we call the moon the people’s wife
A Group Exhibition Presented by Pentimenti x Vox Populi
Friday, January 30, 2026 - Saturday, April 4, 2026 at Pentimenti
Opening Reception: Friday, January 30, 2026 6-8pm
JANUARY 30 – APRIL 4, 2026
Reception & Dialogue: Friday, January 30 | 6:00 – 8:00 PM - Artist’s Dialogue: 6:00 – 6:30 PM
LOCATION | On view at Pentimenti
145 North 2nd Street Philadelphia, PA 19103
www.pentimenti.com
@pentimentigallery
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Pentimenti and Vox Populi are pleased to co-present we call the moon the people’s wife, a collaborative project led by Blanche Brown, featuring Aitor Lajarin-Encina in collaboration with Vox Populi members Aaron Terry, catia colagioia, China Rain, Ella Konefal, Eva Wu, Eve Greensweig, Jim Strong, Lane Timothy Speidel, Natalie Hijinx, and Ollie Goss.
Within Lajarin-Encina’s sparse, architecturally driven nighttime scene painting, Vox artists contributed works that function as objects, signs, and propositions—a graphite drawing of a migraine aura, a small hand-painted flag bearing a diagram of self-alienation, a traffic cone. we call the moon the people’s wife considers collective art-making not as consensus or uniformity, but as negotiated collage. Can we share the same world for a while?
Part of Lajarin-Encina’s ongoing Collaborative Paintings series (initiated in 2020), this project invites artists and artist groups to create exhibitions within a painting. For this iteration, Lajarin-Encina worked collaboratively with Vox Populi members to develop an exhibition inside a painting of the empty lot adjacent to Vox Populi’s gallery spaces at 11th and Callowhill. In we call the moon the people’s wife, the lot operates as both subject and structure: a shared landscape shaped as much by what happens there as by what doesn’t.
Within Lajarin-Encina’s sparse, architecturally driven nighttime scene, Vox artists contributed works that function as objects, signs, and propositions—a graphite drawing of a migraine aura, a small hand-painted flag bearing a diagram of self-alienation, a traffic cone. Each element retains its own aesthetic logic while existing in relation to the others, bound together within a single pictorial field.
we call the moon the people’s wife considers collective art-making not as consensus or uniformity, but as negotiated collage. Can we inhabit the same world for a while? The project asks what it means to share space, authorship, and attention, and what remains inevitably unresolved and interrupted when people work together.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Aitor Lajarin-Encina
Aitor Lajarin-Encina is an artist, educator, and organizer born in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Basque Country, Spain, in 1977, the year of punk. He received his BFA in painting from the University of Basque Country, Bilbao, and his MFA in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego. Aitor is an interdisciplinary artist whose principal expertise is painting and drawing. Some of his creative work and research interests include painting and drawing contemporary critical issues, different modes of critique of modernity, and various speculative intersections of contemporary art practice and public culture. He has recently exhibited with Heritage Square Museum (Los Angeles), Universidad de las Americas (Puebla, MX), Artnueve Gallery (Spain), and Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX). He has been involved in various artist-run curatorial initiatives since 2015, and has taught painting, drawing, and interdisciplinary studio classes at UC San Diego and UDLAP in Puebla, MX. He is currently based in Fort Collins, CO, where he is an Assistant Professor of Painting at Colorado State University, where he teaches painting, drawing, and socially engaged art practice courses.
Aaron Terry
Aaron Terry grew up as a kid with no electricity or running water in the woods of Upstate New York until fate brought his family to Philadelphia, where he grew into the city as a young adult. His biggest fear as a child was nuclear war or a bear attack. Terry’s work has been shown in Argentina, Chile, Moscow, Berlin, Philadelphia, Portland, Oregon and the San Francisco Bay Area. Terry has lived most of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area, but recently returned to Philadelphia. He works in traditional and non-traditional printmaking, sculpture and sound pieces. Terry is a DJ and musician in the band Gold Wood and he organizes art and music related events throughout Latin America aimed at fostering a more creative dialogue between artists and musicians (and the people that enjoy visual and sonic arts). Terry holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at the University of Delaware.
catia colagioia
catia colagioia (b. 2001) is an artist, researcher & musician born and raised and based in South Philadelphia, with a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Fine Art. She has shown work across Philadelphia and has been recognized for her interdisciplinary, community-facing work. She is currently an artist member of Vox Populi Gallery.
Her process is rooted in her traversal of Philadelphia, in her collection and resurrection of found objects and memories, often likening organic forms in the cityscape to our bodies: both held tenuously, and subject to the encircling pressures of modern systems. She is set on carrying the objects, (and by proxy, ourselves) past their (our) status as surplus matter, and into a new territory, where their (our) properties and histories empower them (us) to communicate in service of something larger.
China Rain
China Rain is a writer and multidisciplinary artist trying to synthesize a map of unreality and reality. Pulling from psychology textbooks, gameshow rhetoric, grief ritual, and rush hour traffic, their work explores grief, alienation, and humor.
