Walking Through Light

Walking Through Light explores the landscape through organic and abstract visual languages, reflecting on each of the artists’ connections with nature. The work encourages us to observe, listen, and feel—to experience nature not only through our senses but also through memory and emotion. Together, they present the landscape as both a place and a state of being, offering two distinct yet interconnected perspectives—each grounded in a quiet search for meaning just beyond reach.

Karina Nöel Hean lives in the Galisteo Basin between Cerrillos and Galisteo, NM on the San Marcos arroyo, where the high desert light, skies, and land provide daily inspiration.  By contrast, Hean was born and raised in Mayo, MD along the Rhode River on the Chesapeake Bay’s western shore. Her artwork is grounded in drawing and amalgamates responses to landscape, which aim to transmit the power and impact of place. A significant inspiration in Hean’s work is found in watching storms and cloud structures. The drawings are a way to viscerally connect with the untouchable sky structures she daily observes, the immeasurable and compelling southwest architecture of canyons and rock, or the dramatic cliff edges of various seasides.

Michael O’Neill is a full-time instructor of Art History and Studio Art at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina. He has an MFA in photography from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and a BA in Psychology from Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, NC. He previously taught photography and visual literacy at Queens University in Charlotte where he designed the new darkrooms at the Sarah Belk Gambrell Center for the Arts and Civic Engagement; he has over 15 years of experience teaching art and photography.  O’Neill is a board member of the OBRA Collective; he has exhibited his artwork across the country and has work in the permanent collections at the Betchler Museum of Modern Art, the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Queens University in Charlotte. His photographs have been published in the Pinhole Journal, Len’s Journal, and the Poetics of Light by Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer.