There May Not Be a Bottom: New Landscapes | Lori Kent

New work by Lori Kent explores collapse, myth, and the poetics of disappearance

Akureyri, Iceland — New York–based visual artist and writer Lori Kent presents There May Not Be a Bottom: New Landscapes, an exhibition that transforms the geological phenomenon of sinkholes into a meditation on instability, fear, and imaginative survival.

Raised in the American South, Kent grew up near landscapes marked by sudden collapse — holes that appeared without warning, swallowing ground and memory. In this new body of work, the sinkhole becomes both image and metaphor. Small mixed-media paintings on linen isolate imagined apertures in the landscape: black portals that resist depth and measurement. At once seductive and threatening, they suggest a terrain where disappearance can feel as much like refuge as catastrophe.

The exhibition situates these works within a broader field of myth and spiritual logic. Kent draws on the cultural atmosphere of her birthplace, New Orleans — a city shaped by extreme climate, layered histories, and Haitian and West African cosmologies where magic remains a practical language for survival. This worldview resonates with Iceland’s own volatile terrain, where rupture is not anomaly but condition.

Alongside the sinkhole paintings, found images and assembled objects extend the exhibition into a space of tension between fear and hope. Rather than offering resolution, the works hold open a question: what forms of imagination become possible when the ground itself cannot be trusted.

Artist Bio

Lori Kent is a New Orleans–raised, New York–based visual artist working at the intersection of nature, care, and imagined landscapes. Her paintings and small objects construct idealized or impossible ecologies that invite stillness while confronting the urgency of climate and environmental loss. Through studio practice and community engagement, her work asks how art might cultivate more tender relationships with the living world.

A former Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College and graduate of Columbia University, Kent is a recipient of Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants and a Fulbright Research Fellowship. Her practice moves between advocacy, teaching, and the poetics of landscape.

Exhibition Information

Where
Deiglan Gilfélagið
Kaupvangsstræti 23
600 Akureyri, Iceland

When
February 21–23, 2026

Opening Reception
February 21, 4–6pm
Artist talk at 5pm

Gallery Hours
February 22–23
Noon–3pm