The Light Comes in the Shape of the Voice

Hair + Nails is pleased to present The Light Comes in the Shape of the Voice, a two-person show of drawings by Hannah Motzel Brown and Jonathan Herrera Soto. This is the first time these two artists have exhibited together. Both artists share deep ties with the Hair + Nails community in Minneapolis. This suite of new drawings by Hannah Motzel Brown was built over a year of the artist’s rigorous practice in her home studio in Los Angeles. Working with mechanical pencil on paper, her rendering process holds space to filter, soften, distort, and reflect on her inner world and its external manifestations. Expressive flowers, ripe glistening fruit, poetic shadows, and dense patterns are all symbolic imagery used for analyzing the complexity of identity, the feminine, a deeply personal narrative. Proportion and scale are crudely depicted while texture and detail are approached with precision. A quiet tension between fantasy and realism; a museum of moments that the breeze passes through, where the flowers are always in bloom. Jonathan Herrera Soto shares an iteration of his Deterritorialization Studies that depict storms within the folds of the composition plane. His drawings are complicated by marks made when folding the drawing into a paper airplane, creating contour lines when he unfolds that appear to render the initial scaffolding for a single-point perspective drawing; the vanishing point always placed square in the center of the composition. Herrera Soto reflects: “The location where we first learn how to draw from the single point perspective is one of the initial sites where we acquire the tools to render an image convincing. A procedure we learn and then deploy to convince others of something real — a visual system that invests in remembering and obeying certain rules in compositional space. Within the genocide of early America, Spaniards created maps to render legible their dominion, to visually authenticate an outline of their possessions in the New World. Indigenous peoples also make maps of the world. The differences in perspective meant maps were made rooted in vastly incompatible understandings of space, culture, community, and reality. Visual space literally looks different depending on whether you live in a place, or attempt to convince others you own it.” Hannah Motzel Brown (b. 1994, MN) lives and works in Los Angeles in a home studio. She graduated from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2016, studying illustration. Working primarily with graphite, her drawings are an introspective analysis of domesticity and the natural world. Hannah has exhibited with Hair + Nails at Felix Fair (Los Angeles, 2025) and in her solo show “Personal Record” at Hair + Nails Minneapolis in 2020. Jonathan Herrera Soto (b. 1994) holds a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from the Yale School of Art. Recent solo exhibitions of Herrera Soto’s include “Twice the Legal Minute” at Hartford University, “All at Once” at Brown University, and “In Between/Underneath” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He is a recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, Yale Prison Education Initiative Fellowship, and the Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts at the Hartford Art School. Jonathan has exhibited with Hair + Nails in group shows at Feria Material (Mexico City, 2026), “Together” (H+N Minneapolis, 2024), “Freshly For You” (H+N NYC, 2024), “Painting Show” (2022), “The Human Scale” (Rochester Art Center, 2022), NADA Chicago Invitational (Chicago, 2019), and his solo show “Always Tomorrow (Siempre Mañana)” (2021).

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