Alisha Sickler Brunelli ● Yeon Jin Kim

Two person exhibition

9th Ave. Gallery, Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University

2014 9th Ave, Seattle, WA 98121

June 3 - July 24 , 2026

Opening reception : June 3, 2026, from 5 pm to 7 pm.

Fact and fiction are often portrayed as rivals for the truth, but it can be argued that we only have access to fiction. “Reality” is only indirectly available through interpretation from our brain and senses. What exists beyond our perceptual range remains a mystery.

Through an intuitive process, Alisha Sickler Brunelli explores and excavates an archeology of the unconscious. Collecting, selecting, and arranging images, she follows meaning as it arises. Significance emerges through complex associations and transforms into narrative, allegory, archetype, thematics. Foundational questions regarding our access to and construction of reality are revealed.

In the “Vessel” series, collages are an immediate and material act, whereas related tromp l’oeil paintings problematize modes of representation, revealing a ‘treachery of images’, blurring the line between signifier and real object. There is a build-up of meaning, while at the same time, an inevitable breakdown that exists in the repetitive acts of reproduction - via paint, print, photo, and pixel, subject to time, space, and hand.

“Experiments in Dimension” is a series that explores our multidimensional lives, and the layers of perception, association, and meaning that we create from our abstract world.

Yeon Jin Kim moves between two vibrant cultures, speaking mostly in English but still dreaming in Korean. Speaking in a foreign language requires constant translation and serves as a reminder that we are always translating everything we experience.

In her “Tales From the Temporal Lobe” she concocts a world of invention, association and change that parallels and reflects the human sphere, both social and psychological. An array of elements engage in charged, but indeterminate relationships. Slippery signifiers reach out to one another, overlap or dissolve. Some are tethered together as others drift or float off.

Occasionally, one puffs up and becomes an object or clarifies into a familiar tea cup or a cloud in a box. Potential meanings are not fixed, but proposed through shifting relations.

This is a world where things seem to assemble themselves and interact within a logic yet to be discovered.

About the Artists

Alisha Sickler Brunelli is a professor of drawing and foundations in the Art & Design Department at Binghamton University, New York. Her work has been exhibited at Gallery G, Hiroshima, Japan; Gallery Ondo, Seoul, Korea; the Brooklyn Art Cluster Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY; the Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY; Spool Contemporary Art Space, Johnson City, NY, among others. Alisha’s research in alternative and expanded visual arts education led to the creation of KAPOW! Art Studio, a community art school that served the Southern Tier Region of Upstate, NY, from 2014 to 2021. She was awarded a teaching artist grant (2022) through NYSCA/NYC Arts in Education Roundtable, Empire Creates.

Yeon Jin Kim's multi-disciplinary practice encompasses animated films, bookworks, drawings, collages, sculpture and Jogakbo (traditional Korean fabric patchworks). She has participated in numerous exhibitions, film festivals and artist residencies both at home and abroad. As an independent curator Kim has organized exhibitions in New York City, Korea and Japan. Her work was featured in the books "50 Contemporary Women Artists", edited by Heather Zises and John Gosslee, and in “Shared Dialogue, Shared Space “ by the Korea Art Forum. Her solo exhibition is scheduled for 2026 at Space Unit Plus in Seoul, Korea. Kim teaches at Binghamton University, SUNY.