Separate Reality is pleased to present Almost Someplace Familiar, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of paintings by Santa Barbara-based artist Sam Avelar. Avelar approaches painting as an act of reconstruction: drawing on photographs and remembered landscapes, she builds, obscures, and revises each composition through layers of color and texture. Moving between recognition and ambiguity, the resulting paintings retain only what feels essential, revealing memory not as a fixed record but as something continually remade.

Throughout the exhibition, the boat emerges as a recurring motif. Working from photographs, Avelar transforms it into an image of distance, absence, and passage. Through shifts in color and light, its meaning changes from one painting to the next. The boat quietly evokes transition, moving between changing light and states of feeling.

In her landscapes, Avelar examines how time alters perception, creating a psychic terrain where wind, light, and shadow reshape the memory of a place. Trees, mountains, and bodies of water appear almost as gestures, carrying the immediacy of the artist’s hand. The lightness and speed of her brushwork convey an urgency to capture a feeling before it disappears. At times ebullient and robust, at others spare and monastic, these paintings distill the emotional properties of landscape and what remains of a place long after one has left it.

Almost Someplace Familiar will be on view at Separate Reality, 111 Santa Barbara Street, Suite C, Santa Barbara, California, from September 19 through November 1, 2026. The gallery is open Friday and Saturday from 2 to 6 p.m. and by appointment.