Space 776 is pleased to present Synthetic sanctuaries, a group exhibition featuring Beom Jun, Song E Yoon, and Rob Pruitt, on view from August 14 to September 10, 2025, at its New York location. Bringing together three distinct yet resonant artistic voices, the exhibition explores the concept of sanctuary through material, emotional, and philosophical registers, offering visitors a space of reflection, rupture, and renewal.

In a time when emotional fatigue and fractured perception have become the default conditions of daily life, the desire for sanctuary intensifies—not as a return to an idealized nature or utopian escape, but as a space built from fragments, memory, and the echoes of discarded meaning. Synthetic sanctuaries combines three distinct artistic practices—Beom Jun, Song E Yoon, and Rob Pruitt—to explore what it means to create refuge from within the imperfect, the residual, and the provisional. This is not a sanctuary born of wholeness, but one that arises through composition, rupture, and resonance.

Beom Jun’s paintings are rooted in existential inquiry, shaped by a prolonged physical pain confronting him with mortality. His multilayered compositions, often built from transparent washes depicting mountains, oceans, or cosmic elements, are less about landscape and more about the metaphysical structure of perception. In his Coexistence series, the repeated act of applying and erasing paint becomes a meditative process that allows invisible images to surface and emptiness to transform into presence. The sharp lines trailing his canvases recall ancient mythologies in which the world is born through the rupture of the void. Here, painting becomes a dimension of emergence—a state rather than a surface.

Song E Yoon expands the idea of sanctuary through temporal materiality. Drawing from Eastern philosophy, quantum physics, and the symbolic weight of capital, her installations incorporate IV bags, ink, and salt to create living systems of flow and decay. Her concept of the “Moist Hand”, derived from Roy Ascott’s Moist media, reimagines the intersection between technology and emotion as a soft, permeable interface. In her works, time is not linear but accumulative, tactile, and saturating. Viewers do not merely see her installations; they experience the slow rehydration of their perception. The sanctuary she offers is not a shield, but a space of atmospheric absorption—where emotion condenses and meaning diffuses.

Rob Pruitt offers a counterpoint by turning the notion of the sanctuary on its head. His contribution to the exhibition features a selection of works curated initially and presented through his Flea market project. This ongoing social installation collapses the boundaries between art, commerce, authorship, and anonymity. Recontextualized within Synthetic Sanctuaries, these works—from emotional paintings and discarded objects to daily visual records—speak to the spiritual condition of late capitalism. His Suicide paintings, Date paintings, and Month of sunsets series transform ephemeral feelings and fleeting time into visceral color fields, each imbued with personal resonance and collective familiarity. What was once spontaneous and informal becomes a deeply coded vulnerability archive here.

Pruitt’s inclusion raises a critical question: Can sanctuary be made from the detritus of everyday life? Can it exist in the tension between sincerity and irony, commodified sentiment and genuine affect? His works suggest yes—not by offering transcendence but by rooting sanctuary in the chaotic intimacy of the ordinary.

Together, these three artists construct an exhibition that is less about protection and more about permeability. The sanctuaries they present are not fixed sites, but temporal, affective, and material conditions. Their practices ask viewers to reconsider what it means to feel, remember, and remain intact in a world that often demands disassembly.

Synthetic sanctuaries are not refuges from reality but reassemblies of it. They are spaces where the fractured becomes formative, slowness becomes resistance, and emotion—unfixed, ambiguous, circulating—becomes architecture. In this exhibition, we find that the possibility of sanctuary is not elsewhere; it is here, in the remnants of what we carry, what we shed, and what we choose to make sacred again.