The Only Lasting Truth
Date: September 4, 2026 - December 24, 2026
Gallery: Entel Family Gallery
The Only Lasting Truth takes its title from the words of author Octavia Butler: “The only lasting truth is change.” Featuring artists Katina Bitsicas, Deon Blackwell, Samo Davis & Petra Gurin, Kristin Roles, John Steck Jr., and Eszter Sziksz, this exhibition brings together artworks that are created to transform, deteriorate, and ultimately disappear over the course of the exhibition.
Rather than resisting the passage of time, the artists embrace change as an essential part of the work itself. Through processes of crumbling, fading, melting, and decay, each artwork exists in a constant state of becoming, never appearing exactly the same from one visit to the next. The exhibition invites viewers to reconsider traditional ideas of permanence, preservation, and what it means for an artwork to endure.
By placing fragility and impermanence at the center of the experience, The Only Lasting Truth reflects on larger cycles of growth, loss, mortality, and renewal. These works do not seek to escape change, but to reveal its beauty, inevitability, and transformative power.
Katina Bitsicas Bio
Katina Bitsicas is a Greek-American new media artist who utilizes video, installation, projection mapping, BioArt, EcoArt, photography, and performance in her artworks to translate grief, the archive, and memory through material, microscopic, and digital tools. Her works bridge an interdisciplinary connection between the arts and sciences, combining found materials and archives with photographic and microscopic imagery of natural ecosystems. Decay is reinterpreted through the lens of nature’s cyclical processes and then paralleled with grief, further exploring the science of decay and its relationship to material history. She has exhibited worldwide, including The Armory Show, Candela Books + Gallery, Plexus Projects, Wheaton Biennial curated by Legacy Russell, CADAF: Digital Art Month Paris, Torrance Art Museum, Hatch Art Center, Eye’s Walk Festival, 57th Dimitria Festival in Thessaloniki, HereArt, Art in Odd Places Orlando, Digital Graffiti Festival, Indie Memphis Film Festival, St. Louis International Film Festival, and New Orleans Film Festival. In 2022, her artist book Luci: The Girl with Four Hearts was published with Flower Press. Notable residencies include Open Air Media Festival, University of Arkansas-Fort Smith Windgate AiR, UCSF Library, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prairie Ronde, and Hinge Arts at the Kirkbride. Katina received her BA from Kalamazoo College, Post-Bacc from SACI Florence, Italy, and MFA from the University of South Florida. She is an Associate Professor in the Media School and affiliate faculty in the Environment, Society, and Sustainability Institute at Indiana University-Bloomington.
Deon Blackwell Bio
Deon Blackwell was born in Pensacola, Florida and studied Music Performance and Studio Art at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. In 2007, Deon received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida focusing on sculpture with a primary medium of ceramics. His clay studio practice includes a wide variety of ceramic processes including: Raku, extrusion building, experimental glazing, kiln building and various decal, luster, and casting methods. Along with lectures for several ceramic institutions on his unorthodox processes, his various bodies of work have been exhibited across the country in solo galleries and private collections. Since receiving his MFA, Deon has taught art at the University of South Florida and Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver. He is currently the Adult Education Director for the Dunedin Fine Art Center in Dunedin Florida and works in his studio in Temple Terrace Florida.
Samo Davis Bio
Samo Davis (b.1985) is an interdisciplinary artist whose art practice includes sculpture, digital works, AR. Davis graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a B.A. in Liberal Arts focusing on Japanese translation, creative writing, and sculpture and from Parsons School of Design with an Associates Degree in Fashion Design. Davis has worked in fashion, graphic design, and marketing, and developed their love of VR/AR when working in real estate in New York City. Davis has shown works in London, New York, Tampa, and Sarasota, showcasing smaller works before developing larger installations. Davis is “multi-cultural kid” who was born in Japan and grew up in Tokyo, Singapore, and later, New York City before transplanting to Sarasota in 2018.
