DIVINE TRAGEDY

Sarah Jamison, Jake Lahah, and Victoria Shaheen

Runs / January 9 – February 1, 2026

Reception / Friday, January 9, 6-9 PM

Hours: Sat-Sun from 2-6 PM

Opening the 2026 exhibition season, Grizzly Grizzly presents Divine Tragedy, featuring works by Sarah Jamison, Jake Lahah, and Victoria Shaheen. Across ceramic sculpture, painting and drawing, and textiles, the exhibition brings together research-driven and material-focused practices that examine personal and collective histories, and the uneasy relationship between beauty, power, and survival. Each artist recontextualizes ephemera to investigate what it means to be seen, understood, and valued in a world of shifting symbols and fragmented narratives. 

Victoria Shaheen’s neon-infused ceramics invite close looking, revealing multiple perspectives in a single form. Her two-sided viewing system suggests how visions of the present (reality) and future never fully align, creating tension between utopia and dystopia. Drawing on imagery of martyrdom, her Saint Sebastian-inspired troll doll atop a monumental conical form moves seamlessly between the playful and the desperately serious. Shaheen’s glowing sculptures illuminate the contradictions within systems of power; an exposed laborious thumb print pushing clay over and over, forced to coexist with moments of mass production. 

This sense of contradiction is echoed in Sarah Jamison’s photo-realist paintings and drawings in acrylic and color pencil. Her focus on imagery emblematic of 1990s femininity examines how womanhood is constructed, circulated, and consumed. Using familiar cultural symbols, such as the iconic Princess Diana Beanie Baby, Jamison positions femininity as a system of representation rather than an inherent identity, shaped by expectation, visibility, and control. In Divine Tragedy, each artist considers who gets to define worth in a world that prioritizes conformity.

Jake Lahah’s work bridges these ideas, using mixed-media quilts and textile paintings and to interrogate the fraught intersections of queer identity, labor, and health. Inspired by the urgency of navigating medical spaces where information is often fragmented or miscommunicated, Lahah layers fabric, texture, and symbolic imagery to reflect the disconnect between knowledge and lived experience. Within Divine Tragedy, he mirrors Shaheen’s critique of systems and Jamison’s examination of identity and visibility, particularly for those living on the margins. With motifs that borrow from the zodiac, his work proposes care, survival, and re-appropriation as forms of resistance. 

With a nod to Longfellow’s 1871 poem, in elegiac dialogue with Dante’s descent into hell, the artists in Divine Tragedy explore the human condition. K-pop fandoms, Barbie dolls, butterflies, tarot readings, and neon lights become both playful gestures and tools for critique. Divine Tragedy reflects the artists’ exploration of systems of control, exploitation, and erasure; systems that both promise and deny hope.

Artist Bios:

Sarah Jamison (Washington, DC) creates mixed media work that reflects, confronts, and dignifies the female experience. Her practice examines cultural imagery and systems of representation, and more recently has shifted toward a more embodied, materially driven conceptual approach beyond colored pencil.Jamison’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at IA&A at Hillyer, Latela Curatorial, Capitol Hill Arts Workshop (all Washington, DC), and A Hurd Gallery (Albuquerque, NM) and has appeared in numerous group exhibitions domestically and internationally. Her work has been featured in publications including Smithsonian Folklife. Jamison is a faculty member at Washington Studio School and Capitol Hill Arts Workshop and received her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art + Design. 

Jake Lahah (Richmond, VA) is an artist, researcher, and educator whose work examines labor, queerness, and ecology through installation, printmedia, and craft-based methodologies. His practice considers visual culture and data as forms of testimony to lived experience. Lahah has presented solo exhibitions at IA&A at Hillyer (Washington, DC), Skylab Gallery (Columbus Ohio), and Temple Contemporary (Philadelphia, PA), with group exhibitions at the ICA Baltimore (Baltimore, MD), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Page Bond Gallery (Richmond, VA), and ADA Gallery (Richmond, VA). He is currently an Assistant Adjunct Professor at Old Dominion University and is a recipient of the Gay Cultural Studies Creative Research Grant.. Lahah received a BFA from George Mason University and an MFA in Print from Tyler School of Art + Architecture at Temple University. 

Victoria Shaheen  (Brooklyn, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores modern utopian ideals, industrial manufacturing processes, and systems of value embedded in raw materials. Working in ceramics and sculpture, she combines hand-built forms with references to mass production. Shaheen has participated in residencies including Art Farm (Marquette, NE), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME), Corben’s Estate Art Center (Auckland, New Zealand), and the Incubator Residency at Talking Dolls (Detroit, MI). Her work has been exhibited at Wasserman Projects (Detroit, MI), Transformer (Washington, DC), John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), Arrowmont School of Crafts (Gatlinburg, TN), and Cranbrook Art Museum (Detroit, MI). She received her BFA from the Corcoran College Of Art + Design and her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and currently serves as Faculty and Fabrications Manager at Greenwich House Pottery in New York City.