The Moon Knows Your Name

ICOSA, Austin, TX

December 5 - January 3, 2025

The Moon Knows Your Name brings together the work of Ariana Gomez and Chantal Lesley, two artists whose practices explore memory, myth, and the fragile boundaries between reality and the imagined. Rooted in photography and expanded through textiles, sculpture, installation, and film, both artists create visual languages that hold what slips between generations, across geographies, and through the quiet terrain of grief, longing, and becoming.‍

In this exhibition, the moon serves as witness, guide, and mirror — a patient keeper of histories too vast or tender to speak aloud. For Gomez and Lesley, the moon does not simply illuminate; it remembers. It pulls at the ocean of the subconscious, surfaces what refuses to disappear, and casts a light that binds past and future, the living and the remembered, the rooted and the untethered.

Gomez’s practice excavates lineage, grief, and imagined futures through a cinematic and ritualistic lens. Working from personal loss and ancestral migration, she weaves myth into family history, collapsing time to create an evolving archive of lives lived, interrupted, and reimagined. Her installations and moving images inhabit the liminal hour — that twilight when the veil between worlds thins, when longing becomes presence and absence becomes form. By re-locating loved ones within shifting landscapes, she rebuilds place and identity through tenderness, speculation, and devotion.

Lesley’s work dwells in the liminal — the thresholds between cultures, identities, and internal worlds shaped by migration and collective memory. Raised between borders, she gathers fragments of the intangible: inherited stories, fleeting dreams, and the subtle echoes of absence. Through photographs, textiles, and sculptural forms, she constructs spaces of ambiguity where memory becomes tactile, and belonging remains a question both personal and universal. Her work is an aperture into in-betweenness, inviting viewers to stand inside the quiet pull of the unsaid.

Together, Gomez and Lesley navigate parallel terrains: memory as malleable, identity as layered and inherited, loss as both wound and offering. Their works form constellations across the gallery — separate yet in conversation, orbiting themes of origin, displacement, connection, and the mythologies we build to hold ourselves together.

In The Moon Knows Your Name, the moon becomes more than a celestial body; it is a keeper of the in-between, a celestial witness to grief, migration, tenderness, and the quiet labor of remembering. It is a reminder that even in darkness, there is presence. Even in distance, there is recognition. Even in longing, there is belonging.

Here, memory is not fixed — it shifts, like moonlight across a landscape. And in that shifting, Gomez and Lesley carve space for the intimate and the expansive, asking us to linger in the soft uncertainty of who we are, where we come from, and who we might become when illuminated by what we carry

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Events‍
Artist Talk, Moderated by Barry Stone
Thursday, December 18, 2025
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
ICOSA Collective Gallery
916 Springdale Rd, Bldg 2, #102, Austin, TX 78702