The Architecture of Perception 
Julie O'Sullivan & Kristine Schomaker

Perception is how we transform the overwhelming chaos of existence into meaning. O'Sullivan and Schomaker process reality through completely different methods, but their work reveals a shared commitment to building structures from the raw materials of experience.

O'Sullivan paints the joy of Los Angeles—sirens bouncing off Little Tokyo buildings, ocean waves near her home, the beautiful cacophony that saved her from small-town Nebraska. Her canvases vibrate with urban frequencies, transforming environmental noise into visual celebration through a studio practice that receives the world's energy and gives it back as color and movement.

Schomaker's work emerges from internal archaeology. For over a decade, she has ritualistically cut up paintings, photographs, and pieces of her past selves—a meditation that intensified through cancer, aging, and existing in a larger body within a shame-based culture. Now in reconstruction mode, she builds wall sculptures from thousands of fragments, creating "metaphorical skins" that take up space aggressively and refuse the erasure society demands from marginalized bodies.

Together, they reveal perception as active construction rather than passive reception. O'Sullivan builds harmony from urban chaos while Schomaker builds new selves from destroyed histories. Both practices resist—O'Sullivan fights the numbing that city life can impose, Schomaker fights societal erasure—proving that our particular ways of processing reality matter enough to claim space and offer transformation as invitation and resistance.