In the Curator’s Words is an occasional series that takes a critical look at current exhibitions through the eyes of curators.
When Dinah Poellnitz, director and curator of The Hill Street Country Club Art Space, lost her brick-and-mortar venue in Oceanside last year, she had no choice but to pivot.
Like most artists, she turned to her network in the arts community — relationships she’s built and nurtured over the years.
A collaboration is now in the works with the Oceanside Theatre Company at the historic Sunshine Brooks Theater, and another project is planned at Balboa Park’s ICA San Diego, where The Hill Street Studio and Archives is currently a tenant.
And thanks to a $236,400 grant from the California Coastal Conservancy, The Hill Street Country Club is embarking on a feasibility study that “will explore the development of an affordable, culturally rooted hotel along or near Oceanside’s historic Coast Highway — formerly Hill Street — within the City’s designated Cultural District,” according to a statement.
“The Hill Street Arts Hotel represents an expansion of Hill Street Country Club’s longstanding work supporting artists and creative communities. Through this project, HSCC is extending its mission into the world of social enterprise, piloting a new model in which hospitality infrastructure directly supports a thriving creative economy.”
“Inception,” a 2026 acrylic on canvas by Bryttney-Mischele Salvant, is part of “Phosphene,” presented by Space 4 Art at Art Produce in North Park. (Space 4 Art)
If that weren’t enough to keep her busy, Poellnitz has curated a group exhibition, “Phosphene,” as part of a four-month curatorial residency with Space 4 Art.
Phosphene, by definition, is this: “The sensation of light — color, pattern, shimmer — produced by the eye itself, without any external source of illumination. Seen behind closed eyelids. Felt in the dark. Proof that the body makes its own light.”
In her curatorial statement, Poellnitz writes: “This exhibition begins with that premise and with a word most people have never spoken aloud. A phosphene is the light you see when no light exists: the shimmer behind closed eyes, the color that blooms in the dark, the glow of pure inner vision. It is proof that the body makes its own light.”
Featuring the work of Bryttney-Mischele Salvant, Mark Chamness, Pastelle and Akiko Surai, the exhibit at Art Produce Gallery in North Park is on display through Aug. 15, ending with a closing reception and artist talk.
As an artist, curator and arts leader, “I’ve always been in survival mode,” Poellnitz said by email. “What frustrated me was people saying, ‘Oh, you guys did a good job lasting so long.’ In my head, the system’s designed to fail community arts spaces, and they pat you on the back just for surviving. That’s unfair.”
So it was indeed a blessing when Space 4 Art reached out and offered the curatorial residency — one that resulted in “Phosphene.”
“MC010,” a 2025 work by Mark Chamness, is part of “Phosphene,” presented by Space 4 Art at Art Produce in North Park. (Space 4 Art)
In her curatorial statement, displayed as part of the show, Poellnitz shares some behind-the-scenes thinking that led to “Phosphene.”
“As part of a curatorial residency with Space 4 Art, I was invited to select from their residents as well as other San Diego artists,” she writes. “I chose [Space 4 Art resident artist] Bryttney-Mischele Salvant, and those conversations in her studio became the seed of everything you see here. Watching her work, talking through what she was reaching for, I kept returning to one question: What happens when an artist trusts what they feel before they trust what they know? That question led me to Mark Chamness, Akiko Surai and Pastelle, artists who, each in their own way, have spent their careers negotiating the same tension between instinct and craft, between the organic and the trained.”
Of Salvant, Poellnitz said by email: “Her work, our conversations, her process inspired me to name the show ‘Phosphene.’ It’s about looking inward, not outward. As a curator, my role was to have her commit to that inner guidance, memory, ancestral, intuitive, instead of chasing institutions and other artists’ work. But working with her forced me to do the same thing. I had to revisit my own community roots, trust that foundation, and build something new without losing it. That mutual mirroring, that’s what inspired the show. Because Bryttney reminded me that we lose it when we start looking outward for guidance, when we are the ones building it for ourselves and our communities.”
