Opening Reception for
ORIGINS
by
Jonathan Peña Tabares
Chris Chou
Clyde D’Mello
Atlantic Works Gallery is pleased to present ORIGINS, a group exhibition showcasing the newest members of our gallery: Jonathan Peña Tabares, Chris Chou, and Clyde D’Mello. Through painting, collage, and experimental mark-making, the exhibition explores identity, migration, memory, and the emotional landscapes we carry with us as we move through the world.
While each artist brings a distinct visual language and lived experience, ORIGINS unites their practices through a shared inquiry into belonging and transition. Rather than pointing to a single place or fixed beginning, the exhibition reflects on origins as layered, evolving, and deeply persona-shaped by culture, movement, faith, and resilience.
Jonathan Peña Tabares, a Colombian American artist based in East Boston, approaches art as a primary language—one that communicates through color, form, and emotion rather than explanation. His work in the exhibition explores the inner landscapes formed through cultural identity, transition, and growth. Through experimentation with color and mixed media, Peña Tabares creates spaces of vulnerability and connection, inviting viewers into moments of shared emotional truth.
Chris Chou, born in Taipei, Taiwan and based in Boston, brings over two decades of painting practice shaped by her American journey from Honolulu to New York to Boston. A Guggenheim Fellow (2007), Chou builds her paintings through luminous layers of color, each holding memories, relationships, and personal symbols drawn from nature and faith. For Chou, painting is both a discipline and a way of life—one that offers humility, strength, and joy, and invites viewers to experience color as memory, sensation, and comfort.
Clyde D’Mello presents new works from his ongoing Flight Paths series—atmospheric investigations of migration that reject clean, cartographic representation. Using airplane stamps sourced from office supply stores, D’Mello layers impressions that collide, blur, spiral, and fail to arrive. These works do not map literal journeys but instead trace the psychological weight of displacement and movement across borders. “Flight Paths doesn’t map actual routes I’ve traveled, it investigates the atmospheric condition of displacement itself… This is what migration feels like: turbulence, failed movement, uncertain arrival.”
Together, the artists in ORIGINS offer a nuanced meditation on what it means to come from somewhere—and to carry that “somewhere” forward. The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on their own origins not as fixed points, but as ongoing processes shaped by experience, memory, and connection.
The show will run between February 7 – 28, 2026. After the Opening Reception this Saturday 2 – 6 pm (February 7), there will be a Third Thursday reception on February 19, 2025, 6 – 9 pm and a Closing Reception on February 28, 2025, 6 – 8 pm.
