Worlds Within Worlds
Participating Artists: Santina Dionisi, Rodney Stephens, and Lauren Williams
Exhibition Dates: September 11, 2025 – October 4, 2025
Location: PASC Detroit Gallery, 9301 Kercheval Ave, STE 2, Detroit, MI, 48214
PASC Detroit Gallery Hours: Th, Fr, & Sa, 12 – 5 pm and by appointment
Worlds Within Worlds is a three-person exhibition focused on PASC artists who create complex narratives that guide the imaginative subjects of their artworks. Santina Dionisi, Rodney Stephens and Lauren Williams all create stories that pull influences from their personal histories, films, and literary references as well as anime and video games, sometimes all in one piece.
Santina Dionisi is a multi-talented artist, working in drawing, painting and sculpture. Most of her artworks are driven by one or two references, popular film culture such as animated features, fantasy, and horror films, to characters from unique plays that Santina has created. With a taste for the macabre and carnivalesque she makes sculptures in both papier mâché and fabric. In this exhibition we will be showing a series of fabric dolls, and painted backdrops, which reference an illustrated play Santina has composed about a circus family.
Rodney Stephens creates narrative drawings and paintings that often reference movie posters or information maps in museums guides. He pulls from both his personal history as well as his knowledge of pop-culture to create humorous artworks that play with vulnerability, desire, voyeurism, irreverence and horror. His sometimes racy posters gently push against societal norms, and are sometimes accompanied by a warning label, PG-13, parents strongly cautioned, or even R, restricted audiences! Yet these works can be enjoyed by all.
Lauren Williams creates richly illustrated drawings and paintings featuring ornate scenes of people in somewhat otherworldly landscapes and scenarios. These artworks are influenced by fantasy, anime, video games, and landscape painting. One artwork may depict a scene of a girl completely enveloped by a vortex of candy and pastries. While another may feature a chimera like flying beast, carrying a woman in knights clothing as she stops at a sugar free pastry café atop a castle. These dreamlike scenarios are depicted in fluorescent and rainbow colors, elevating the viewer into hyper-color fantasies.
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.
