Whitehot: Eden Seifu and Carolyn Oberst's A New Sacred at Storage
By Maria Lopez Farias
May 2025
In A New Sacred, on view at Storage, NYC (March 14th - May 3rd 2025), artists Eden Seifu (b. 1996) and Carolyn Oberst (b. 1946) stage a visual dialogue across generations, one that focuses on spirituality and the feminine divine. Through a charged entanglement of temporal rhythm and religious iconography, the exhibition lingers on the fragile boundary between the sacred and the secular, asking what forms of beauty and belief remain in times of ecological crisis. It seduces the viewer into imagining multiple ways of accounting for time’s passage and the world’s fragmented levity.
In both Seifu and Oberst’s works, you find the seed of an idea: the origin of our natural desires to uncover truth, the mythic image of our mortality and to give light to our grief. These questions take form immediately upon entering the exhibition space. You are met with Seifu’s The Angel Of Pilgrimage and Oberst’s Burning the Tree of Life, which stand about a foot apart, occupying the longest wall in the gallery. Oberst’s date-palm tree burns in the form of a martyr, a monument in the shape of a cross, its crown over the sky and edges of purple mountains at a distance, the braided tree engulfed by the luscious green landscape which is no longer an untouched paradise. The question of whether the palm standing is at the axis of survival or sacrifice surfaces. In Seifu’s painting you see a holy child, where breath meets brush, haloed with soft, fragile and pastel whirlwinds in the shape of an arch, a shell resting between his fingertips. Their work inscribes itself in a world full of appearances, in an America that is spectacle and play. By making evidence of this reality, both works are tainted by the embellishment of these poetic devices, punning at the verge of deliberate ambiguity and irony.
As you turn to the front, the room unfolds juggling between despair and spectacle– you see a dying angel, a tree of worried birds, and falling petals. In the far-left corner of the room, the haunted image of a woman recoils, terrified by her own reflection. Punk, chic and mad, together, these paintings from the exhibit’s first room.
As you move into the second room of the exhibit, you are met with Seifu’s canvases, a series that conjures sonic transfigurations and the crystallization of chants– and Oberst’s quiet and melancholic depictions. While Seifu’s paintings find rhythm, as you can almost hear their movement: the friction of fabric brushing shuffled arms, the bells tinkling in the tremor of a broken heart in Eden The Fool Begs A Street Cat To Love Her, Oberst’s works sit in deliberate silence. Her paintings make you hold your breath; Oberst’s pieces offer no music, but instead invite the audience to take on the role of witness. In Showgirl, an orchestral explosion of the world’s origin unfolds, when Seifu paints her subjects into existence at that same moment in time Shirley Bassey sings at her Las Vegas residency at the Hollywood Theater in the MGM Grand hotel-casino in February 2000. The world ignites into being, the Big Bang. All together, all at once. The imagery, both life and death side by side, becomes an invocation.
Seifu’s painting illuminates a type of fantasy that is in touch with this very human madness, it is comical and it allows you to cry and laugh at once. Oberst’s, by contrast, echo grief with a quiet, unrelenting urgency. In The Crosses We Bear (1990–1994), there is empathetic pain, and a warning. Over three decades, the series reveals how the seemingly banal elements of the natural world have long been tethered to fragility. Her work exposes the slow violence of the contemporary condition, where material natural history is raptured into crucifixion. Oberst emphasizes a concern central to today’s panorama: that beginnings and endings are no longer sufficient to hold the weight of our unfolding tragedies, a tragedy that comes clearest in its slowness, how long it has taken to extract and deplete these landscapes. Viewing her work requires an oscillation between attempting to navigate the echo of grief and latent devastation while also taking in the intricate beauty in the crucifixion of life itself.
There’s something to be said about the glamour and the feminine, the beauty in the frivolous and exotic, the dramatic and camp, how they speak about the universe, delivered in a palette full of bright and dark colors… In Seifu’s words: “The mind can be misled but the spirit can’t”. Together, their work challenges narratives of permanence. It does not restore faith in progress or the image as authority. Instead, it invites us into a space where time rages, where truth falls, and where meaning is neither granted nor denied but asked for– again and again. A New Sacred is not a return to belief but a choreography of vulnerability, a temporal entanglement of myth and refusal. What is holy here is not certainty, but hope. What is sacred is what still pulses.