Lauren Boilini: Celestial Navigation in the Nichols Gallery
- SJIMA
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
On view March 6 – June 1, 2026 | Nichols Gallery | San Juan Islands Museum of Art
Stand in front of one of Lauren Boilini's paintings long enough and something shifts. What begins as a swirling mass of birds, insects, or fish — dense, insistent, almost overwhelming — gradually resolves into something else: a rhythm, a pattern, a pulse. That transformation is the whole point.
Celestial Navigation, Boilini's first solo museum exhibition, fills SJIMA's Nichols Gallery with large-scale oil paintings on linen that are as intellectually rich as they are visually arresting. The work asks us to sit with excess — to look at abundance until it starts to come apart at the seams — and in doing so, to recognize something uncomfortably familiar about the culture we live in.
A World Built on Accumulation
Boilini's artist statement is a provocation:
"This gluttony is reflected back to us: we are a hedonistic society, always looking for more until 'the more we are looking for' loses its meaning."
That sentence is the engine of the entire exhibition. Her canvases — most larger than her own wingspan, many taller than her height — are built through an act of accumulation. Birds pile upon birds. Feathers multiply into fields of motion. Fish crowd every inch of the picture plane. The Greeks, Boilini has noted, had a word for the compulsion to cram spaces full of objects. Her paintings enact that impulse and, in enacting it, expose it.
What makes her work so compelling is that she doesn't moralize. The paintings don't scold. They seduce — and then they make you reckon with the seduction. Excess, in Boilini's hands, is both beautiful and unsettling, which is precisely where the most interesting art lives.
The Studio as Island, the Island as World
Behind the lush surfaces of Celestial Navigation is a deeply committed narrative practice. Boilini's studio is not simply a place where she makes paintings — it is, in her telling, an island. Years ago, she developed a fictional backstory for her entire body of work: a world set on an island where only males of different species survived. Part Lord of the Flies, part The Odyssey (with Boilini casting a knowingly critical eye on the male-dominated canon), this ongoing narrative gives her work a connective tissue and a sense of place that spans paintings, drawings, and artist books.
The fish painting in Celestial Navigation — titled Wet Into Wet — is chronologically among the first works in the show. Boilini began it at the end of 2020, as the pandemic settled in. Her response to the global crisis? To paint fish. Relentlessly. For about six months, she kept building the composition, she has said, painting her way through the uncertainty. After fish came moths, then snakes — a kind of species migration through the studio that mirrors the evolutionary arc she traces in her fictional world.
"The Studio Becomes the Island"
"Walking into a painting, because they're large, you walk into it and it surrounds you. Walking into a studio is kind of a world."
— Lauren Boilini, in conversation at SJIMA
That sense of immersion is not accidental. Boilini works at a scale she describes as movie scale — paintings large enough that she needs a ladder and scaffolding in her 20-by-20-foot Seattle studio. The canvases have no frames, their edges rough and unfinished, inviting you to feel like you've stepped into something still unfolding.
Her process is as layered as the paintings themselves. It begins with research — reading, drawing, making collages — before moving into studies on paper, sometimes large-format works nearly four feet by eight feet. She experiments with materials, including fluorescent oil paints and neon pigments she first explored in watercolor and gouache before bringing them into her oils. The studio, she has said, is a laboratory.
On the Title — and the Moths
The title Celestial Navigation carries more than one meaning, as Boilini's titles tend to. It is, she has explained, a reference to a favorite episode of The West Wing. It also connects to a piece of writing by Midwestern author Melissa Faliveno, about a woman moving through a breakup who finds unexpected comfort in a moth infestation — drawn to the lights in her room, these creatures become companions in loneliness, their movement through the dark a kind of navigation.
That image — of animals orienting themselves by light, of humans looking to the stars, of all of us finding our bearings in the dark — runs through the whole exhibition. The large moth painting in the show, If Your Mother Only Knew, and a painting of lightning bugs (fireflies, as they're known in the Midwest, where Boilini grew up in Bloomington, Indiana) carry that emotional charge. Those fireflies, she has said, feel like her own star charts — her own small lights in the night.
Background and Ongoing Work
Lauren Boilini holds a BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has participated in artist residencies across the United States and internationally, including Can Serrat in Spain, Jentel Arts, the Studios of Key West, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her installations and commissioned public works are installed throughout the country.
Currently based in Seattle, Boilini teaches painting and drawing at The Evergreen State College. She is also at work on a public art project for SeaTac's South Concourse in collaboration with artist Henry Cowdery — a continuation of her commitment to art that lives in the world, not only on gallery walls.
Her ongoing artist book project — a graphic novel-style series rooted in the fictional island narrative — has grown to two completed volumes, with a third underway. Copies are on view in the gallery during the run of Celestial Navigation.
See the Work. Hear from the Artist.
Celestial Navigation is Boilini's first solo museum exhibition, and the Nichols Gallery — SJIMA's largest and most expansive space — gives her work the room it demands.
Celestial Navigation is on view March 6 through June 1, 2026 in the Nichols Gallery at SJIMA. The museum is located at 540 Spring Street, Friday Harbor, and is open Friday through Monday, 11 AM – 5 PM. General admission is $10; free for visitors under 18. Mondays are pay-what-you-like.
SPONSORS:
Honeywell Foundation, Mark Torrance Foundation, Town of Friday Harbor, San Juan County. In-Kind Sponsors: Browne’s Home Center, Harbor Rental, Printonyx, Terry Ogle Painting
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