The Boat | Tactile Horizons | Final Porcelain Sculptures
Homare Ikeda: The Boat | Naomi Scheck: Tactile Horizons | Cheryl Ann Thomas: Final Porcelain Sculptures
William Havu Gallery
1040 Cherokee Street, Denver, CO 80204
May 16–September 20, 2025
Admission: free
Review by Dani/elle Cunningham
The current exhibitions at William Havu Gallery showcase a captivating trio of artists—Homare Ikeda, Naomi Scheck, and Cheryl Ann Thomas—each exploring the in-between spaces that are formed through distinct yet harmonious mediums. In The Boat, Ikeda presents abstract paintings that evoke journeys through liminal spaces, blending layered textures, pseudo-geometric shapes, and gestural marks.
A view of works on view at William Havu Gallery, including a sculpture by Cheryl Ann Thomas in the foreground and paintings by Homare Ikeda in the background. Image courtesy of William Havu Gallery.
Naomi Scheck’s Tactile Horizons invites viewers into the intimate space between material and memory, where a range of surfaces and soft gradients reference natural landscapes and personal reflection. Cheryl Ann Thomas’s Final Porcelain Sculptures offers what seems to be a quiet, powerful conclusion to this part of her practice, with delicately collapsing porcelain forms that speak to impermanence and resilience. Together, the works create a range of contemplative and diverse experiences.
Homare Ikeda, Spoken, acrylic on canvas, 38 x 38 inches. Image courtesy of William Havu Gallery.
The most visually boisterous of the three, Ikeda’s paintings are large, bold, and dynamic. They are bursting with bright colors and a playful sense of chaos that, upon closer inspection, reveals an unexpected sensitivity. In Spoken, one of the first works one encounters upon entering the gallery, the canvas is divided into two contrasting halves that loosely echo each other. The upper half features dreamy, warm pinks and oranges, resembling a landscape, while the lower half is dark with cool blues and cosmic energy. A jagged line traverses the divide, unpredictably but with purpose, creating a surprising sense of balance and harmony that brings together the spontaneous and planned elements of the painting.
Homare Ikeda, Peek, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Image courtesy of William Havu Gallery.
Ikeda’s Peek also features jagged lines; however, in this work, a central line encompasses radiant, melting colors and implied textures rather than bisecting the composition. This line flows continuously around the center of the painting before breaking abruptly on the right side into a sharp border of green, blue, and yellow color blobs, alongside a panel of tidy, straight lines. Over this section, a transparent orange triangle is layered, inviting the viewer to peek beneath it. The outer areas of the painting are dark, except for a flowing, multi-colored swath—reminiscent of the cosmic space in Spoken. Here though, the tone feels more earthy than celestial. Taken together, the two works reveal Ikeda’s ability to create art that exists between worlds. Light and dark as well as structure and irrationality cohesively merge, with one never fully overtaking the other.
Homare Ikeda, Fountain, mixed media on paper, 20.5 x 16.5 inches. Image courtesy of William Havu Gallery.
Homare Ikeda, Untitled, mixed media on paper, 33 x 28 inches. Image courtesy of William Havu Gallery.
Ikeda’s mixed media works on paper—Fountain, Untitled, and Vista G—maintain the same visual language as his large paintings, though the smaller format imposes a welcome degree of restraint. The limited scale necessitates simpler lines, more contained shapes, and, overall, less complex compositions, which, paradoxically, makes these works more compelling.
Homare Ikeda, Vista G, mixed media on paper, 27 x 22 inches. Image courtesy of William Havu Gallery.
With increased clarity, they invite closer engagement and a more sustained emotional connection than the immediate spasm of excitement provoked by some of Ikeda’s more expansive canvases.
Naomi Scheck, Unfurl, mixed media on paper, 36 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of William Havu Gallery.
Naomi Scheck’s work displays a similar balance of intent and accident, yet much softer and more organic, with a clear nod to ocean environments. Unfurl begins with a flat substrate of pastel and earth tones, overlaid with seemingly intuitive dots and fluid, natural patterns. A punctured foreground toward the bottom of the surface resembles coral or seaweed, bringing cohesion to contrasting elements and blurring the line between painting and sculpture. Despite the interplay of dissimilar media, Unfurl evokes a deep sense of calm. It invites quiet contemplation and offers a tranquil counterpoint to its complex construction.
Naomi Scheck, Furrow, mixed media on paper, 16 inches in diameter. Image courtesy of William Havu Gallery.
