CONDUIT GALLERY

Soomin Jung
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June 14 – August 9, 2025

Opens June 14 // 5:30-7:30pm

Conduit Gallery is honored to announce the exhibition of new mixed media drawings by Koreanborn, San Antonio-based artist Soomin Jung. The exhibition will be the third solo exhibition at Conduit Gallery for the artist.

Through a delicate combination of gouache, watercolor, graphite and fluorescent gouache, Soomin Jung’s landscape drawings examine the subtle ways in which memory, emotion and a sense of place can distort—or illuminate—our perception of reality. Jung’s landscapes are at once precise and surreal, inviting viewers into spaces where mountains reflect in still water, valleys echo light, and the flickering lights from stars, fireflies and snow momentarily suspend the boundaries between reality and imagination.

Jung’s deeply personal approach to art is rooted in her nomadic upbringing as the daughter of a ROK Army colonel. Her early years were defined by constant relocation—new schools, new environments, and shifting relationships—experiences that deeply shaped her worldview. Amid this flux, family became a constant source of grounding, a theme that quietly resonates throughout her work. Jung’s ability to balance accuracy and dream-like distortion is both meditative and expansive, asking the viewer to consider how we understand the world—and what happens when that understanding falters or transforms.

In addition to the larger drawings, the exhibition will include a grouping of fifty 8 by 8-inch silhouette landscapes on paper that are each a meditation on the brilliance and unreality of the sky at dusk and dawn. These smaller works, minimal yet commanding, further Jung’s inquiry into how ephemeral moments can carry enduring emotional weight.

Soomin Jung was born in Seoul, South Korea, and relocated in San Antonio, Texas where she earned an MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2008. She was awarded a private artist residency sponsored by the CEO of Proseq in Zermatt, Switzerland in 2023, an Artist Residency at the McNay Museum of Art in San Antonio, TX in 2022-2023, and a student artist residency funded by the University of Texas at San Antonio at the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy in 2005. She is a nationally and internationally exhibiting artist, and a full-time lecturer at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. She has served as a Juror for an annual international colored pencil competition held by Colored Pencil Magazine in 2022 and has won the Best of the Show award CPSA international annual competition in 2018. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Strathmore Mansion Gallery, Bethesda, MD (2025), World Heritage Office at Culture Commons Gallery, San Antonio, TX (2025), OXO art gallery, London, UK (2024), Brea Art Gallery, Brea, California (2024), McNay museum of art in San Antonio TX (2022-2023), grayDUCK gallery, Austin, TX (2022), Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX (2021), Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, TX (2021), Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2021); Hopkins Arts Center, Hopkins, MN (2020), Brea Gallery, Brea, CA (2019), Culture Commons Gallery, San Antonio, TX (2019), the Bridgeport Art Center, Chicago, IL (2018), the Hunting Art Prize, Houston, TX (2015), and more. Her work is part of numerous private and public collections including Stanford Healthcare systems, Proseq in Switzerland, and Aspen Art .

Jeff Baker
Arriba, Abajo, al Centro, pa Dentro

June 14 – August 9, 2025

Opens June 14 // 5:30-7:30pm

Conduit Gallery is honored to present Arriba, Abajo, al Centro, pa Dentro, the fifth solo exhibition at the gallery by Jeff Baker, a Dallas-born photographer currently based in Costa Rica. The exhibition features large-scale photographic prints that capture the ethereal beauty of New Mexico’s cloudscapes and ancient cliff dwellings—images both timeless and timely, taken during and following the global pandemic shutdown.

ARRIBA …EL CIELO …the sky
ABAJO … LA TIERRA …the earth
AL CENTRO … EL CORAZON … the heart
PA DENTRO … LA ALMA … the soul

– Latin American Toast

The exhibition title, derived from a traditional Latin American toast, frames the show as a meditation on sky (el cielo), earth (la tierra), heart (el corazón), and soul (la alma). The photographs, grand in scale and contemplative in nature, invite viewers to step into a landscape of spiritual magnitude and raw beauty.

This work is not merely landscape photography—it is a visual philosophy.

Baker notes of the work, “Landscape photography is a process of meditative outlook and rapid reflex… akin to a martial art. These prints are intended to be immersive—so you can walk into them. Let the beauty distract you, so you can remember what is really important.”

Following his 2022 exhibition Gaia’s Rant—a fierce reflection on environmental destruction—this new body of work offers both a reckoning and a reprieve. Created amid the isolation of the pandemic and against the backdrop of global crisis, these images channel both reverence and urgency. They serve as what the artist calls “a sledgehammer of love,” challenging us to reconnect with the natural world and to
protect what remains.

Jeff Baker was born in Dallas, Texas in 1952. He found himself in Gary Winogrand’s photography courses at UT Austin in the mid 1970s, listening to and being critiqued by Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Larry Fink and John Szarkowski among others, who came to lecture. Honing his craft through 35 years of editorial and advertising assignments, he continually worked on personal projects, including large-format ethnographic studies in South America and Indonesia, landscapes informed by the relationship of man to his surroundings, and still-lifes of industrial-age tools that reference the personalities of their inventors. His later work looks at urban encryption as a means of communication within a neighborhood’s core population and more recently, he has been abstracting those elements to concentrate on color, form and gesture, giving new life to those public communications. Baker lives and works in Costa Rica

1.Soomin Jung, Tamed, 2023, graphite & colored pencil on paper, 11×14″
2. Jeff Baker, El Silencio – Taos Gorge, 2021, pigment print on Dibond, 36×108″

Conduit Gallery
1626 C Hi Line Drive. Dallas, TX 75207  214.939.0064

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 AM – 5 PM
conduitgallery.com