Towards is pleased to present Material Imaginations, a group exhibition featuring work by Viktor Fordell, Sophia Lapres, Matt Schust, and Maria Trabulo.
Drawing inspiration from Gaston Bachelard’s 1942 text L’eau et les rêves (Water and Dreams), the exhibition brings together a selection of works that use water as a point of departure to explore themes of memory, temporality, and transformation.
Uniting the works in Material Imaginations is their engagement with the ephemeral–their attempt to render permanent that which is fundamentally transient. Water–fluid, mutable, and perpetually in motion, resists containment. The works in Material Imaginations grapple with this contradiction–capturing fleeting, elusive, moments and suspending them in time–negotiating the tension between movement and stillness, permanence and dissolution.
Matt Schust’s work explores themes of memory, place, and the ways in which meaning is made. His paintings possess a quiet atmospheric quality, dissolving the boundaries between observation and recollection, drifting somewhere between lived experience and fragmented memories. In Material Imaginations, Schust turns his attention to the ephemeral qualities of water and light—the glimmer of reflections across a dark canal at night, the drifting shadows that gather along the bottom of a pool.
Across her practice, Sophia Lapres explores desire, fantasy, and the ways in which images increasingly mediate our experience of the world. Drawing upon film, popular culture, and personal experience, her work explores the full breadth of the human experience – from the sublime to the utterly mundane. Lapres’s paintings included in Material Imaginations reflect this breadth, presenting water as both a monumental force—capable of inspiring awe—and as the quiet, ever-present substance that flows through the ordinary moments of daily life.
Viktor Fordell’s practice spans photography, collage, sculpture, and found objects, often focusing on the overlooked poetics of urban space. For the works within his Material Imaginations, he turns his attention to the minutia within the city – capturing a series of water droplets in the moments right before they break. Set against obscured backgrounds of diffused light, each droplet contains a world nested within – brimming with potential but forever suspended in a perpetual state of becoming.
Within her series Wine Dark Sea, Maria Trabulo draws upon the ancient Greek understanding of colour—where the sea was described not by a fixed hue but through shifting qualities of light, depth, and atmosphere—to explore how perception is inseparable from experience.
Using seawater collected from the Mediterranean and Atlantic Ocean she allows crystallized salt to leave delicate traces upon dyed textiles. Each work is informed by conversations with migrants, fishermen, and climate activists across Italy, Greece, and Portugal, whose personal descriptions of the sea determine the colour of the textile beneath. Together, these material processes and individual testimonies form a layered portrait of the sea, revealing it as a site shaped as much by memory, migration, and politics as by geography itself.