Petra Gurin Bio
Petra Gurin (b. 1978) is an environmental sustainability professional with a diverse background in health advocacy and communications, before becoming an artisan and collector of historical objects. Gurin has an Interior Design Diploma, degrees in Business Management, Economics, and Computer Programming. She received her B.A. in Anthropology from Oregon State University Summa Cum Laude, and a Master of Science in Environmental Sustainability from Everglades University. Her passion for the planet is illustrated through her environmental consulting and is showcased in her artistic practices through her use of natural materials such as wood, plants, and clay. Gurin’s work in photography, interior design, and advertising, has brought her all over the world. Gurin has been an avid collector of African and Asian art and has been known throughout Sarasota for establishing cultural connections to African artisans through her interior design company. Gurin was born in Hungary and has resided in Sarasota since 2003.
Kristin Roles Bio
Kristen recently relocated from Tampa to Albuquerque, where they continue to make pictures of the distances within communication.
Through the subjectivities of stewardship, they hope to become a prism for another’s archive and memory.
Kristen completed their MFA from the University of New Mexico in 2018 and has since facilitated photo courses at the University of South Carolina, the University of Tampa, and the University of South Florida, where they served as Visiting Assistant Professor for the 2024-2025 academic year. Kristen has been in residence with the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS for applied grief and bereavement research (London) and the School of Making Thinking (NY) to explore texts somatically and collaboratively. Their work has been shared online and in print. Recent exhibitions include Good Samaritans, a 10-years posthumous curation of Jaroslaw Studencki’s last body of work (2025); You Again and Me for the First Time with Tatiana Mesa Paján and Becca Wahl (2025); When Do We Decide to Give It All Away? with Patrick Carew (2024); and Desiring Production, curated by Jocelyn Chase (2023), all in Tampa. In 2021, Kristen co-curated an exhibition, Bodies for Scale (This Has Happened Many Times Before), at Goodyear Arts in Charlotte, NC, wherein the bridges between us did, in fact, hold.
John Steck Jr. Bio
John Steck Jr. is a visual artist and educator from Chicago, IL, currently residing in Baltimore, MD. He is a maker of photographic and ephemeral objects. Using light-sensitive emulsions and experimental processes, he creates images that fade or form over time, addressing our complex relationship with memory, time, and impermanence.
Steck has exhibited in 20 states and 7 countries. In the summer of 2026, he presented his project, In Search of Lost Lakes, at the Time & Entanglement conference of the International Society for the Study of Time, hosted at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia. His work was also featured in an accompanying exhibition at the University Museum of Contemporary Arts and Cultures in Cagliari. His recent solo exhibition, Come to Life, Again, took place in 2025 at the Norco Gallery Art Gallery in Norco, California. This exhibition highlighted five bodies of work, spanning over 12 years of his artistic practice. Steck has been featured in over fifty publications, including “The Art of Letting Go: An Interview with Two Ephemeral Artists” in Art21 Magazine. He has attended artist residencies in Iceland, Ireland, Canada, Spain, and throughout the United States, including the Vermont Studio Center, Hatch Projects, and Latitude Artist Residency. He is also a member of the International Society for the Study of Time.
Steck is a first-generation graduate who received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. He also earned a Professional Program Certificate from the New England School of Photography and, before that, attended Wright Community College in Chicago. Steck is currently in his eleventh year as an educator and holds the positions of Photography Coordinator and Senior Lecturer for the Program for Visual Arts at Johns Hopkins University.
Eszter Sziksz Bio
Eszter Sziksz is a Hungarian artist whose work brings together printmaking, installation, sculpture, and video to explore memory, presence, and human connection. Many of her projects invite participation from the audience, allowing the work to unfold through physical interaction and shared experience. She has lived and worked internationally, with projects spanning Europe, Asia, and the United States.
Her work has been featured in exhibitions such as Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration at the Sarasota Art Museum, the International Print Triennial in Poland, the Boston Printmakers North American Print Biennial, juried by Elizabeth Rudy of the Harvard Art Museums, and the upcoming Human/Nature: Envisioning the Environment at the Castellani Art Museum (2026–27). In fall 2026 she will present her first museum-level solo exhibition at the Sarasota Art Museum.
She is the recipient of the Halo Arts Project Fellowship (2026), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant(2024), and a Puffin Foundation Grant (2023), and received the Prix de Print Award from Art in Print magazine, where her work was featured on the cover.
Eszter earned her MFA from Memphis College of Art and her Doctorate in Liberal Arts (DLA) from the University of Pécs, Hungary. She teaches Fine Arts/Printmaking at Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, Florida.
