RIVERS started as a dream. I was coming out of a year of wild nightmares and wanted to make a show that felt more alive than my dreams. And I wanted to make paintings that would engage a younger version of myself who fell in love with painting in eighth grade. Back then I loved massive paintings that could be stage sets and insisted on their own POV and invented space. And I loved little paintings that whispered secrets too. Both approaches promised freedom. Every mark registered a code that spun out fractally to create not just a world, but new selves for the artist, viewer, and thirteen-year-old me. I wanted this show to celebrate how painting underscores the porosity of ourselves, and to show how real and imagined worlds slip into each other. It’s also a love letter to my boyfriend, Rivers, who teaches me to see art differently. RIVERS marks the first time I have shown abstractions since maybe 2010, though I’ve been using silver lamé for a while. Like us, the fabric is fragile and tough, futuristic and pathetic—all at the same time. It acts as a non-color more than a white ground, refusing to participate in the action of the brush marks. Instead, it incorporates the color of our world, dissolving the “fourth wall.” The painted world and the lived world mix together, questioning what is real and what is not. It’s sexy and unstable. These paintings live in flux, born of a queer perspective, meandering, layering, and dancing back onto themselves. Like a river. I paint sunflowers, our friendliest bloom, as both regeneration and death. A portrait of a nude figure deciding where to walk is both intimate and monumental. According to the River Continuum Concept, a watercourse is an open system in constant interaction with the bank, changing as it moves. These works investigate the ways paintings do that too. Intentionally or not, all modes of aesthetic and technological production are tools to code out new realities. How do we seize agency in deciding what kinds of demi-god we become? What dream are we building? These paintings ask those questions too, just as painting always has. -Paul Heyer Paul Heyer (b.1982, Olympia Fields, Illinois) lives and works in Chicago, IL. He received his MFA in painting from Columbia University in 2009. Heyer has had solo exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Soccer Club Club, Chicago; Mickey, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; among others. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Manarat Saadivat, Abu Dhabi, UAE.; Perrotin, New York; Paul Soto, Los Angeles; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Rodeo Gallery, London; Young Art, Los Angeles; 356 Mission, Los Angeles; and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2012); among others.

Chapter NY is thrilled to announce, CLOSER, Cara Benedetto’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Her immersive installation will feature a series of dye-sublimation prints, a PowerPoint video, a large-scale wall vinyl, velvet stanchion ropes, and a collection of printed ephemera including xeroxes, lithographs, and printed silk handkerchiefs. Benedetto's multimedia practice examines the creation of value and its ingrained structures. Through printmaking, writing, performance, pedagogy, and video, Benedetto embraces the poetics of contradiction through pluralism. Her work layers gendered language with content from popular media that embody ideologies of progress that prevent femme-identifying subjects from voicing their true wants. Formally trained as a printmaker, Benedetto emphasizes the hierarchy of different forms of print media and embraces the physicality of the medium as a metaphor for the fragility of our present moment. Her images and text together reveal the alienating effects of patriarchal capitalism and present complex voices that are open and multivalent. She creates interruptions as a form of resistance, finding optimism, gentle understanding, and empathic vision. In CLOSER, Benedetto centers white women, specifically femme-identifying celebrities, as false arbiters of progress and unknowing accomplices in the subjugation of vulnerable populations. At odds with the allegedly subversive or abject characters they frequently represent in film and TV, the celebrity relishes their status awarded to them by the oppressive, dominant culture that they serve. A series of prints combine images of actors winning awards—such as Olivia Colman, Frances McDormand, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, among others—with poetic, fictional testimonies of people ‘coming to’. Examples of ‘coming to’ include waking from a night terror or gaining consciousness. Benedetto embellishes these printed image and textual collages with Prismacolor and sharpie, mimicking an obsessive ‘fangirl’ aesthetic. The women depicted in the images, with open mouths and languid eyes, embody extreme examples of achievement. The accompanying text, however, articulates a world where being awake, gaining consciousness, or living life under the strictures of power feels like a loss—where living is equated with mourning. People often say they dream of winning an award. Winning lives inside of our unconscious minds yet remains largely unattainable. CLOSER extends Benedetto’s ongoing Against Coming series, where coming, arriving, or winning in phallocentric terms is continually thwarted. The artist uses obfuscation as a gesture to break apart these ascendent and unavoidably elitist aspirations to make space for collective reimaginings of a culture built with love.   