Hit to the Soul // Rahn Marion

Sheet Cake Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Rahn Marion (Memphis, TN), Hit to the Soul. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 26 from 5 - 7:30 PM and on view through October 31, 2026, with an artist talk on Saturday, October 17 at 1 PM.

Drawing from Medieval manuscripts, Americana, and mythological and religious symbolism, Rahn Marion constructs a visual world where the sacred and the profane, the historical and the contemporary, continually collapse into one another. Rooted in his experience as a queer Black man from the South, his paintings search for the sacred not as something fixed or inherited, but as something continually made and remade. 

New works in Hit to the Soul are informed by the philosophy of jazz: a structure that creates freedom rather than containing it. Recurring figures, shapes, and rhythms establish a visual throughline across the exhibition, while color and gesture move with the spontaneity of improvisation. Swaths of saturated color ground and frame intricate figures and patterns, producing a tension between intensity and tranquility, restraint and excess. 

Marion’s paintings borrow freely from the visual language of art and religious histories, returning to figures such as Mary Magdalene, early Christian saints, and Medieval court jesters. Yet these inherited images are never presented as relics. They are pulled forward into the present: saints and celestial figures appear with hi-top fades, gestures, and subtle references to queer culture, their bodies inhabiting a space that is simultaneously ancient and unmistakably contemporary. 

Moths recur throughout the exhibition as quiet agents of transformation. Night creatures often eclipsed by the more celebrated butterfly, they occupy a different relationship to light, darkness, and visibility. Their metamorphosis echoes the paintings’ preoccupation with becoming, moving between identities, states, histories, and worlds. Their repeated forms provide a subtle visual anchor amid Marion’s shifting fields of color, their bodies carrying an intimacy that feels both fragile and uncanny. 

Throughout Hit to the Soul, Marion creates a space where symbols are loosened from their histories and made strange again. His paintings hold devotion alongside irreverence, beauty alongside the grotesque. They ask what might happen when the images we inherit are not simply preserved, but inhabited, questioned, and transformed. The answer is a body of work alive with rhythm and possibility—paintings that seem to offer their revelations slowly, then all at once, like a sudden hit to the soul.