Bajo el Sol Gallery opens the exhibition season with Nature as Refuge, a group exhibition featuring three women artists whose work is deeply inspired by the natural world and the islands they call home.
Opening on Feb. 14 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., the exhibition brings together mixed media, oil painting, ceramics, and glass to explore nature as sanctuary and emotional refuge.
Artists Aimee Trayser, Elisa Bryan, and Jessica Rosenberg approach the landscape through distinct materials and perspectives while sharing a common reverence for the Caribbean environment. The works presented in Nature as Refuge do not simply use nature as a backdrop; they offer viewers a space for connection, grounding, and renewal.
About the artists:
Aimee Trayser, co-founder of Bajo el Sol Gallery, presents richly layered mixed media works that emerge from a contemplative, intuitive process. Drawing inspiration from dreams, the unconscious, and the rhythms of the natural world, her collages are built from accumulated layers of handmade and collected papers, dense with fibers, texture, and luminous pigments. Celestial bodies, waves, fish, birds, and enigmatic figures drift through her compositions, evoking both the mystery and sensuality of island life. Working from her studio on St. John since 1982, Trayser’s art captures the spirit of the Caribbean, taking familiar land and seascapes just beyond reality into something quietly otherworldly.
Elisa Bryan, a Native Virgin Islander from St. Thomas, brings a deeply personal connection to her paintings. Raised in a French fishing community and immersed from childhood in the sea, her work reflects a lifelong relationship with the ocean and island life. Bryan focuses on light, form, and motion, increasingly drawn to classical still life as a way of capturing intimate moments of the Caribbean experience. Her paintings feel both grounded and luminous, elegant yet practical, balancing refined composition with an honest sense of everyday island life.
Jessica Rosenberg, a multidisciplinary artist based on St. Thomas, works with stoneware, porcelain, and glass, embracing materials that are transformed through fire. Her ceramic vessels, often slab-built, are gently pushed into expressive, organic shapes that invite surface pattern and painterly exploration. Her glass works, made through casting glass from nature using coral, fish, shells, fruits and vegetables, respond directly to her surrounding environment.
Together, the artists in Nature as Refuge invite viewers to experience nature not only as scenery, but as a vital source of refuge, resilience, and renewal.
Located at Mongoose Junction on St. John, Bajo El Sol Gallery & Art Bar is a hybrid art gallery, bookstore, café, rum and cocktail bar. As a gallery and events space, Bajo El Sol is dedicated to offering the best in Virgin Islands fine art and cultural expression.
