Via Boley: shapeshifting

Via Boley opens her first solo exhibition, shapeshifting, at Unchained.Art Contemporary Gallery on Thursday, September 10. It's a new body of work from the Austin painter, and the opening reception runs from 5 PM to 8 PM that evening. The show stays up through November 7, so you've got plenty of time to catch it if you can't make the opening.

Boley's process here is a bit of a construction project: she works in cut and sanded metal, ink glazes, and thin layers of acrylic, building each piece toward a point where something has to give and something new takes its place. A lot of the work sits on reflective metallic surfaces that act as mirrors, but the reflection is broken apart—Cubist-inspired forms collide and warp across the surface, giving you a fractured image instead of a whole one.

That tension is exactly what the show is about. Boley describes it as a look at the many states a self can hold at once. "I have been thinking a lot about gaining strength through tension," she says. "To experience tension is to change."

Rather than resolving that instability, the paintings hold onto it. You'll see soft edges alongside sharp protective spikes, and dark passages sharing the same piece with bright ones. The title shapeshifting comes from that refusal to settle into one version, one image, or one fixed self. It's less about arriving at a final form and more about the state of being in between.

Unchained.Art Contemporary Gallery is at 311 West 7th Street, Suite 307, in downtown Austin. Admission is free, and the show runs from September 10 through November 7.