VEIL SEASON: A Group Exhibition at Mortal Machine Gallery

Opening Reception: Friday, October 16, 2026 | 7–10 PM
On View: October 16 – November 6, 2026
Mortal Machine Gallery | 940 Royal Street, New Orleans

This October, Mortal Machine Gallery presents VEIL SEASON, a group exhibition bringing together six artists whose practices inhabit the strange territory between the beautiful and the unsettling.

Featuring new work by Erika Sanada, Calvin Ma, Rebecca Chaperon, Caitlin Hackett, Gerlanda di Francia, and Louis Braquet, the exhibition moves through surrealism, mythology, nature, transformation, and the uncanny.

The title VEIL SEASON takes its inspiration from the ancient idea that autumn, particularly the weeks surrounding Halloween is a time when the boundary separating the visible world from the unseen grows thin.

Erika Sanada’s delicate sculptural creatures balance innocence and unease, creating beings that appear simultaneously vulnerable, beautiful and otherworldly. Calvin Ma’s figurative sculptures explore identity, isolation and the complicated architecture we construct around ourselves. Caitlin Hackett draws upon the natural world to create elaborate hybrid creatures where mutation and mythology collide.

The paintings of Gerlanda di Francia occupy their own dreamlike psychological spaces, while Louis Braquet builds mysterious visual narratives from symbolism, atmosphere and the uncanny.

And in the work of Rebecca Chaperon, whose painting serves as the featured image for the exhibition, seemingly idyllic landscapes open onto stranger worlds. Figures, plants and distant environments coexist according to an internal logic that feels somewhere between a dream, a memory and a folktale.

Together, these six artists create a world in which the line between reality and imagination becomes increasingly difficult to locate.

VEIL SEASON opens Friday, October 16 from 7–10 PM at Mortal Machine Gallery in the historic French Quarter. The exhibition will remain on view through November 6, 2026.

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Calvin Ma | Think Big