Veiled Forms

Curated by Evan Mazellan and Amber B. Nax  

Exhibition Dates: November 13, 2025 - January 23, 2026 

Location: PASC Southgate Gallery, 13721 Eureka Road, Southgate, MI 48195

PASC Southgate Gallery Hours: Friday, 9 - 3 pm, and by appointment  

Veiled Forms is a group exhibition at the PASC Southgate Gallery bringing together several PASC Southgate artists to question how artists build relationships through layering, grouping, and concealment. The artworks in this exhibition have been selected for what they represent and what they hold back, including the tension between what’s visible and what’s hidden. With a focus on pairings and groupings of objects, whether figures or abstract marks, these artworks challenge the idea that to bury something is to cover it, to veil it, to keep it secret. 

Many of the artists featured are exhibiting their work publicly for the first time. In Denny Assenmacher’s painting, a figure stands in the center with a poker face, holding an unknown thing close. With Lamp Leg and other artworks, Santina Dionisi leans into humor and camp; her sculptural forms playfully exaggerating the familiar and the absurd. Similarly, Robert Duncombe’s lamp, an object of everyday use, reflects the artist’s whimsical sensibility of light and color. All three artists explore themes of what can be hidden, adorned, or transformed. 

Amanda Ross-Ferree and Stanley Brown each explore the language of paint through layered surfaces that build slowly, forming camouflage-like patterns. What’s hidden never truly disappears; it continues to pulse beneath the surface. Ross-Ferree’s dynamic color fields hum with vibrancy as if the colors themselves are alive. Brown’s abstracted representational artworks bloom with swirling hues; the forms appear to drift and swim through a psychedelic current.  

Several of the artists in this show explore themes of nostalgia and belonging. Through “Ryan’s Vision”, Ryan Cooke’s The Creation of Adam reinterprets Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel, where figures stretch toward one another in a search for contact. His figures reach, but they never touch trying to find something through what’s lost. The artist, Manual Bart, disassembles pop culture icons, unraveling characters from his childhood and early adulthood memories. In this exhibition, he presents a large drawing based on caricatures of the stars from the popular Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, a children’s TV show from the 90s. 

Avetta Gabriel presents a group of comic-style figures, each linked through shared visual cues. James Tishler’s portrait reveals a network of connections within his brushwork. His figures seem to vibrate with frenetic energy, tied together through expressive mark-making. Erin Toliver’s artwork recalls the structure of mechanical machines, systems that seem to interact within themselves, evoking rhythm and motion. Zainab Elhasan and Kimberly Pettey’s artworks both showcase animals in serene, natural settings, radiating a calm and quiet beauty. 

Evan Mazellan is an artist who currently works in Metro Detroit, MI. He holds a residency at Buffalo Prescott in Detroit, MI. Upcoming projects include Untitled Art Fair in Miami, FL. with Buffalo Prescott and a two-person exhibition at Diener Gallery in Boston, MA, in December. He earned his MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI in 2024. Evan is the Lead Art Advisor at PASC; Evanmazellan.com

Amber B. Nax (she/her) currently serves as PASC Gallery Assistant and is a multidisciplinary artist and independent curator from Detroit, MI. She earned her B.F.A. from Wayne State University with a focus on Black American and African history, contemporary art, and folklore. Recent projects include Adler & Adler (Southside Community Art Center, Chicago, 2024) and the ICI Forum Research Fellowship (Chicago, 2024).  

Launched in 2021, PASC is the first progressive art and design studio and exhibition program in Detroit and Wayne County dedicated to supporting artists with developmental disabilities and mental health differences to advance artistic practices and build individual careers in the art and design fields. PASC is a program of Services to Enhance Potential (STEP), a non-profit service organization founded in 1972 that provides services and support for more than 1,400 individuals with disabilities and mental health differences across Southeastern Michigan.