Sill — Bad Water

Sill, installation view

Tom Henry, Swans at Sunset, 2025
acrylic on paper mounted to board in artist’s frame

Tom Henry, Country Life, 2026
acrylic on paper mounted to board

Tom Henry, Derbyshire Tile, 2026
acrylic on paper mounted to board in artist’s frame

Tom Henry, What We Can Learn From English Gardens, 2026
acrylic on paper mounted to board

Tom Henry, Showers of Diamonds, 2026
Acrylic on paper mounted to board in artist’s frame

Sill, installation view

Ella Gonzales, A Room's Proportion, shell, 2026
acrylic and gouache on fabric

Ella Gonzales, A Room's Proportion, shell (detail)

Sill, installation view

Sill, installation view

Tom Henry, Topiaries, 2026
acrylic on paper

Ella Gonzales, Window throughline, 2026
acrylic on jusi silk

Sill
Ella Gonzales & Tom Henry
July 24 - August 31, 2026

I didn’t know this when I started dreaming of the show, but Ella lived with Tom’s paintings before she knew they were Tom’s paintings. While in New York for a residency, she stayed at his house, sleeping and eating and moving through rooms where his work hung on the walls. She didn’t know he had made them. She didn’t even know he was a painter.

There’s a particular intimacy in being in someone’s home while they’re absent. As you learn your routes from room to room, you begin to imagine how they might move through the same space. You see what has been arranged carefully and what has been allowed to accumulate. Objects begin to suggest a life without ever explaining it. Ella met Tom’s paintings this way, as part of the house before they became part of a person.

Tom has a studio separate from his apartment, though lately he has spent more time painting in the spare room. There, the work is lived beside before it is asked to explain itself or offered up to view. His paintings carry some of that privacy with them. Sometimes he paints windows, and when he doesn’t, his paintings still behave like them. Watercolors and monoprints are pasted onto larger sheets of paper and stretched over supports. Each painting is framed several times: first by the edge of the image, then by the larger sheet of paper, the support, and finally the wooden frame.

His landscapes come from places he has traveled, scenes from daily life, and the pages of Better Homes and Gardens. Whether borrowed from a magazine or painted from life, each is equally real, a way of looking through one place into another.

Ella Gonzales’ thirty-foot curtain is too large to belong to any ordinary window. Painted pale blue, green, and lavender panels suggest doorways, windows, and rooms opening into other rooms, then break apart across seams and folds. As the fabric gathers and pools, the architecture buckles under its own softness. An edge disappears into a pleat and returns somewhere else. The curtain gives the room a boundary that cannot hold still.

Curtains make privacy visible. Pulling one closed tells the outside world that an interior exists and is no longer available to view. Ella’s curtain never fully closes the room. Its scale surrounds the body, while its translucency keeps the architecture faintly visible behind it. Her work grows from an experience of home shaped by migration, where rooms are packed, remembered, and made again. She often begins with family photographs and memories of homes carried across countries, layering their floor plans through digital modeling. Fabric can become a wall, then be folded and carried elsewhere. Each time it is hung, a room takes shape again.

There is no actual window in Sill, but it becomes a way of thinking about how one person blows into the life of another, changing the air of the room. Their works meet along its narrow ledge, where inside and outside touch. We place small things there because the light is good, because we want to be reminded of them, or because we want them close to the edge. Plants, stones, half-finished cups of water. Things we mean to keep and things we have not yet decided what to do with.

★ ★ ★

Ella Gonzales (b. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) is a Toronto-based painter. Her recent exhibitions include YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto (2025); Mercer Union, Toronto (2025); Unit 17, Vancouver (2024); and The Power Plant, Toronto (2023). In 2025, she was an artist-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York City. Gonzales holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Western University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Guelph. She is represented by Unit 17, Vancouver.

Tom Henry (b 1984) is an artist and printmaker from Aotearoa, New Zealand, and currently lives in New York City. Recent exhibitions include Best Western, (New York, NY), Freddy (Harris, NY), Scroll (New York City, NY) Cleo Gallery (Savannah, GA), Gern en Regalia (New York City, NY), Adler and Floyd (Chicago, IL). Residencies include Driving Creek Pottery (Coromandel, New Zealand) and Macedonia Institute (Chatham, NY). Henry also has a handmade wallpaper practice, Henry Wallpaper.

Tom Henry & Ella Gonzales
Sill
July 24 - September 6, 2026

Earthen Clay, Jan Lynch & Jackson Markovic
Planet of Love
May 15 - June 26, 2026

Justine A. Chambers, Kyle Alden Martens & Kern Samuel
Bag, curated by Elly Reitman
September 19 - October 26, 2025

Ellie Rae Hunter
Heel
August 1 - September 10, 2025

Adi Blaustein Rejto
The Possibilites of Apples
April 12 - May 28, 2025

Adrienne Herr
4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry

March 14- April 5, 2025

Audrey Gair
Rind

November 22, 2024 - January 4, 2025

Phyllis Baldino, Max Guy & Ellie Rae Hunter
Outliners
October 4 - November 10, 2024

Elly Reitman
energy
August 16 - September 20, 2024

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie
The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica Pinteric
July 12 - July 29, 2024

Tiziana La Melia
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
June 7 - July 6, 2024

Jacob Jackmauh, Caitlin McCann & Benjamin Stallings
As for me, I’m just passing through this planet
March 8 - April 14, 2024

Irina Jasnowski Pascual
Wipers
September 15 - October 29, 2023

Coco Klockner
honesty
July 8 - August 6, 2023

Morgan Canavan, Ben Estes, Marisa Takal
More Coming Back & More Returning
May 5 - June 11, 2023

Sylvie Hayes-Wallace
Center of the Universe
August 5 - September 18, 2022

Amanda Horowitz
Bad Water, True West or Between Myself the Crickets and the Coyote
performed by Sophia Cleary and Ada Friedman
July 14 & July 15, 2022

Suzanna Zak
Coming Home to the Ice Age
opening May 13 - June 24, 2022

★

About
Instagram

★

open by appointment

located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee

Adrienne Herr 4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry March 14- April 5, 2025

November 22, 2024 - January 4, 2025

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica PintericJuly 12 - July 29, 2024 Tiziana La Melia Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster June 7 - July 6, 2024

★ About Instagram ★open by appointment located beside320 E. Churchwell Ave Knoxville, Tennessee

Adrienne Herr
4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry

March 14- April 5, 2025

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie
The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica Pinteric
July 12 - July 29, 2024

Tiziana La Melia
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
June 7 - July 6, 2024

★

About
Instagram

★

open by appointment

located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee