Perception: Opening Reception
About the Exhibition
The Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery is pleased to present Perception, an exhibition of paintings by Washington, DC-based artist Craig Cahoon exploring the intersection of light, color, memory, and visual experience. This exhibition will open on Friday, October 2nd, with an Opening Reception from 6–8 PM.
Cahoon’s paintings are built through layered applications of semi-transparent color, fluid marks, and iridescent interference paints. As light moves across the surface and viewers shift their position, colors appear to materialize, dissolve, and transform. This constant change is central to the exhibition, inviting viewers to consider perception not as something fixed, but as an experience shaped by movement, environment, and point of view.
A key component of Perception is Cahoon’s Apparition series. The imagery first emerged from the idea of a benevolent, light-emitting presence, leading Cahoon to create floating, ambiguous forms that seem suspended between atmosphere and physical matter. The works occupy a liminal space between stillness and movement, clarity and uncertainty.
“The Apparition paintings are light-reflecting floating entities in a liminal space,” Cahoon explains. “They are material manifestations of immaterial light and color.”
The exhibition also draws from Cahoon’s longstanding engagement with the natural world. Walks through forests and landscapes inform his observations of changing light, growth, resilience, and the relationships between colors and forms. His Botanical paintings translate these experiences into imagined organic shapes and unexpected color combinations.
In the Synchromy series, Cahoon focuses more directly on color itself. Two fields of color meet along a shared edge, creating a dynamic tension between separation and unity. The works explore how contrasting colors can be understood individually or experienced simultaneously as parts of an integrated whole.
Across these bodies of work, Cahoon approaches painting as both a material investigation and a meditative process. His use of transparent layers and reflective surfaces encourages viewers to move around the work and experience it over time. What appears from one angle may shift entirely from another.
Ultimately, Perception considers the instability and subjectivity of seeing. Cahoon’s paintings ask viewers to slow down and recognize how light, movement, memory, and perspective continually reshape what is in front of us.
Based in Washington, DC, Craig Cahoon has developed a painting practice centered on sustained observation, material experimentation, and the translation of perceptual experience into paint.
Cahoon has received twenty-five artist residency fellowships in the United States and internationally, as well as six grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He has also received support from the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, The Painted Bride in Philadelphia, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.
He was selected as an American Artist Abroad by the U.S. Department of State and has presented his work in more than 25 solo exhibitions and 80 group exhibitions. His work has appeared in exhibitions including Apparitions at the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery at Smith Center for Healing and the Arts and LightWeight at the American Center for Physics. A mid-career retrospective, Reflections, was presented at the Embassy of Slovakia in Washington, DC.
Cahoon’s paintings are held in more than 170 public and private collections, including IBM, the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC.
For press inquiries, images, and additional information, please contact: Sara Khambalia, Gallery Director, Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery, sara@smithcenter.org
This exhibition will open on Friday, October 2nd, with an Opening Reception from 6–8 PM.
On view through January 3, 2027 at Smith Center, 1632 U St NW, Washington, DC 20009.
Please contact the gallery manager at sara@smithcenter.org to schedule your appointment.