Cara Benedetto (b.1979, Wausau, Wisconsin) lives and works in Richmond, VA. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2009. Benedetto has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Michael Jon Gallery, Detroit; Art Metropole, Toronto; and Young Art Gallery, Los Angeles; among others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; the Hite Art Institute, Louisville; The Pit, Los Angeles; The Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona; The Jewish Museum, New York; Art in General, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; among others. Benedetto is an associate professor in print media at Virginia Commonwealth University. Benedetto is the author of two experimental romance novels, The Coming of Age and Burning Blue, and is the editor of Contemporary Print Handbook, published with Halmos. In 2020, Benedetto published her first collection of short stories, Origin of Love and Other Tales of Degradation.

Chapter NY is excited to announce, Sublunary, Erin Jane Nelson’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a new body of work centered around the Okefenokee swamp, including quilted silks, ceramic wall works, and ceramic sculpture. Nelson’s practice unfolds serially, with each project delving into new conceptual frameworks as far ranging as regional histories of the Southern barrier islands, formative personal relationships, spirituality as a process of mourning and healing, and science fiction narratives. Her multimedia works— including silks, hand-crafted quilts, panels, and ceramics—all stem from photographic source material that the artist intuitively merges and collages together. For her newest series, Nelson explores the Okefenokee swamp in a remote area along the Georgia- Florida border, allowing the landscape to guide her formal choices and seep into the content of her work. Prevalent in the American South, wetlands play an important role in protecting and preserving the natural world by absorbing excess water and repurposing harmful chemicals. Despite their valuable ecological contributions, nearly half of U.S. wetlands have been eradicated and continue to be threatened. Throughout history swamps have also carried negative associations with witches, monsters, concealment, and decay. Nelson harnesses these connotations as well as the site’s resilience to explore its generative potential. The title of the exhibition, Sublunary, is a term that points to the terrestrial world, that which is situated below the moon, the mundane. Nelson, however, reclaims the sublunary realm as a site of higher possibilities, one that stems from interconnectivity and regeneration, and reveals the expansive, healing potential of the non-human world. Enacting an ephemeral performance over several visits to the swamp, the artist photographed various life forms, created self-portraits, made drawings, and placed her ceramics along the water. The shapes of her compositions stem from these observed visual references and her glazes emphasize the wetness of the environment and its varied textures. Throughout the swamp, the blackwater reflects its surroundings with unsettling clarity, blurring boundaries and eliminating any hard edges. The artist channels the subsuming quality of this murky space to speculatively explore the intermingling between her body and the swamp itself. Erin Jane Nelson (b. 1989, Neenah, Wisconsin) lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2011 she received her BFA from The Cooper Union. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta; Chapter NY, New York; DOCUMENT, Chicago; and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; among others. Her work was included in the 2021 New Museum Triennial and has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; the Fries Museum in La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain, Noisy-le-Sec; Deli Gallery, Brooklyn; Van Doren Waxter, New York; and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

