Sabbatikal is pleased to present Vessel, a group exhibition curated by Sacha H. Cohen and opening at The KINN in Venice, California, on Friday, October 9, 2026. The exhibition remains on view through January 16, 2027.

Before the weapon, there may have been the vessel.

Something made not to pierce, conquer, or divide, but to gather, hold, and carry. In her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin observes that mammoth hunters may command the cave wall and the cultural imagination, while much of human survival depended on gathering. She turns from the heroic tool that projects force outward to the container that brings what has been gathered home: a bag, a basket, a box, a bottle, a belly, a house.

For Le Guin, this shift also proposes another form for storytelling. A story need not travel like a spear toward a single victory or conclusion. It can behave like a carrier, holding fragments, people, gestures, contradictions, losses, and transformations in a particular relation. Its meaning lies not only in resolution, but in what it gathers and keeps in motion.

The body is such a vessel. So is a painting.

Vessel takes the canvas in this spirit: as a surface that receives experience and carries it forward. Each work becomes a form of testimony. Some tell their stories through a recognizable figure or inherited image; others through pressure, repetition, color, rupture, rhythm, or trace. Abstraction does not remove the body from the story. It changes where the body can be found.

Sedona Cohen's The Play, 2025, is a self-portrait, a diary entry, an energy signature from a particular period of time. It gathers elements from across her wider body of work into a single image, including a zoetrope-like passage near its base. The body is present, but not in the way a body is usually expected to be represented. A portrait can be a likeness, but it can also be a trace of how it felt to inhabit a moment.

Amy MacKay similarly treats abstraction as documentation. Her practice translates collective, site-specific experiences through recollection, image, and affect. In Curtains, 2026, veils of oil seem to part and withhold at once, compressing the residue of an experience into a smaller, intimate field. Roberta Gentry's The Visitation, 2024, draws from botany, science fiction, and medieval iconography. Its rising forms feel at once vegetal, architectural, and bodily, proposing mythology as another container through which lived experience becomes legible.

Elsewhere, bodies emerge only to recede. In Orbit the Self I, 2026, Yeonsu Ju approaches painting as a site of encounter shaped by Gijesa, a Korean ancestral ritual. Figures form and dissolve within layered surfaces, held between arrival and disappearance. Tatiana Gorgievski's Driven, 2025, begins without a predetermined image, allowing color and matter to spread before drawing figures from what appears. The painting is not the illustration of an idea, but the record of an encounter with its own surface. Nicolas Mehdi Pour Vahid's The Weeping Bird, 2025, places a solitary figure within a luminous natural world shaped by childhood recollection, literary imagination, and the memory of religious icons. Across these works, the figure is never entirely separate from what surrounds it.

Gesture itself becomes a kind of figure. Jan Vallverdú's The day before, 2025, carries strength and presence through the force of the drawn and painted mark. Jackson Hunt's Aluminum, 2025, builds its image through acrylic, collage, and accumulated fragments. Forms appear alternately as bodies, skins, silhouettes, and interruptions, allowing narrative to surface without fixing it into a single scene. Across Wall of Death, 2023, Genesis, 2026, and Soma Sema, 2026, Higinio Martinez layers, reduces, and returns to marks until natural design, psychedelia, and spiritual imagery begin to coexist. Each surface preserves not only an image, but the sequence of decisions that brought it into being.

For Ben Quinn, imaginative introspection opens toward what lies beyond ordinary perception. Split Star 2, 2025, holds its image between symbol and sensation, using radiating color and a divided form to make an interior state visible. Charles Arnoldi's Venice, 2026, moves between control and release, geometry and gesture, painting and object. Its large surface carries the memory of the physical actions that produced it. Brian Wills is anticipated to join the exhibition during its run. His thread-based paintings transform line into material tension, gathering repeated strands into shifting fields that change with the viewer's position and make perception part of the work's continuing story.

Eric Doeringer's Yayoi Kusama, 2024, complicates this relationship between hand, body, history, and authorship through repetition. By remaking a recognizable visual language, Doeringer turns painting into a record of looking at another artist's gesture and passing it through his own hand. The repeated mark becomes devotional, mechanical, historical, and bodily at once. It is an inherited story retold through labor.

The works in Vessel do not illustrate a single theory of the body, nor do they resolve into one story. They gather different encounters with memory, ritual, material, perception, authorship, and states of mind, then hold them in proximity. Like a journal, a painting collects fragments without demanding that they become a seamless account. Like the earliest images carried across cave walls, it can stand as a testament that something was seen, felt, feared, desired, remembered, or imagined.

The gallery becomes another container. The works enter it with separate histories and remain distinct, but not untouched by one another. Vessel is the body, the canvas, the exhibition, and the story itself: a holder, a recipient, a form through which experience can pass without disappearing completely.