A Memory Penumbra
Soleil Summer & Yianni Kourmadas
Curated by Eva Wu
Opening Reception: Friday, January 9, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, January 9th | 6pm
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Imagine having a reoccurring dream of crossing a specific bridge near your family home, only to find out it never existed. The mis-remembered, often-repeated dream bridge may represent the endless sequence of passages from one form to the next. Forging a deliberate connection between the conscious and unconscious, it makes way for the space where transformation takes hold. For this exhibition, Philadelphia artists Yianni Kourmadas and Soleil Summer present two bodies of work born from the improvisational, automatic, semi-subconscious drive to create.
Yianni’s mechanical sound sculptures are made with meticulous hand-crafted detail down to the minuscule custom screws, washers, and ratchet wheels from reclaimed discarded construction materials. “I design and build machines that can never be used to cause harm, wage war or do work to create profit.” Mirroring the movement of Yianni’s haunted characters are the bold organic lines of Soleil’s abstract works on paper and canvas. Soleil’s work explores themes of memory (or lack thereof), isolation, time, architecture, and the natural world through a profoundly beautiful and distinct approach to mark-making. Sensational, striking, and deeply feeling, these works inspire and mystify.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Yianni Kourmadas fabricates machines from the trash and excess of the industrialized world. They give voice to the mystery and spirit in the materials liberated from the waste stream. Their machines are free to sing and move with curiosity, to express their beauty and eroticism without the expectation of doing work or harming others. Using scraps of mahogany and oak, brass and copper, old pipes and obsolete antennae, Yianni models revolution and emancipation from racial capitalism and war by creating machines that cannot be harnessed for profit or violence. Drawing on their skills as a working tradesperson and from their interest in jewelry-making, coppersmithing, manual machining, horology, and carpentry, they hand-make most of the components used in each piece, from brackets, gears and washers to decorative elements. (@yianni.kourmadas)
Soleil Summer is a Philadelphia, PA based artist working primarily with ink and graphite. (@7.13705)
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Eva Wu is an interdisciplinary artist working across animation, installation, social practice, and new media. An optimistic visionary and an avid dreamer, Eva’s work conjures portals to utopias rich with seduction, delight, and color. Her work disrupts traditions in form and content, blurs the boundaries between public and private, and generates bold remedies of what could be.
Eva is from Northern New Mexico and has lived in Philadelphia for over a decade. She has been awarded fellowships from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, Leeway Foundation, Elsewhere Museum, and Center For Emerging Visual Artists. Her work has been exhibited at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Oakland Museum of California, Brown University Granoff Center for the Arts, Galleries at Moore College, SOMArts, and Schwules Museum.
Eva is co-founder of Hot Bits Film Fest, with whom she collaborates to produce sex-positive art and film experiences centering QTIBIPoC self determined desire, joy, and pleasure.
