Katie Shapiro: The Other Side of the Moon
September 26 - November 14, 2026
Reception for the Artist: Saturday, September 26 from 3-5 PM
Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory
5613 San Vicente Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90019
Katie Shapiro, Passing Through to the Other Side, 2026, inkjet print, mirror, etched glass, 28 x 43 x 3.5 inches
Press Release
LOS ANGELES - Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory is pleased to present The Other Side of the Moon, a solo exhibition of photo-based works by Katie Shapiro, on view from September 26 – November 14, 2026. In her most autobiographical body of work to date, Shapiro uses photography as sculpture to explore psychological spaces and life experiences that resist straightforward representation. Photographs of landscapes, celestial bodies, and intimate moments with her adolescent sons are printed on glass, arranged in mirrored frames, and placed into geologic specimens like obsidian and jade, giving a robust, three-dimensional presentation to her ideas about interior life.
Since its invention, photography has been bound to the idea of evidence: the medium that records what was there. Shapiro belongs to a counter-tradition that treats the photograph as a threshold between what is seen and unseen. She draws openly on the language of abstraction, citing the stained color fields of Helen Frankenthaler and the meditative grids of Agnes Martin as touchstones for her practice. Her images are layered and translucent, seeking not what the camera can verify, but what lies just beyond perception, where psycho-spiritual and physical experience intersect.
In late 2023, Shapiro began photographing the moon on 35mm film, and the first developed rolls surprised her with their quiet intensity. The moon appeared less as a celestial body than as a mirror of the subconscious. It became the series' guiding motif, joining the artist's long-standing interest in the unseen forces of sacred landscapes, energy vortices, and impact craters to new questions about motherhood, healing, and personal transformation. Informed by Jungian ideas of the archetype and the shadow self, Shapiro reads the moon as a figure of the feminine and of cyclical time, its phases echoing the cycles of caregiving and rebirth.
Against these lunar images she sets fragmented photographs of her children, their hands, feet, shadows, a lost tooth, and gestures of discovery. Children are reflectors and screens, urging parents to confront aspects of themselves they otherwise might not face. Shapiro views parenthood itself as a cosmic act, grounded in daily ritual, yet situated within something vast and disorienting.
Materially, Shapiro extends the photograph into object. Images of the moon are printed on multiple sheets of glass and stacked to produce shifting spatial depth, nestled in shells or embedded in rough hewn stones. She is particularly drawn to obsidian, a volcanic glass long associated with emotional release and transformation. In ancient Mexico, polished obsidian mirrors known as tezcatl served as instruments of divination; gazing into their smoky surfaces, practitioners believed they could enter the realm of gods and ancestors. In Shapiro's assemblages the black stone cradles and frames the luminous photographs, functioning as anchor and conduit. Image and object, photography and geology, memory and matter converge in works that are visual and tactile, grounded and otherworldly.
In extending photography into physical space, Shapiro joins a history of artists who have tested the boundaries of the medium. A significant precedent is Photography into Sculpture, the landmark 1970 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art curated by Peter C. Bunnell, which presented photographs and photographic materials as sculptural objects rather than simply as images. Shapiro carries this lineage into distinctly personal territory, giving material form to psychological and emotional experience.
In The Other Side of the Moon, the landscape that has long occupied Shapiro's practice becomes the terrain of the psyche, refracted through the lens of motherhood. The works offer no single reading. They create instead a space where the intimate becomes cosmic, and individual experience gestures toward collective meaning.
Vanessa Woods, Form Unmoored 1, 2023, silver gelatin print, 14 x 11 inches
Eightfold
Curated by Katie Shapiro
September 26 – November 14, 2026
Presented alongside the exhibition in the front gallery is Eightfold, a selection of small works curated by Shapiro from her critique group of eight women artists whose practices meet at the intersection of photography, materiality, and three-dimensional form. Through sculpture, installation, and object-based work, the group asks how photography can extend beyond the flat image to become a physical, spatial, or perceptual experience. Laura Plageman layers photographs to render landscape as unsettled and resistant to a single view; Vanessa Woods builds disorienting reconstructions from photographic collage and sculptural objects; Sophia Chai collapses space through the camera's optics, drawing and painting the corner of her studio; Brea Souders blends digital phenomena with physical objects to reveal how we see and relate to images; Janna Ireland turns to analog darkroom manipulation of familial archives to reconsider history; Paula McCartney moves between photography, ceramics, and sculpture to explore presence and absence; and Aimée Beaubien presses at the limits of photographic experience through immersive installation. Together with Shapiro, they share a commitment to reimagining how photography can occupy space and unearth new kinds of meaning.
Press inquiries can be directed to Diana Fitzgibbon at diana@hannahsloan.com.
/ About
Katie Shapiro’s (b. 1983, Los Angeles, CA) practice explores the ineffable—making visible what cannot be seen. Her most recent work reflects her ongoing investigation into perception, presence, and what lies beyond view. The artist writes:
“Through my work, I aim to create evocative, multi-layered pieces that reflect the complexity of human existence across personal, historical, and cosmic dimensions. I combine my photographic practice with sculptural elements, blurring the lines between image and object, surface and structure. This material expansion allows me to craft immersive environments that challenge conventional boundaries and invite a more tactile, spatial engagement with visual media.
Sculpture, for me, is not simply about form—it is a way of embodying the unseen. By integrating photography with physical materials such as wood, obsidian, and mirrors, I explore how material presence can hold and transmit intangible states: memory, emotion, energy, and psychological depth. The works often draw from natural topographies—energy vortices, impact craters, high mountain elevations—which act as metaphors for the internal landscapes we all carry. These geologic markers mirror our own transformations, holding space for rupture, resilience, and rebirth.
Motherhood has profoundly shaped my artistic inquiry. It has attuned me more acutely to the liminal, intuitive, and cyclical aspects of life—the quiet, often unseen labor of care and creation. As both a personal and archetypal experience, motherhood introduces an expanded awareness of time, space, and bodily knowledge. It offers a lived experience of duality: being both self and other, grounded and dissolving, nurturing and fiercely protective. This duality echoes in my work, where form and image coalesce to explore the unconscious currents that flow beneath everyday reality.”
Shapiro holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a BFA in Photography from CalArts.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, with recent and past shows at institutions including Aperture Gallery, Kopeikin Gallery, Klompching Gallery, Christopher Grimes Gallery, and The Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA. Her work has appeared in Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, and New York Magazine.
Her work is included in numerous private and public collections, notably the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Huntington Library and Art Collection, the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, and the Amon Carter Museum Library.
Shapiro has held residencies at the Banff Centre in Canada and Bullseye Glass in Pasadena, and is slated to attend Mass MoCA next summer as an artist-in-residence. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
