CURRENT Exhibition

Towards a soft animism

Towards a soft animism
Monica Mohnot and Jenn Wilson Shepherd
Exhibition dates: April 10th, 2026 - May 9th, 2026
Artist Reception: Friday April 10th, 2026, 7-10pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, May 9th at 1:00 PM

Image: Jenn Wilson Shepherd, soft spirit (detail), 2026, oils and fabric dye on linen, 20 x 60 inches
Monica Mohnot, #17, 2026, Painting, Textile, Hand-woven on jacquard loom

Towards a soft animism
Monica Mohnot and Jenn Wilson Shepherd
Exhibition dates: April 10th, 2026 - May 9th, 2026
Artist Reception: Friday April 10th, 2026, 7-10pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, April 25th at 2:00 PM

Towards a soft animism, Monica Mohnot and Jenn Wilson Shepherd present works that explore how presence can be sensed without being fully fixed or contained. Both artists approach the image as a kind of archive. An archive that records traces of time, movement, memory, touch, and encounters rather than presenting stable representations. Mohnot’s woven and painted surfaces accumulate memory through layers of stitching, dye, and pigment, creating tactile fields where forms suggest bodies, landscapes, or internal systems without fully resolving. Wilson Shepherd’s practice similarly engages traces rather than direct depiction, drawing from camera trap imagery in which animals activate the image through their own movement, leaving fleeting records of their passage. Across both bodies of work, presence often appears indirectly: as a shadow, a scent, a fragment, or a form that hovers at the edge of recognition. By foregrounding these partial encounters, the artists invite viewers to consider perception as an ecological process shaped by attention, time, and the more-than-human world. The resulting works open spaces where surfaces hold memory, forms remain fluid, and the act of seeing becomes a shared field between human and nonhuman forms of awareness.

Monica Mohnot’s practice approaches painting as a durational, layered field built through weaving, stitching, painting, and collage. She constructs the surface itself as painting, designing and weaving cloth from the ground up before adding vinyl, dye, paint, and embroidery. Through this process, duration, and repetition remains visible on the surface, as layered passes of weaving, stitching, and painting accumulate into form. The work investigates how images emerge through sustained attention, proximity, and the slow buildup of fragments over time.

The work is composed of rounded, organic forms, interlacing lines, and dense proximities that suggest bodies, landscapes, or internal systems without resolving into fixed images. Color functions as both surface and substance. Earthy greens, ochres, browns, and blues recur throughout the work, carrying familiarity and memory rooted in lived experience and place. Charged synthetic hues interrupt these fields, introducing vibration and pressure.

Painting becomes a space within a space, an atmospheric ground laid over woven structure that holds or resists the stitched line. Layering functions as both method and meaning: forms accumulate, hover, and nearly connect, emphasizing the space just before contact.

Mohnot’s work engages with perception and how looking slows and sensation intensifies through proximity and repetition. Drawing from ideas of the positive sublime and the erotics of presence, the work holds a charged interval before dissolution, where fullness is felt but resolution is withheld. With roots in South Asian Indian culture and based in the United States, her relationship to place, memory, and material quietly informs a practice grounded in tension and becoming.

Monica Mohnot is an Indian American visual artist based in Austin, Texas. Notable exhibitions include Solo show at LHUCA(Lubbock, TX), Flex Space Gallery (San Marcos, TX), TSA( Greenville, SC), Torrance Art Museum(Torrance, CA), and Throughline Collective(Houston,TX). Her work has been reviewed in Issue no. 180 of New American Paintings, Arts and Culture TX, and Glasstire. Mohnot holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Born in Kolkata, India, she moved to the United States in 2001.

monicamohnot.com
Instagram: @ monica.mohnot

Jenn Wilson Shepherd creates work at the intersection of painting, archival imagery, and scent, exploring what it means to inhabit a world shared with other living beings. Her practice draws on posthumanist thought to challenge human-centered frameworks, privileging the agency of animals and the natural world alongside her own.

Central to her work is the collection of paintings sourced from camera-trap images from wildlife refuges. In these systems, animals trigger the camera themselves, producing images without a human operator. The creature becomes both subject and unintentional author, revealing the relational dynamics of perception, observation, and control. Wilson Shepherd reconfigures these traces through painting and sensory investigation, creating layered surfaces where memory, movement, and presence accumulate.

Inspired by John Berger’s Why Look at Animals and humanity’s thousands of years of fascination with representing animals, her work questions the invisible boundaries humans construct between themselves and the natural world. Whether in liminal landscapes, monitored preserves, or layered painted surfaces, Shepherd’s practice invites viewers into a shared field of being. A space where bodies, histories, and attention converge, and where the quiet poetry of coexistence becomes palpable.

Notable exhibitions include TSA LA (Los Angeles), Corbett vs Dempsey (Chicago), Packer-Schopf Gallery (Chicago), Eggman & Walrus (Santa Fe), American University of Beirut (Lebanon), SACI Institute (Florence, Italy), University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center Gallery, Austin Museum of Art, and Kohler Art Museum in Wisconsin. Her work has been reviewed in Artslant, Newcity Magazine, Austin Chronicle, MW Capacity, TimeOut Chicago, Chicago Magazine, Chicago Reader, and the Chicago Tribune. She received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008.

jennwilsonshepherd.com

Towards a soft animism
Monica Mohnot and Jenn Wilson Shepherd
Exhibition dates: April 10th, 2026 - May 9th, 2026
Artist Reception: Friday April 10th, 2026, 7-10pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, April 25th at 2:00 PM
Gallery Hours: Fridays & Saturdays 12-6 pm or by appointment
ICOSA Collective Gallery
916 Springdale Rd, Bldg 2, #102, Austin, TX 78702
www.icosacollective.com