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hollow thread, solid ground

21 June - 02 August 2025

Opening Reception:
Saturday, June 21, 6-9pm


Curated by Amy Shindo and Todd Stong


FJORD is pleased to present hollow thread, solid ground, an exhibition of sculpture, drawing, weaving, and print that interrogates questions of language, image, and truth. Artists Kiani Kodama, Paolo Mentasti, Abbey Muza, Ellie Richards, Hester Stinnett, and Katie Wynne constellate a set of proposals for accessing something more real than the network of signs we often rely upon to build our understanding of shared reality. In-so-doing, they reorient us toward embodiment, empathy, and wonder.


From the moment we first externalized our thoughts, carved in stone or spoken in air, we have lived in a mediated reality. With language, we came to construct our understanding of the world not based solely on direct lived experiences, but also the experiences of others, which we chose to believe as truth. Language was a tool of faith; it required that we saw truth in it, and that we believed in one another. Maybe, for some time, we did.

But, inevitably, one direct experience of the world refutes another: one man is bitten by a snake, while another finds one playing dead. Which behavior became definitional? Of course, the bite; and then all snakes were to be feared. Then, too, competing interests and beliefs between groups incentivized language for propaganda, deception, ruse, and rumor. Our signs shifted from vehicles of truth to a network of contradiction.

Today, truthlessness accelerates.

Jean Baudrillard expounded on the phenomenon of mediated reality in three seminal essays compiled under the final title The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in which he argued that the media’s images and stories of the 1991 invasion of Iraq by a US-led coalition were so sanitized that the conflict may as well have not happened in the Western imagination. A premium was placed on displays of advanced military technology, with no follow-up on the ground. Horrific deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians were reduced to statistics. For Baudrillard, the event was the first total hyperreality, a state where the gap between what actually happens and what we imagine to happen is so wide that there is no bridging it. We live in another, separate reality.

But what of today, when unvarnished images of war do break through? Civilian videos out of Ukraine and Gaza are anything but sanitized. And still, we seem not to accept the weight of their reality – if we did, surely we would have stopped these conflicts by now? Again, Baudrilliard describes the phenomenon in another text, The Transparency of Evil – that an excess of information in fact collapses meaning. A flood of war footage in algorithmic feeds doesn’t bring clarity; it turns atrocities into fleeting content alongside memes and fitness accounts. Social media blurs the lines between propaganda, activism, and brain rot, creating a contextless stream where urgency is constant but little resonates. Source credibility becomes irrelevant and truth is indistinguishable from noise.


The artists in hollow thread, solid ground interrogate the ways in which humans meet experience through language, tools, time, and the body, often as an interrelated web of phenomena. They present antidotes to the deficiencies of meaning-making and truth in modern times, engaging with solutions that anchor to the interior body and outward into the world of shared spirit. They engage with senses of time and memory far outside the constant present-tense of the infinite scroll, shifting back generations or leaping deep into the future, all to re-find themselves and us, as we are.

This exhibition does not propose these artworks in and of themselves as a solution to the problems of hyperreality. But it hopes to collect a group of artists who have, in their small ways, used art to undo its structure.


For an extended press release, click here.
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