An impressive line-up greets visitors at Momentum Gallery in downtown Asheville this fall. The collection presented highlights phenomenal painting in solo exhibitions from four of the gallery's biggest stars! Two of Momentum Gallery's inaugural artists – Samanatha Bates and Ron Isaacs – join Paul Sattler and John Cleaveland with imaginative works that range from intimate to epic, at once narrative and emotive, introspective, and nostalgic.
Ron Isaacs creates trompe l’oeil sculptures that invite you to look twice. Using birch plywood, acrylic paint, and found objects, he transforms everyday materials—like vintage clothing, leaves, and sticks—into lifelike compositions that blur the line between painting and sculpture.
"I am still fascinated by the old, simple idea of resemblance," he explains, "the very first idea of art after tools and shelter: That an object made of one material can take on the outward appearance and therefore some of the 'reality' of another"
His work is a visual poem, gently illustrative and wonderfully mysterious, encouraging viewers to pause and discover hidden stories within each piece.
Samantha Bates grew up surrounded by the forests and trails of the Pacific Northwest, and that sense of landscape and memory continues to shape her work today. Her art is made through thousands of small, careful marks — tiny dashes, stitches, and loops — that slowly build into larger images. The result feels both familiar and dreamlike, like catching a glimpse of a place you’ve known but can’t quite name.
“I make work that speaks to the personal relationship of images,” she says, “the recognition of the familiar in an intangible and reaching sort of way.”
Her process is inspired in part by family traditions of handwork, like cross-stitching, where every mark carries both time and care. In her own words, her pieces are about “glimpses, impressions that build to an awakening at the edges of recollection… about coming home in a small way.”
Through this blend of repetition, memory, and landscape, Samantha Bates invites viewers to pause, look closely, and perhaps find a moment of quiet recognition within her work.
John L. Cleaveland Jr. paints landscapes that feel timeless. Known for his breathtakingly realistic oil paintings, he offers viewers a glimpse into iconic southern scenes as well as vast pastoral expanses of the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia. This exhibition, The Nature of the Boy: Landscapes from the childhood of Jimmy Carter, is a collection of works from South Georgia exhibited earlier this year at the Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta. Reimagined at Momentum with five new paintings, the works depict areas within walking distance of the president's home as a boy – the fields he helped work, the creeks where he fished, and the roads he journeyed.
“My paintings are specific expressions of places I’ve been to that I love, that I’m connected to, or that I’m pushed to some expression by,” he explains. “I’m not necessarily looking for a thing so much as I’m looking for a feeling—something that might tell a greater truth but in a very simple way.”
Cleaveland's work invites you to linger, to feel the presence of the places he paints, and to experience the world through his eyes.
