Transformer continues its exhibition partnership with the LINE DC to present compelling new bodies of work that bring together two interconnected photographic series by Baltimore based artist Rachel A Sale. Icons and Flow offers audiences an exploration of identity, perception, and the lived experience of the body. Bridging conceptual inquiry with intimate storytelling, the exhibitions challenge viewers to reconsider deeply ingrained ideas of beauty, gender, and resilience.

Icons, developed through a collaboration between creative director John Coplen and photographer Rachel A 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, the artists 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 Rachel A 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. Photographed in dynamic, unapologetic poses, these women occupy space with intention. Their accompanying words reveal how yoga serves as a tool for navigating adversity, reclaiming agency, and sustaining inner balance in an unpredictable world. Originally created as a series of calendars and shared widely during the Women’s March in Washington, DC, this work exists at the intersection of personal ritual and collective empowerment. Each image becomes both portrait and testimony - an assertion that resilience is not the absence of struggle, but the conscious choice to remain present through it.

Together, Icons and Flow expands conversations around the human body: not as something to be redefined or disrupted, but as a site of endurance, awareness, and lived truth.

About Rachel A Sale:

Visual storyteller working at the intersection of commercial production and humanitarian documentary. Based in Baltimore. Working globally. Two decades capturing human stories across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and beyond. Building visual narratives that connect mission-driven brands with their audiences.

About John Coplen:

John Coplen is a Washington, DC based recovering architect turned real estate agent. His career has always focused on how the spaces we design and inhabit reflect our inner lives. As a gay man, he brings a keen understanding of what it means to exist outside expected norms. He uses the freedom that comes from that to inspire his own architectural designs, and his clients. He is excited to help organize this debut collection featuring friends breaking the rules and looking fabulous.