connection forms one of the conceptual bridges at the center of the exhibition.

During the opening reception, He Gong will also be presented with a newly created volume of ekphrastic poetry written by poets from the Whatcom region in response to his work and the themes of the exhibition.

Through painting, ceramic sculpture, ceramic bas-relief, and philosophical curatorial framing, Where the World Breaksasks what remains possible when there is no longer a single shared understanding of reality — and whether art can still hold together what the world no longer can.