Scheck’s distinctive style carries through in two mixed media discs, Furrow and Crest, both of which reflect the artist’s deep reverence for oceanic landscapes. [1] More painterly than the other pieces in the show, these works feel like early experiments—prototypes for the sculptural direction she pursues throughout the rest of the exhibition, where she manipulates paper to physically transform the surface of her compositions.
Naomi Scheck, Crest, mixed media on paper, 16 inches in diameter. Image courtesy of William Havu Gallery.
With their soft watercolor backgrounds and restrained use of cut paper that gently interrupts the painted surface, they maintain a quiet tension between fragility and control—echoing the delicate balance found in the natural landscapes that inspire Scheck. In doing so, these works suggest an artist in transition, testing the direction of her materials while remaining loyal to a formal language of restraint.
Cheryl Ann Thomas, Reef, hand coiled porcelain (foreground); Homare Ikeda, Toki #5, acrylic and oil on canvas (background). Image courtesy of William Havu Gallery.
While Scheck explores surface and tiptoes towards disruption, Cheryl Ann Thomas pushes material to its structural limits, using porcelain to question form, function, and expectation. At first glance, Thomas’s sculptures may appear to be yet another iteration of porcelain works mimicking other materials—here, evoking the appearance of sensitively colored woven baskets. However, upon deeper reflection, her work emerges as the most conceptually rigorous among the artists featured at Havu. Rather than simply showcasing technical mastery, Thomas engages in a nuanced interrogation of artistic identity and material expectation.
Two sculptures by Cheryl Ann Thomas and a painting by Homare Ikeda. Image courtesy of William Havu Gallery.
Her use of porcelain—a medium historically associated with precision and fragility and tone that is notoriously difficult to master—is particularly compelling. By deliberately allowing her forms to collapse and distort, she challenges conventional standards of perfection often instilled by academic training. In doing so, Thomas not only subverts the traditional associations of her chosen material but also redefines the boundaries of beauty, inviting viewers to reconsider the value of imperfection, failure, and process in contemporary art. Her work resists containment—both literal and metaphorical—breaking molds in a way that feels quietly, but powerfully, radical.
Cheryl Ann Thomas, Harmony, hand coiled porcelain, 25 x 25 x 21 inches. Image courtesy of William Havu Gallery.
The artist’s forms range from bending subtly to twisting violently, some appearing to coil in on themselves with the force and chaos of a car crash. On one end of that spectrum, Harmony bends gently at its middle, cascading forward into a twist at the bottom that contributes to a funnel shape at its top. The color palette shifts subtly from a pale cream tone at the top to soft blues and light pinks toward the base, creating a gentle gradient that echoes natural elements like seashells or woven fibers.
Cheryl Ann Thomas, Nostalgia, hand coiled porcelain, 30 x 26 x 28 inches. Image courtesy of William Havu Gallery.
Nostalgia embraces the car crash end of the spectrum, its wheat-colored, tightly wound upper section seeming to bear down on a lighter, pink-striped base, creating a palpable tension between the perceived weight and the known delicacy of its material. The effect is uncanny—so much so that it feels almost impossible that the form isn’t toppling under its own weight. The work excitedly destabilizes perception, prompting questions about balance, collapse, and the contradictions between what an object is, what it appears to be, and all the other rules surrounding making objects. Together, Thomas’s sculptures challenge traditional expectations of form and function, positioning fragility not as a limitation, but as a potent and deliberate aesthetic strategy.
Works by Naomi Scheck and Cheryl Ann Thomas on view at William Havu Gallery. Image by DARIA.
William Havu Gallery succeeds at drawing viewers into a thoughtful dialogue about boundary states—between mediums, between material and meaning, and between order and disorder. While each artist is distinct, they converge in their willingness to probe questions about form and transformation. Ikeda’s energetic abstractions explore dualities through gestural excess and compositional tension; Scheck's quiet surfaces reveal an artist negotiating between serenity and disruption; and Thomas's porcelain vessels collapse both physically and ideologically, subversively reconfiguring the very expectations of sculpture. Rather than offering easy resolutions, the exhibition thrives in ambiguity, reminding us that meaningful art often lives not in answers, but in the lack of them.
Dani/elle Cunningham (she/her) is an artist, scholar, and independent curator. She writes about science fiction, gender, sexuality, and disability, with an emphasis on mental illness. The co-founder of chant cooperative, an artist co-op, she holds a master’s degree in art history and museum studies from the University of Denver.
[1] From the artist statement.
