Bodies of Becoming: Corydon Cowansage, Camilla Engström, Tahnee Lonsdale, Brie Ruais

Main Projects presents Bodies of Becoming, a group exhibition featuring Corydon Cowansage, Camilla Engström, Tahnee Lonsdale, and Brie Ruais. Working across painting, sculpture, and video, the artists approach becoming as something that gathers slowly, shaped by duration and interior force. Forms emerge through repetition, pressure, and sustained attention. Change is sensed in accumulation — in surfaces that hold time, in gestures that hover before fully resolving.

Each practice constructs a distinct atmosphere. Transformation is not staged as rupture or spectacle, but unfolds through material process, relational presence, and the quiet charge of forms coming into being.

Brie Ruais presents the ceramic wall work Petaling Within, 130lbs (2025) alongside the video Daughter, You Seem Foreign to Me. Ruais begins with a mound of clay equal to her own body weight, kneeling and pressing it outward with sustained force. Breath and exertion register directly on the surface. The clay is later torn, fired, and reassembled with deliberate spacing between fragments. In Petaling Within, the reconfigured mass assumes a botanical logic, suggesting growth shaped through resistance and repetition. The accompanying video lingers on duration and labor. Its title originates from an exchange between Ruais and her mother, who lives with dementia. Held in proximity to the sculpture, the work reflects on fragmentation, memory, and care, allowing transformation to remain ongoing rather than resolved.

Working intuitively from a central color field outward, Tahnee Lonsdale builds layered oil surfaces that oscillate between opacity and fluorescence. Figures surface gradually from luminous grounds, less as fixed bodies than as energetic presences. In Signs of Life, forms gather in stages: a bouquet emerges, a luminous orb concentrates, figures appear and recede. The light feels generated from within, and the repetition of forms suggests that becoming is relational — sustained through presence rather than solitude. 

Camilla Engström’s practice centers on constructing inner landscapes - psychological terrains generated from within rather than observed. In this body of work, created in the early months of motherhood, that inward logic intensifies. During long stretches of sitting in darkness with her newborn, the absence of visible landscape deepened her interior construction. The palette shifts darker, horizons dissolve into atmosphere, and recurring suns and trees function as steady presences within these imagined spaces. In works such as Ember Blossom, the central form unfurls in a fluid, ember-toned arc. The elongated stamen introduce a biological charge, suggesting generative force beneath the painting’s atmospheric surface. The works feel self-contained and inward, shaped by duration and sustained attention.

Corydon Cowansage’s paintings evoke ambiguous anatomical landscapes in which biomorphic forms gather in charged proximity. Sensual shapes repeat and duplicate across the surface, at times pressing against one another, at others barely grazing. Symmetry and accumulation suggest processes of division and proliferation, while tonal contrasts create depth and tension within the field. In Flock (Blue, Turquoise, Maroon) (2025), multiple shaped canvases are assembled into a clustered formation. Individual units align and lean toward one another, generating a sense of collective motion. Becoming here is proliferative and communal, shaped through repetition and adjacency rather than singular transformation.

Together, the works in Bodies of Becoming treat form as something that gathers through contact and duration. Surfaces hold energy. Material records attention. Becoming is sensed not as conclusion, but in the quiet moment when something begins to take shape.