Will Maddoxx, Julie Schenkelberg, and Yena Seo-Yeon Park
Synesthesia
September 10—October 10, 2026

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 10, 6:00—8:00 PM

Synesthesia (noun) – the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.

Equity Gallery is pleased to present Synesthesia, stemming from the practices of three contemporary artists who utilize the canvas and the gallery floor as sites of rigorous phenomenological inquiry. Operating at the intersection of gestural abstraction and monumental assemblage, Yena Seo-Yeon Park, Will Maddoxx, and Julie Schenkelberg interrogate the dialectical friction between isolation and accumulation, stasis and collapse. Their works transcend mere representation, translating raw materiality and fragmented visual data into complex, affectively charged spatial environments.

Yena Seo-Yeon Park’s atmospheric canvases establish the exhibition’s psychological baseline, articulating a state of suspended ontological tension. By juxtaposing indeterminate, blurred silhouettes against dense, impasto abstract marks, Park investigates the spatial politics of omission and the visceral weight of the void. Her compositions trap the figure in an ephemeral matrix of isolation, capturing moments of profound stillness within a destabilizing, entropic field.

This atmospheric friction finds a stark, intellectual counterpoint in the urgent painterly vernacular of Will Maddoxx. Maddoxx’s work investigates the anxieties undergirding contemporary subjectivity, deconstructing themes of identity and self-image in a hyper-mediated landscape. Through aggressive compositional cropping and disruptive, painterly erasures, Maddoxx enacts a formal subversion—juxtaposing mimetic fidelity with sudden, gestural obliterations to mirror the fractured, alienated nature of modern technoculture.

Julie Schenkelberg extends these two-dimensional formal tensions into the architectural envelope of the gallery. Sourcing material from the post-industrial debris of the Rust Belt, Schenkelberg constructs

monumental site-specific installations and high-relief structures that fuse domestic remnants with industrial matter—plaster, resin, and oxidized iron. Her work operates as a physical taxonomy of decay and structural precarity, actively destabilizing the site's gravity and tectonic equilibrium.

Collectively, Park, Maddoxx, and Schenkelberg delineate a topography of structural resilience. The exhibition explores the raw, mechanical operations of systemic rupture and the subsequent, forced integration of form.