The Sky Borrowed Our Canvas

NAVA Contemporary is pleased to present The Sky Borrowed Our Canvas, a group exhibition that examines how scale changes everything. Featuring the work of SoHyun Bae, Tracie Cheng, Koen Delaere, Daniel Diaz-Tai, Amelie Ducommun, Christine Flynn, Anthony Lamb, Chase Langford, Fernando Mastrangelo, Erin Treacy and Bas van den Hurk, the show brings together a selection of monumental works—each exceeding seventy inches—that invite viewers into an expanded field of vision. At this scale, painting and photography transcend the intimate encounter, unfolding instead as environments that surround, immerse, and reorient the body in space.

The exhibition's title evokes the boundless expanse of the sky as a surface without edges, a shifting plane of light, atmosphere, and imagination. Like the sky itself, these works resist containment. Their scale allows gesture, color, texture, and image to breathe, stretching across the wall with a sense of openness and possibility. Standing before them, the viewer becomes acutely aware of their own physical presence, experiencing art not only as an image but as a spatial encounter.

Across diverse practices and materials, the artists in The Sky Borrowed Our Canvas embrace largeness as both a formal and conceptual gesture. In some works, scale amplifies private moments of observation; in others, it heightens abstraction, movement, and emotional intensity. What unites them is a shared ambition: to create works that meet the viewer eye-to-eye, or even horizon-to-horizon.

In a time when so much of our visual world is compressed into handheld screens, these expansive works reclaim the wall as a site of encounter. They allow our gaze to wander. The canvas becomes a sky of its own, an open space where perception can stretch beyond its usual limits.

SoHyun Bae layers rice paper and pure pigment to create expressive canvases. Inspired by the Jewish Mystical understanding of why we have suffering in this universe, Bae's Nature of Water series examines the fragility of life and the strength in vulnerability through depicting shards found in our natural world.

Tracie Cheng's work portrays otherworldly organic forms inspired by the multilayered dimensions of topographical maps. Woven into the very essence of each work is the idea that there is always more than meets the eye. Her most recent body of work references the slow and steady shift from night to day alongside the complexities of parenthood, filled with exhaustion and cracks of brilliance.

Koen Delaere's artistic approach is fast-paced, collaborative, and driven by chance, often resulting in hundreds of paintings a year, many of which he reworks or uses as tools for new pieces. His technique involves layering water-based and turpentine-based paints, creating dynamic textures and swirling colors due to their differing drying times. This method reflects his ongoing interest in the materiality and unpredictability of art-making.

Daniel Diaz-Tai's exuberant canvases are borne of his multicultural heritage being raised between Venezuela, China and the US. Diaz-Tai uses graphite, sumi ink, oil and charcoal to bring to life richly textured pieces. His aesthetic bridges disciplines across graphic design and fine art, melding the use of calligraphy with painting to create a decidedly distinctive visual style.

Amelie Ducommun's deeply textured and layered paintings address the behaviors and visual qualities of marine environments. The core of her practice seeks to uncover the rhythms, echoes and hums of different ecologies and translate them into a visual experience.

Christine Flynn is known for her landscape photography imbued with abstract elements, creating works of art that exist in between traditional photographs and mixed media. Flynn composes images that hinge on nostalgia to ground the viewer, presenting photographs that embody the memory of a place, rather than a straight-forward depiction.

Chase Langford has developed a distinctive visual language that is grounded in the natural and built environment while embarking into uncharted territory. His paintings recall maps and aerial photography of sea coasts, mountains, farmland and cities.

Fernando Mastrangelo's striking sculptures occupy a fluid space at the convergence of art and design. The artist uses materials common to quotidian life but entirely atypical of fine art, including salt, coffee, sand, glass and cement. He then combines the raw materials with resin, and other industrial components, to create deeply textured and evocative works.

Erin Treacy's work features fantastical, amorphous figures that take inspiration from the natural world. Her fluid linework and vibrant color palette evoke flowers, fallen tree boughs, insects, and underwater crustacean.

Bas Van Den Hurk's work unites a multitude of modernist languages, styles and techniques. His large scale silkscreens combine abstract expressionist gestures in oil paint with pop-like patterns, printed on silk. Hazy and diffuse, they rarely have a fixed center, instead appearing as allover fields of subtly expressed forms and tones.