“Echoes Unveiled” Exhibition

Echoes Unveiled
In the Back Room Gallery at Arts Warehouse
August 2 – October 19, 2024

Echoes Unveiled encapsulates Neptune’s two-decade journey as an Interdisciplinary Artist and Independent Curator focused on empowering emerging artists. Neptune founded South Florida based organization, ArtHeart. Through hosting group exhibitions and projects, the artist collective was able raise money and awareness to support orphaned children in Rwanda, Africa and Cap Haitien, Haiti.

A common theme both in her support of emerging artists and in her own art practice, is Neptune’s navigation of mental health. Her work is process-oriented, reflective, and introspective. She explores the complexities of her mental health through a range of mixed-media sculpture, abstract mapping, photography, painting, digital art, and installation. Each medium she employs is carefully, yet often intuitively, selected to reflect her psychological and emotional state. By utilizing personal and intimate visual narratives, Neptune shares her struggle and healing, aiming to normalize conversations around mental health and de-stigmatize mental illness. Noted in this exhibition, the video installation depicts animated mind mappings, mimicking the marks found on the hanging works around the gallery and bringing internal thoughts to life.

Echoes Unveiled is the intimate intersection of Neptune’s heart and mind by honoring the lives of children across the globe, and drawing attention to her mental processes.

The mixed media works in the exhibition are portraits of women and children that Neptune captured in Rwanda, Africa in 2012 and 2014. The pieces include matte medium, pencil, watercolor, polyurethane, thread, sharpie, and brush markers on paper and fabric to embellish the large-scale photo-transfers of children and women. The chosen scale of the pieces is meant to emphasize the strong emotional ties that the artist has to this work. The colored areas are watercolor paint painted directly over the photos, used because of the fluidity of the medium which contrasts rigidity, a common element of Neptune’s art practice. Many of the color choices and placements are related to the Chakras based on how each color is described and defined. The video installation depicts animated mind mappings, mimicking the marks found on the hanging works around the gallery and bringing internal thoughts to life. The videos are projected on to individual cast hands that are of the artist herself as well as people important in her life and artistic practice.

For more information about Katya Neptune

Instagram | @katya_neptune_art
Website | katyaneptune.com

Photos by Radha Neptune