I Believe I Know
August 7 - September 19, 2025Opening reception Thursday, August 7 | 6-8 pm
I Believe I Know brings together revelatory works to explore everyday experiences of transcendental awareness, exposing the synchronicity of the divine and human. Through examinations of the natural world, the cosmos, mythology, science, and dialect, I Believe I Know offers a world unseen, though universally felt. This group exhibition, with works in various mediums, brings together artists Sobia Ahmad, Maggie Bjorklund, Centa Schumacher, and Elijah Burgher.
In his seminal tome on the psychology of religion, The Varieties of Religious Expereince (1902), William James scrutinizes the phenomenon of a mystical experience, writing: “In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oness”. I Believe I Know acts as a crucible to this notion--presenting moments within nature, religion, the solar system, and language which analyzes occurrences of singularity in connection with the divine, leaving viewers with a varied expression of wonder, ecstatic revelation, and humanness.
Sobia Ahmad and Maggie Bjorklund’s work are both rooted in their personal experiences with religion, connecting their spiritual sensibilities to the natural world to evoke an introspection that is both interior and organic. Elijah Burgher and Centa Schumacher share a scientific sentiment which employs language and experimentation as tools to connect mythologies and hidden universes.
This exhibition was curated by Nina Friedman, Director, Tomayko Foundation. Special thank you to Western Exhibitions, Chicago, and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg for their collaboration.
About the artists:
Sobia Ahmad is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in public health. Her practice explores the transcendental power of everyday experiences, objects, and rituals through film, photography, and social practice. She draws from non-western intellectual and spiritual lexicons, specifically traditions of devotional poetry and oral storytelling associated with Sufism. Often made in domestic and social spaces, her process-based work engages in conversations about relationality and reciprocity, embodied knowledge, alternative pedagogies, material experimentation, and DIY ethos.
Maggie Bjorklund makes paintings that engage ambiguity and subtlety to capture the spirit of things. Her process draws from memory, sensation, and intuition, prioritizing a fluid, recipricol relationship with the material. Manipulating thin layers of oil paint with scratchy, sweeping brush strokes, vague forms unravel organically. The compositions float between unrecognizable and familiar, capturing the subject’s tactile and spiritual realities. Bjorklund is drawn to forms that communicate both their earthly grit and their holiness--textures, colors, and elements resembling plant matter, decomposing food, flesh, and angelic forms. The work seeks to evoke the profundity in the small, raw retails of being human.
Centa Schumacher is a lens-based artist working with photography, video, and textiles. Her practice examines the transformative power of scale and light, drawing from cosmology, deep space imagery, and western mystery traditions. She uses manipulations of the photographic process, including modified lenses, speciality filters, and double exposure, to create images that exist parallel to--but do not overlap with--objective reality.
Elijah Burgher uses painting, drawing, photography and printmaking, working at the crossroads of representation and language, figuration and abstraction, and the real and imagined. Drawing from mythology, ancient history, the occult, and ritual magick, Burgher cultivates a highly intimate code of sigils and emblems imbued with magical power to investigate the personal and cultural dynamics of desire, love, subcultural formation, and the history of abstraction. However, at the core of this multifaceted practice, Burgher “aims to know whether an artwork, any artwork, can possess meaning--to truly embody it somehow”.