Gallery Sonder is pleased to present The Thing In Itself , a group exhibition on view from November 21 to February 16, 2026. The exhibition features works by Ruben Benjamin, Jae Ford, Noosha Golab, Gary Lang, Sheng Lor, Susan Maddux, Josh Sperling, and Pilar Wiley.
“We can never know the thing in itself, we know only its appearance, shaped by the conditions of our perception.”
-Immanuel Kant
The Thing In Itself, features eight contemporary artists exploring how form and color shape the way we encounter reality. Drawing on Immanuel Kant’s idea that we can never know objects as they truly are - only as they appear through the filters of our senses and mind - the exhibition reflects on the gap between perception and truth. What we see is never the thing itself, but the world as refracted through feeling, intuition, and thought.
Through painting, sculpture, textile, and relief, these artists test the boundaries between material and meaning. Their works suggest that perception is not passive but creative - that seeing is an act of translation, and each surface becomes a record of that process.
Each work functions as both presence and veil, a reflection of experience and a record of encounter. Every hue and form is tempered by structures of cognition that shape interaction. We do not apprehend the thing itself; we apprehend its translation, its echo, the trace of consciousness made tangible.
To engage with these works is to enter a dialogue between sensation and understanding, between the physical and the sensory. The artists trace this boundary with both precision and surrender, revealing how deeply our experience of the external is shaped by the internal.
The Thing In Itself invites viewers to consider not what is seen, but how seeing unfolds. It is an exhibition about awareness as creation—about how each engagement becomes a negotiation between vision and thought, between what exists and what is felt. What remains, as Kant reminds us, is not the thing itself, but the shimmering trace of experience, the color of consciousness made tangible.
