There’s nothing wrong with love
June 6 - June 27
Opening Reception on Arts Night Out
Sunny and Jae are both trans/non-binary artists who explore their queer identities through abstraction. As friends and collaborators who use complementary materials to create imagined worlds, they want to discover how their work can be in conversation with each other. Love, in this context, is a celebration of desire and connection, and our muster point in a world on fire.
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Sunny Allis (they/them) is a trans/non-binary multimedia artist. Their artistic works focus on cultivating community and connection through different forms of play and storytelling. Sunny studied directing and design for theater at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and received their MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Integrated Media.
Sunny has developed an alphabet of objects and symbols that translate into a variety of media. They function as building blocks, creating foundations for new languages and worlds. Through queering spaces and objects, they seek to unlock ways that bodies relate to their environments in unexpected ways. Sunny explores how shifts in scale and perception affect our orientation to the world around us, expanding our awareness of the different ways we can move and feel.
Sunny’s paintings, sculptures, immersive environments and animations have been featured in galleries both in solo and group exhibitions. They have created interactive public art installations that take people through imaginary worlds and immersive environments at Occidental College, the City of Santa Monica, and Kidspace Children’s Museum, among other organizations.
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Jae Southerland (they/them) is a working class queer visual artist from North Carolina currently living and working in Montague, Massachusetts. Their creative practice has included painting, zine making, sculpture, textiles/fiber art, immersive installation, photography, video, and graphic design. They recently began working with tulle as their primary medium to create small adornments, sculptural pieces, and site-specific installations.
In 2022, Southerland created their first interactive public work, where we dream–an outdoor installation made with hand-dyed tulle and reclaimed wood, constructed on the beach at Laurel Lake in Erving, Massachusetts. The piece was dedicated to the transgender community and part of the Survivor Art Collective’s annual Queer Trans Beach Day. In May 2023, they held their first solo showing of work, tender fortress, as part of an ARC 2023 residency at A.P.E. Ltd Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts. Southerland returned to A.P.E. in 2025 to create a large-scale experiential installation for Registry of Grief and Delight, an exhibition created in collaboration with the gallery’s co-directors.