Icons and Flow

Icons: Rachel A Sale & John Coplen
Flow: Rachel A Sale

A compelling new body of work brings together two interconnected photographic series, Icons and Flow, offering an exploration of identity, perception, and the lived experience of the body. Bridging conceptual inquiry with intimate storytelling, the exhibition challenges viewers to reconsider deeply ingrained ideas of beauty, gender, and resilience.

Icons, developed through a collaboration between artist John Coplen and photographer Rachel Sale, reimagines culturally iconic images through the reversal of gender - not as imitation, but as disruption. By unsettling familiar representations of beauty and desire, the work exposes how deeply these ideas are conditioned, and how easily they can be reassigned.

In reconstructing these images, we are not only questioning what we see, but why we see it that way. What is beauty if it can be transferred from one body to another without losing its power? Rooted in a personal search for self beyond appearance, this series points toward something more constant beneath the surface - an identity not defined by gender, image, or form, but shared across all of us. What remains is not the body, but the awareness that recognizes itself within it.

In parallel, Flow, created by photographer Rachel Sale, centers on women who embody resilience not as an abstract ideal, but as a daily, lived practice. Through the language of yoga, each subject expresses strength, vulnerability, and presence - using the body not for performance, but for grounding, healing, and self-definition.

Smaller editions available upon request-- contact camille@transformerdc.org for more information.