C U R R E N T E X H I B I T I O N
What We See, What We Keep
Leslie Brack · Iris de la Torre · Nicole Hayden · Jillian Shea
October 6 – November 7, 2026
Reception and Artists Talk: Friday, October 9, 2026, 5–7 PM
EUQINOM Gallery is pleased to present What We See, What We Keep, a group exhibition featuring new and recent work by Leslie Brack, Iris de la Torre, Nicole Hayden, and Jillian Shea. Bringing together four artists with distinct approaches to painting and sculpture, the exhibition explores the ways artists transform observation, memory, place, and everyday experience into images and objects.
From fleeting encounters with the natural world to intimate domestic moments and imagined landscapes, the artists in What We See, What We Keep share an interest in the emotional and psychological possibilities of representation. Their works move between the observed and the invented, the personal and the collective, and the familiar and the strange.
Leslie Brack
Leslie Brack’s paintings of icebergs take inspiration from the small oil sketches made by American landscape painter Frederic Church during his 1859 journey to Newfoundland. Church’s sketches were studies for his monumental paintings of icebergs, capturing fleeting observations of ice formations that would soon disappear.
Brack initially approached these paintings as technical exercises while returning to oil painting after working primarily in watercolor. She became interested in translating the translucency, layering, and luminosity of watercolor into oil through glazes and delicate layers of paint. While referencing Church’s original studies, Brack’s paintings are larger and slower to make, transforming his quick observations into contemplative contemporary paintings.
The resulting works function both as tributes to Church’s observations and as meditations on the transient nature of the landscape itself. The iceberg becomes a subject that is simultaneously physical and ephemeral—something witnessed, recorded, and ultimately lost.
Brack’s recent solo exhibitions include presentations at Cathouse Proper in Brooklyn, Ithaca College, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell. She has received support from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, Ucross Foundation, and Millay Arts, among others. Brack teaches painting and drawing at Cornell University and lives in Ithaca, New York.
Iris de la Torre
Iris de la Torre’s paintings explore the emotional experience of place and the shifting boundary between memory and imagination. Working intuitively from memory rather than photographic reference, de la Torre creates vibrant, dreamlike environments in which color, gesture, and pattern take precedence over conventional spatial representation.
Bright hues and expressive marks—made with house paint, acrylic, gouache, and oil pastel—produce paintings that feel exuberant, playful, and emotionally charged. Her maximalist compositions embrace improvisation, allowing the landscape to become a space of psychic possibility.
De la Torre is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in painting and illustration. She studied art at Whitman College and has been making and showing work in the Bay Area since 2011. Her work seeks to reconnect with joy and wonder during periods of loss and uncertainty. She lives and works in El Cerrito, California.
Nicole Hayden
Nicole Hayden’s sculptural ceramic skulls bring together humor, ornament, and the macabre. Richly decorated and often metallic in appearance, the skulls transform a familiar symbol of mortality into something theatrical, playful, and visually seductive.
Hayden’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, sculpture, murals, and decorative arts. Drawing from vintage imagery, figurative painting, popular culture, and pattern, she creates vibrant works that explore nostalgia, humor, and the relationship between ornament and the figure. Her ceramic sculptures extend these interests into three dimensions, where surface, decoration, and the physical presence of the object become central to the work.
Hayden received her BFA from the University of Kansas in 2001 and her MFA from California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in 2003. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Bay Area, including at Southern Exposure, The Lab, Hang Art, Adler & Co., 111 Minna Gallery, and Modern Eden Gallery. Her public art practice includes large-scale murals throughout San Francisco, including a 2021 mural featuring poet Amanda Gorman. Hayden lives and works in San Francisco.
Jillian Shea
Jillian Shea’s paintings begin with photographs pulled directly from her camera roll. Treating the smartphone archive as both sketchbook and memory box, Shea transforms ordinary snapshots into intimate paintings that consider how personal memories are recorded, preserved, and revisited.
Her recent paintings focus particularly on domestic life and the emotional landscape of home. Cats, interiors, friends, nightlife, and other seemingly ordinary moments become occasions for looking closely at light, atmosphere, and feeling. Working wet-on-wet, Shea maintains soft edges and luminous passages that allow the photographic source to become something more atmospheric and subjective.
For Shea, painting offers a way to slow down time: to return to a moment and consider not only what happened, but what it felt like to be there. Rooted in photography and the snapshot as a form of contemporary documentation, her paintings explore the increasingly intimate relationship between the camera roll and contemporary memory.
Shea received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from California College of the Arts in 2021, after studying at the Glasgow School of Art. She has exhibited throughout the Bay Area at galleries and institutions including KARL, Berggruen Gallery, Good Mother Studio, Berkeley Art Center, and Southern Exposure. Shea lives and works in Berkeley, California.