Asked what she hopes viewers will take away from seeing the exhibition, Poellnitz said: “Each artist comes from different backgrounds, different lived experiences, different educational backgrounds, professional backgrounds, different mediums. Some are autodidactic, some are academia-trained. But they all looked inward honestly, vulnerably and ancestrally to make this work.”
“When you come in, take your time with the pieces, read between the needle and thread, the line and the burst of color. See if you can read the story they’re telling,” she added. “All these artists were really in their inner thoughts, truly, honestly looking inward to guide them. That is honest work. We’re all living in this brain fog climate right now, in our feelings, trying to figure out how to navigate it together. Don’t just look outward for answers, those things have no deep roots. Go to that inner space, that intuitive, that ancestral, that archival, that memory. That’s your personal archive. That’s your guide.”
She continued: “And when you enter that phosphene moment, when you close your eyes and see that light and decide to let go and open up, that’s how you trust yourself and navigate this climate. That’s how you listen to others, relate to them, commune with them. We’re individuals in a communal space, but we each contribute to the bigger conversation. If you don’t see yourself, you’re listening to somebody else so they can be seen. So ask yourself: How am I looking inward to make decisions about my own life, my connections, my relationships with my community, my children? Where are these decisions coming from? What is guiding me beyond what’s outward? What keeps my hope, my joy, my connection alive?”
In her own words, Poellnitz describes the other artists this way:
“Mark Chamness comes from painting, but has found his truest expression in fiber. He collects discarded plastic bags pulled from beaches and bushes, strips them thin, treats them like yarn, and tufts them into needlepoint. Formally trained, he has deliberately moved toward the handmade, the slow, the found. Color for Chamness is geographic and spatial, always searching for the third space, the in-between, the place where hue becomes territory.”
“Pastelle works with the confidence of someone who has already decided. Her illustrations are not searching, they are declarations. Color, for her, is not chosen so much as claimed, each shade an extension of a self that has been fully internalized and is now, unapologetically, turned outward. There is a readiness in her work that is rare, a willingness to be seen, to let the image carry everything without apology. Her work lives between a disco ball and a liberated self-awareness — fantastical and radiant, sensual and proud. It is the softest kind of power. In the language of this exhibition, Pastelle’s phosphene is the one that fills the whole room.
“Akiko Surai’s ‘Untitled (mass 03)’ grows the way living things grow, slowly, deliberately, without permission. Working in embroidery and beading on found stone, she lets fiber creep like lichen across concrete, the material body learning the surface, eventually absorbing it. Inspired by the radical imagination of Black revolutionaries and the cross-pollination of craft traditions across the African diaspora, her work is not decorative. It is architectural. It encodes knowledge. It dreams of new worlds. The inner light in Akiko’s practice lives inside the archive, in the craft traditions, the survival instincts, the creative inheritance carried forward through Black revolutionary thought. That light is not a metaphor. It is how we have always built. It is how we continue.”
“Untitled (mass 03),” a 2025 work by Akiko Surai, is part of “Phosphene,” presented by Space 4 Art at Art Produce in North Park. (Space 4 Art)
Poellnitz concludes her curatorial statement by saying: “There is a moment every artist knows and rarely names. It arrives somewhere between the first mark and the last, when the mind finally stops negotiating with the hand. When the question of whether it is right dissolves into the certainty that it is real. Scientists call it flow. Poets call it presence. In neuroscience, it lives in the same region of the brain as memory and emotion, the place where what we have felt becomes what we make. These artists did not plan their way to that moment. They surrendered to it. And in that surrender, something was made that could not have been made any other way.”
“A phosphene cannot be forced. It has to be allowed,” she writes. “Close your eyes. Notice what’s there. That is where this work lives.”
Space 4 Art presents “Phosphene”
When: Through Aug. 15, with a closing reception and artist talk from noon to 3 p.m. on Aug. 15. Gallery hours: Fridays 1-7 p.m.; Saturdays noon-6 p.m.; and by appointment
Where: Art Produce Gallery, 3139 University Ave., San Diego
Admission: Free
Online: sdspace4art.org