Sheet Cake Gallery is proud to announce the gallery's debut participation in The Armory Show 2025, a cornerstone of New York’s cultural landscape since its founding in 1994. The gallery will exhibit in the Presents section, which highlights emerging gallery programs through  solo or dual presentations of recent work. Sheet Cake’s booth will feature works by Coulter Fussell (Water Valley, MS) and Rahn Marion (Memphis, TN), two singular artists who blend craft traditions and folklore with thoughtful contemporary practices to create work with a sense of otherworldliness that remains grounded by the social and cultural realities of the American South.

Together, Marion and Fussell represent the breadth, grit, and ingenuity of art made in and of the South. Their work is generous and tender, offering unique artistic perspectives that look backward and forward simultaneously. 

Coulter Fussell creates dream-like objects that blur perspectives of love, violence, and place in the rural South through her idiosyncratic quilting practice. Fussell's ongoing War Quilt and River Raft Quilt series will be featured, demonstrating the complex and fantastical nature of her work. Her War Quilts are a rumination on love, conflict and violence, juxtaposing intimate, domestic relationships with large-scale global conflicts. In contrast, the River Raft Quilts are outfitted for personal odysseys à la Huckleberry Finn — equipped with fishing gear, escape tunnels, and guide-maps. Using exclusively donated materials defying conventional quilting techniques and patterns, Fussell pulls from the history of the materials and creates something new and deeply layered. 

Rahn Marion employs an expansive visual language that references Medieval manuscripts, Americana, and mythological and religious symbolism, all rooted in his perspective as a queer Black man. Marion searches for the sacred in his work, imbuing the paintings with blessings and revelations. New work for this presentation incorporates all of these elements as well as his self-taught woodworking practice, lending a tactile, devotional quality to his paintings. Drawing on representations of the sun and Seraphim in particular— historically significant motifs across various religions, cultures and time periods— Marion queers these images and grounds them in a contemporary context, forging his own Southern folklore. His works depict figures and places that exist both within and beyond our known reality — tender, radiant, and mythic. 

Fussell and Marion each draw from personal and regional histories to create work that is emotionally charged, spiritually rich, and materially dense, mining both the real and imagined South to create new mythologies for the present.