Joy Machine is pleased to present Feel Free, a group exhibition featuring new works by Rachel Hayden, Paulina Ho, Hanna Lee Joshi, and Jeremy Miranda. The opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. on May 15, 2026.
Attempting to create order and find clarity amid chaos is human instinct. Since time immemorial, we’ve endeavored to make sense of a world in which reason and certainty are never assured. Change, as the saying goes, is the only constant, which means notions of autonomy or control are a subjective fantasy rather than a concrete reality. In Feel Free, we witness four artists grappling with this enduring paradox. Each surrenders to the inevitability of change and focuses on the small instances of understanding that, for a brief moment, allow us to believe we’re closer to figuring it out.
Hayden is known for her uncanny compositions that infuse flowers, plants, and insects with human emotion, often those that are unsightly or difficult to voice. She’s described her work as a way “to take control” amid situations that are so often out of our hands. For this exhibition, Hayden subsumes fruit and figures with the checkerboard pattern of a picnic blanket, utilizing color to make one indistinguishable from the other. As ants crawl along a character’s face in the shape of perfectly arched brows, the artist gestures toward the brief intervals when disparate components align, creating an uncanny harmony.
Blending gouache and colored pencil into textured gradients, Joshi similarly reflects inarticulable experiences through her signature nude figures. In the bold “Held like a flower,” the artist presents an anonymous woman with a mass of black hair as she peers down at a single flower. The thin vines mimic the gestural qualities of her fingers, suggesting an affinity between the two.
Typically working in controlled acrylic on canvas, Ho shifts to textiles sourced from a thrift shop, rendering soft landscapes with Japanese indigo. This new direction emerged from an artist residency in Joseph, Oregon, following a trip to Andalusia, where she found inspiration in the cream-and-blue Moorish architecture. Frayed edges and bold gradients capture both movement and evolution, invoking a sense of the undone and the cyclical processes that often pattern our lives.
Miranda, too, captures singular moments of impermanence. There’s a stock pot atop a roaring flame, a bundle of plump white asparagus bound by bands, and an antique ceramic sink unadorned by backsplash or countertop. To create his painterly compositions, Miranda incorporates a wet-sanding process that reveals how “the painting has lived.” Acknowledging that his own desires are not the sole factors in an artwork’s creation, he surrenders to the slippery qualities of memory and paint itself.
Feel Free is on view from May 15 to June 27, 2026. RSVP.
