CURRENT Exhibition

The Moon Knows Your Name

Ariana Gomez & Chantal Lesley

Exhibition Dates: December 5, 2025 - January 3, 2026
Artist Reception: Friday, December 5, 7-10 pm, 2025
East Austin Arts District Third Thursday Artist Talk: December 18th at 6:30pm
Open Hours: Fridays and Saturdays, 12-6pm or by appointment

Image: The Ocean Is So Big, And I’m So Far Away by Ariana Gomez and Chantal Lesley, 2025

The Moon Knows Your Name
Ariana Gomez & Chantal Lesley
Exhibition Dates: December 5, 2025 - January 3, 2026
Artist Reception: Friday, December 5, 7-10 pm, 2025
East Austin Arts District Third Thursday Artist Talk: December 18th at 6:30pm

The Moon Knows Your Name brings together the work of Ariana Gomez and Chantal Lesley, two artists whose practices explore memory, myth, and the fragile boundaries between reality and the imagined. Rooted in photography and expanded through textiles, sculpture, installation, and film, both artists create visual languages that hold what slips between generations, across geographies, and through the quiet terrain of grief, longing, and becoming.

In this exhibition, the moon serves as witness, guide, and mirror — a patient keeper of histories too vast or tender to speak aloud. For Gomez and Lesley, the moon does not simply illuminate; it remembers. It pulls at the ocean of the subconscious, surfaces what refuses to disappear, and casts a light that binds past and future, the living and the remembered, the rooted and the untethered.

Gomez’s practice excavates lineage, grief, and imagined futures through a cinematic and ritualistic lens. Working from personal loss and ancestral migration, she weaves myth into family history, collapsing time to create an evolving archive of lives lived, interrupted, and reimagined. Her installations and moving images inhabit the liminal hour — that twilight when the veil between worlds thins, when longing becomes presence and absence becomes form. By re-locating loved ones within shifting landscapes, she rebuilds place and identity through tenderness, speculation, and devotion.

Lesley’s work dwells in the liminal — the thresholds between cultures, identities, and internal worlds shaped by migration and collective memory. Raised between borders, she gathers fragments of the intangible: inherited stories, fleeting dreams, and the subtle echoes of absence. Through photographs, textiles, and sculptural forms, she constructs spaces of ambiguity where memory becomes tactile, and belonging remains a question both personal and universal. Her work is an aperture into in-betweenness, inviting viewers to stand inside the quiet pull of the unsaid.

Together, Gomez and Lesley navigate parallel terrains: memory as malleable, identity as layered and inherited, loss as both wound and offering. Their works form constellations across the gallery — separate yet in conversation, orbiting themes of origin, displacement, connection, and the mythologies we build to hold ourselves together.

In The Moon Knows Your Name, the moon becomes more than a celestial body; it is a keeper of the in-between, a celestial witness to grief, migration, tenderness, and the quiet labor of remembering. It is a reminder that even in darkness, there is presence. Even in distance, there is recognition. Even in longing, there is belonging.

Here, memory is not fixed — it shifts, like moonlight across a landscape. And in that shifting, Gomez and Lesley carve space for the intimate and the expansive, asking us to linger in the soft uncertainty of who we are, where we come from, and who we might become when illuminated by what we carry.

Ariana Gomez (she/her) is a visual artist living in Austin, TX. Centering photography and installation, her practice explores mythmaking in relation to place, reflecting on her parent’s relationship to land and home. Gomez has exhibited both in the US and internationally most recently with her solo show at Flats Gallery in Houston, TX, and group shows with Trespasser Books in Austin, TX, Vermont Center of Photography, Clamp Art Gallery, and with LensCulture at Photo London. Awards include the 2024 Lenscratch Student Award, the Hopper Prize Grant and the MASS MoCa University Fellowship. Gomez holds a BFA in Photography from The Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and is a Diversify Photo and ICOSA member.

Chantal Lesley (she/her) is an Austin-based artist and first-generation American from the Rio Grande Valley, born to Peruvian and German immigrants. Her work explores identity, belonging, and social issues shaped by her multicultural experience. Lesley earned a BFA in Fine Art Photography from Texas State University in 2021 and has exhibited across the U.S., at institutions such as the Houston Center for Photography, Craighead Green Gallery, and Touchstone Gallery. She has participated in residencies such as LATITUDE, Vermont Studio Center, kala, and Château d'Orquevaux.

The Moon Knows Your Name,
Ariana Gomez & Chantal Lesley
Exhibition Dates: December 5, 2025 - January 3, 2026
Artist Reception: Friday, December 5, 7-10 pm, 2025
For the opening we will have full moon tarot readings by Anna Rossel @annita_brujita
Come for the art, stay for the fortune.
East Austin Arts District Third Thursday Artist Talk: December 18th at 6:30pm
*Moderated by Barry Stone
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