In the quiet hum of Freight + Volume, myth breathes anew — through clay, through oil, through the occulted pulse of memory and transformation. Elizabeth Insogna’s luminous ceramics rise from ionic pedestals like ancient offerings, while Jorge K. Cruz’s visceral canvases create a kaleidoscopic backsplash, drawing viewers into a dialogue between the sacred and the subversive.
Here, myth is a living language. Both artists speak it fluently, yet with new grammar, new gods, new truths. Cruz excavates Baroque and colonial imagery — Frans Snyders’ brutal abundance, Manuel de Samaniego’s perfectly divine order — and rewrites them through bruised brushwork and emotional immediacy. His paintings do not quote the old masters; they interrogate them, asking what conquest and divinity mean when filtered through his postcolonial, queer experience.
Insogna’s approach is equally transformative. Drawing from telestikê — the ancient practice of animating statues with spirit — she creates forms that are both vessel and sculpture, hollow interiors opening to cradle intangible presences. Works like The Well and Strange Armor embody this duality: activated objects that hold space for the unseen. Insogna embraces the ambiguities found in ancient Greek papyri, where Sappho’s Aphrodite shifts between “richly enthroned” and “many-minded” depending on the fragment.
This multiplicity illuminates new meanings. Here, surfaces never define essence. Hence her violet and gold piece The Double Sun: one object, two times over—or one Aphrodite, two understandings. A bent figure like Loosen on the Dark Earth captures myth in motion: hands actively releasing something unseen yet potent unto the ground below, while the gesture is caught forever in hardened clay’s perpetuity. Insogna’s sculptures do not simply stand. They lean, curve, beckon. Their creamy glazes shimmer like the cosmos. Insogna mixes these glazes herself, and their resulting alchemical display of color and texture is always one of a kind.
The vacant eyes aren’t blind but receptive, searching for something beyond sight. In pieces like from the stars, automatic drawing techniques meet ritual gestures. Obscured signs and angel tongues emerge from the clay’s surface, creating what Insogna calls “an initiation into space and a protection of space.” These forms dwell in the in-between: material and spiritual, ancient and contemporary.
Cruz’s canvases mirror this liminality through their treatment of flesh, animate and inanimate side by side, creating visceral tensions between beauty and brutality. Like Alice Neel, he paints not bodies but souls beneath them, capturing emotional truths that blur past and present, the sacred and profane.
Both artists challenge inherited visual languages, opening space for new truths. Cruz’s distortions of archetypal figures — his haunted shepherdess, his fighting dogs — transform historical imagery into tools for probing identity, appetite, and power. His brushwork is ravenous, rewriting colonial narratives with contemporary urgency.
Insogna’s towering forms reclaim sacred space for those traditionally excluded from dominant religions and storylines. Her ceramics function as “altars, vessels, and portals,” creating what she calls a new temple—one made of clay, ritual, and care. The activation performances she describes, like embodying the Bacchae’s ecstatic worship, infuse these objects with lived spiritual practice.
The works’ installation amplifies their power: Insogna’s pieces on classical pedestals invoke ancient ritual while Cruz’s paintings create an immersive environment of transformed tradition. Together, they form what Insogna recognizes as “an interesting vibration”—a resonance between destruction and creation, memory and metamorphosis.
In this exhibition, myth becomes mirror and prism, splintering received truths into radiant new forms. The artists remind us that transformation remains possible, that hardened clay can shimmer and bend, that violent histories can yield tender futures. Their work doesn’t destroy tradition; it remakes it, tenderly and defiantly, inviting viewers to participate in the ancient-yet-urgent practice of reimagining the divine. Here, faith and flesh converge not in doctrine but in the living pulse of art itself.
Jorge K. Cruz & Elizabeth Insogna, Divine Myth– Faith and Flesh At Freight + Volume through November 15, 2025
About the writer: Amalia Rizos is a writer and critic living in North Carolina. She studied film, literature, and art at NYU Tisch, where she developed her interest in the intersection of visual culture and spiritual practice.