Ella Konefal
Ella Konefal (she/her) is an artist across forms whose work engages time, collectivism, and will/power through ongoing conversations with the physical world.
Eva Wu
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 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. Eva 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.
Eve Greensweig
Evan / Eve Greensweig is a self taught abstract Painter from the Philadelphia area working primarily with oil and wax on wood or canvas. Their practice revolves around the murky mire that is spiritual abstraction, their relationship with Judaism, and fire.
Jim Strong
Jim Strong is an Artist and Curator based in the outskirts of Philadelphia, PA who employs homespun low-tech processes to create personal languages in Painting, Musical Instrument Invention, Anthropomorphic furniture, Poetry, and DIY Publishing – Often merging many of these elements into works and environments, which are both devotional and absurd. He operates the experimental music label, COR ARDENS and under constantly shifting pretexts has organized events and workshops in abandoned graveyards, school auditoriums and exhibition spaces throughout the Philadelphia area. His work is committed to a discreet world-building in which the viewer may also observe inside jokes and desperate allusions to the artist’s faith, beliefs, confusions and friendships. One may also catch brief references to his on-going amateur-research into the history of religious antinomianism, Vitalist currents in the tradition of William Blake and Meister Eckhart, American Utopian experiments, and the pop-mysticism of UFO and other anomalous phenomena.
He has created site-specific work for the National Liberty Museum, The Philadelphia Flower Show and Rhizome DC and exhibited at Vox Populi Gallery, Space 1026 (Phila, PA), Platform Project Space (New York, NY), The Center for New Music (San Francisco, CA) and Hudson House (Hudson, NY). His video work has been screened at RAUMERWEITERUNGSHALLE (Berlin-Friedrichshain), CPH:DOX (Copenhagen, DK), Unrequited Leisure (Knoxville, TN) and Icebox Projects (Phila, PA).
Lane Timothy Speidel
Lane Timothy Speidel is an artist living in Philadelphia with their partner and cat. They permit their art, curatorial, and writing practices to express indiscriminately. Drawing, painting, poetry, sculpture, stories, plays, clothing, quilts, and music, often come together as installation. Their journey is an infinitely collapsing spiral staircase and their output is a patchwork of found materials and trash. They equally enjoy the dark and the brilliant light of their friends. Queer as in oddity and asking questions and straying. Trans as in changing form and moving towards opposite. Disabled as in looking for ways to do things that feel good. Jewish as in finding comfort within both belief and doubt. They are interested in beauty, finding it in the trash, in mistakes, and on the ground. They find themselves often captured in between awe, grief, silliness, and confusion.
They are firmly placed in the city of Philadelphia having a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art, and being an artist member of Vox Populi Gallery. They received the 2024 Leeway Transformation Award. Their art has been exhibited at Vox Populi Gallery, Transformer Gallery, the National Liberty Museum, Space 1026, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Unrequited Leisure, and Flux Factory. Their writing has been published in Wicked Gay Ways, Title Mag, Artblog, Ginger Zine, and Stone Fruit. They have also published zines of poetry, a book of short stories, and a catalog through body joke press. They have curated many live performance events and a show of trans abstraction called Transcendent Mess. Their music projects include the bands Saggy and MENERGY which celebrate friendship and improvisation.
Natalie Hijinx
Natalie Hijinx (aka Natalie Hutchings) is a Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary artist, futurist, and polymath. Her practice humps the lines between traditional and parodic sculpture, immersive installation, video, performance, interactive human-engagement debacles, and public acts of disobedience. Her current works are the poorly-mannered love children spawned from an orgy of speculative futurism, A Very Dystopian Anthropocene Epoch, space!, fake food, retro-futurism, confidence tricks, scientific experimentation, subversion, activist pranks, the absurd, and the awkward.
Natalie has an MFA from the University of Delaware in Studio Art and a BFA from Towson University in Interdisciplinary Object Design: a hybrid of digital fabrication, craft, and sculpture. As a graduate student, she was a winner of the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Awards from The International Sculpture Center, published in Sculpture Magazine, and was a 2018 Fellow of the Delaware Public Humanities Institute (DelPHI) for her research in Material Culture Studies. She has shown work in Berlin, Germany; Dallas, TX; Portland, OR; Baltimore, MD; Wilmington, DE; and Philadelphia, PA.
Ollie Goss
Ollie Goss is an artist, puppeteer, and performance-maker whose work blends sculptural installations, animated objects, re-tooled electronics and live performance. They attempt to achieve this through a prefigurative politic, hoping to align the means and the ends within their work. In 2016, they received the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship which took them to seven countries to research puppetry and collaborative performance making. Their work has been shown in places like Icebox Project Space, Temple Contemporary, the Wassaic Project, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Dixon Place, and La Mama. They regularly hold performance events throughout Philadelphia and in collaboration with Hannah Tardie annually curate work for the exhibition portion of Electronics Faire.
Ollie holds an MFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and Architecture where they currently teach.
