Gallery 901
HOPE WASHINUSHI
August 2 - 31, 2025
Dark Night of the Soul
Opening Reception - August 2, 2025 | 5pm - 7pm
Dark night of the soul is a period of profound emotional and spiritual crisis.....death, loneliness, isolation, emptiness, worthlessness & despair where it disconnects and engulfs the soul. You embrace and engage with the darkness, feeling its comfort as it begins to connect and deeply root into your being. Tethered and bound, it shreds everything you love as the darkness takes it away, blinding everything from the light.
The darkness doesn’t just come upon you, but infiltrates you, offering its cold comfort. Not as a visitor, but as something that becomes part of you. That feeling of being bound to it, like the light is a distant memory you’re not even sure you want anymore… because the pain has become familiar, almost sacred in its own way.
It’s an intimacy of suffering—where the soul is undergoing a quiet, invisible death, and yet, sometimes that total obliteration is the beginning of something unnameable, something more true than anything that came before - Truth, realization & Love.
Artist Statement – Hope Washinushi
Hope Washinushi is a graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied foundry and fabric printing. She is the owner of Yasuko Design, creating murals, mosaics, and fabricated art for clients across the Chicagoland area. She also serves as the Creative Director for Open Studio Project, where art is a tool for healing and connection.
This is my first solo exhibition — a deeply personal offering shaped by grief, resilience, and love. It holds the weight of caring for aging parents through their final days, the quiet ache of watching children navigate mental health struggles, separation and the heavy shadow cast by Metastatic Breast Cancer.
For a long time, I tucked these emotions into compartments, hidden and unspoken. But something within has stirred — a whisper urging me to open those sealed spaces. Through this work, I begin to sift through the darkness, to honour it and to let in the light.
This is not just art. This is release. This is remembrance. This is the beginning of healing.