Morgann Trumbull Projects is proud to announce our newest exhibition, Ceremony, a pop-up presentation featuring work by Windy Chien, Christopher Robin Duncan, Mark Fox, Nathan Lynch, Joshua Moreno, and Rachelle Reichert. The exhibition will be on view from October 18 to November 22, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, October 18 from 3:00 to 6:00pm.
Ceremony explores the act of artistic creation as a deeply contemplative and ritual based process. Ritual making here emerges through actions or processes performed consistently over time. These actions—cyclical, controlled, intimate—imbue a work with symbolic or personal meaning. The ceremonial quality of the works lies not only in their processes but also in their quiet exposure of certain interpretations or truths.
Ritual making, by definition, relies on repetition and duration over time. For some artists, their practice becomes a structure for engaging with time deliberately, and they leverage time as a material in its own right—visible in their work as wear, decay, or change. For others, time manifests through the accumulation of marks and materials that act as physical records of time spent. The works in the exhibition do not demand quick comprehension; instead, they reward patience, mirroring the slow, meditative processes that brought them into being.
The respective media each artist employs is varied and unique, including salt, sunlight, fabric, paper, rope, wood, and graphite pencil. The exhibition features a limited color palette and instead shifts the viewer’s attention to the fundamentals of visual perception—light, shadow, form, and pattern. Light and shadow, in particular, are visited repeatedly both as technical tools for art creation and as powerful thematic elements.
Windy Chien is a connoisseur of knots. Chien is best known for The Year of Knots (2016), a monumental knot installation for which the artist learned a new knot every day for a year. The Year of Knots has since served as a visual lexicon for Chien, whose current bodies of work explore a single knot produced repeatedly to create visually striking patterns that maximize the aesthetic potential of this typically vernacular form. The artist often produces multiple works concurrently over time until they reach a natural state of completion. Repetition, control, and the ultimate exploration of a single subject are at the core of Chien’s artistic practice.
Christopher Robin Duncan approaches light and time as both concept and artistic medium. Sheets of dark fabric are left exposed outdoors, allowing a distinct fingerprint—created by light, weather, and chance—to emerge uninterrupted over six or twelve month increments. The end result beautifully captures the ephemeral elements of light, time, and environment in physical form. For example, in his 12 Symbols series, Duncan began work on the solstice and harvested the fabric exactly twelve months later. The completed works manifest a tension between the impacts of nature and the manipulations made by the artist, including cutting, sewing, or painting.
Paper is the foundation of Mark Fox’s artistic practice. He perpetually explores and tests its capabilities as a medium, approaching it as both a two dimensional surface on which to draw or paint and as the scaffolding for constructing three dimensional objects. Fox works on many paintings—composed of oil paint on prepared paper on canvas—simultaneously in his studio, slowly molding each over time in a process that is both additive (layering) and subtractive (tearing). Fox’s grayscale series, produced in 2021, represents a departure from his usually vibrant color palette. The monochromatic color scheme represents a visual exploration of shadows, both literal and figurative, born out of the mental and emotional weight exacted by the COVID pandemic.
Nathan Lynch employs absurdity, humor, and irony to reflect on political conflict, environmental upheaval, and psychological distortion. His abstract ceramic sculptures share qualities with surrealist traditions—their rounded, organic shapes feel viscerally familiar and yet ambiguous, contributing to a feeling of uncanniness. By being surprising or slightly imperfect, his characteristically blobby, primordial forms create an opening for the viewer to tap into their instinctive response. The exhibition also features Lynch’s wood sculptures, which are considered by the artist to be the complementary “shadows” of his ceramics—not just in form, but in essence. While the ceramics are tactile and dense, the wooden pieces feel like their ghostly counterparts, echoes of the originals. In this way, Lynch plays with the concept of shadow as both visual trace and psychological absence.
The work of Joshua Moreno exists at the intersection between the natural and the built environment. Fleeting shadows cast by natural light as it passes through a window or curves around an object are carefully traced by Moreno in graphite pencil over days, weeks, or even months onto site specific surfaces. This process is a type of ritual that requires the artist to revisit the same shadows, the same surface, repeatedly and precisely. Through this repetition of gestures, the artist produces exquisite patterns that are tantalizingly abstract but still subtly hint at the shadows of the objects that led to their creation
Rachelle Reichert employs salt as a vehicle for investigating the impact of human industrial activity on the natural world and the delicate balance that exists between the two. Salt is an apt medium as a pillar of nature that connects us to geologic history, but also as the topic of a long legacy of resource extraction. Salt is a major industry in the Bay Area, with over 500,000 tons of salt extracted and processed each year from the San Francisco Bay. Reichert personally harvests the salt for her works from the shorelines of the Bay calling attention to the larger impact of urban development and industrialization on the natural landscape. Her work also confronts themes of decay and environmental loss. A work in the exhibition, for example, features salt harvested during red tides, which are toxic algae blooms caused by warming water temperatures. Another incorporates the ashes of redwoods burned in California wildfires. Reichert also includes tiny pieces of plastic in what appear at first glance to be otherwise uninterrupted fields of natural salt. Reinforcing the influence of human activity on nature and the inevitability of decay, Reichert also constructs her salt works in frames of steel—a material that embodies industrialization and that, fittingly, corrodes over time. Reichert’s salt works function as poetic forms of temporal recording, capturing the impermanence of the landscape, shaped by both human and natural forces.
Ceremony will be on view at 445 S First Street, San José, CA 95113 from October 18 to November 22, 2025. The gallery will be open on Fridays and Saturdays from 12:00 to 5:00pm, and by appointment. For inquiries, please email info@morganntrumbull.com or call 650-257-0485.
Tagged: Exhibition