Chapter NY is thrilled to announce, Make me Mulch!, Olivia van Kuiken’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a new series of paintings. Oliva van Kuiken merges abstract and representational subjects to upend traditional notions of legibility. She considers the meaning of accuracy as it pertains to visual representation: what is needed to create an identifiable image and what are its associations? She avoids narrative conventions and instead, begins each piece with a formally derived structure or logic guided by a preexisting work. The artist creates a series of sketches, engaging an intuitive and frenetic drawing practice that informs her paintings on canvas. Enlarging small scribbling forms into sinuous, stretching shapes, she parodies the gesture itself and questions mythic status of the artist’s hand. The title of van Kuiken’s exhibition, Make me Mulch!, follows New York’s recent legalization of the composting of human bodies after death – a process that aptly mimics the breaking down of the artist’s female subjects within her abstract compositions. Stripped of the personhood that portraiture strives to capture, van Kuiken’s figures serve as symbols of ideas rather than real people. Often inspired by surrealist literary sources, van Kuiken embraces the irrational and absurd. Her diptych installed across two walls in the exhibition space, stems from Unica Zürn 1968 novella about childbirth, Trumpets of Jericho, in which a burdensome uncle births a daughter through his ear. Van Kuiken’s painting pictures two heads sharing a single ear pieced together by a constellation of “pixels”. Imprecisely hand painted, her geometric pixel-like shapes defy the reproducibility enabled by mechanical processes while also referencing technology’s integration into the language of painting. Her fractured image diminishes the possibility of assigning the role of muse or subject, instead urging their presence as abstract paintings despite any recognizable forms. The central painting in the exhibition, Zig Zag Girl (Hodler, Woman on her Deathbed), is based on Ferdinand Hodler’s 1876 painting of a woman on her deathbed. Van Kuiken removes the subject from her intended context, fragmenting her body across three panels and enmeshing her contours within an abstracted landscape. The title of van Kuiken’s painting also references a famous magical illusion in which a magician appears to saw a woman’s body into three parts. In her painting, the artist wittily reenacts this butchering of the female subject. She pits these two examples of female subjectivity against each other to playfully obliterate the well-ingrained constructs that ascribe their meaning. Olivia van Kuiken (b. 1997, Chicago, IL) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA from Cooper Union, New York, NY in 2019. She recently had her first solo exhibition, She clock, Me clock, We clock at King’s Leap, New York, NY. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, LA; Chapter NY, New York, NY; and Shoot the Lobster Gallery, New York, NY.

When you have given [Man] a body without organs you will have relieved him of all his automatisms and rewarded him with his real freedom Chapter NY is excited to announce, Body without Organs, a group exhibition featuring works by Samuel Guerrero, Maren Karlson, Heidi Lau, Rosha Yaghmai, and Stella Zhong. Beyond habitual or constraining organizational structures—bodily or otherwise—there lies a limitless unknown. All the artists in this exhibition adapt and deconstruct the familiar, investigating subjects that depart from representational conventions. Navigating the liminal space between reality and imagination, their works reveal objects and beings not yet seen. Both Guerrero and Lau merge elements of ancient history with conditions of contemporary existence. Guerrero’s practice considers humankind’s longstanding preoccupation with transcendence, stemming from Pre-Columbian spiritual practices to present-day fitness regimens. They consider the human body’s relationship to machines and the use of modern science and technology to push beyond natural physical limits. His subjects succumb to divine forces that inspire hope for something more. Lau similarly channels spiritualty, interweaving mythic histories to build fictional narratives that dislocate her work from the linearity of time. Inspired by The Classic of Mountains and Seas, a Chinese text from 4th Century BCE that chronicles mythic geography and creatures, her ceramic sculptures propose the possibility of a non-hierarchical, post-human world in which hybrid creatures and lush vegetation occupy a genderless and generative terrain. Simultaneously engaging a cultural history while eschewing its identity-based significations, Yaghmai’s paintings confound the viewer with an other-worldly, kaleidoscopic layering of moiré patterning. She inverts, enlarges, and distorts images from historical Persian miniatures, enacting a formal othering that speaks to her own experience as an American with Iranian heritage. She removes all narrative structures to create elusively microscopic or bodily compositions that suggest the presence of embedded meaning just beyond grasp. The haziness of Yaghmai’s work carries into Karlson’s enigmatic paintings that merge the bodily with the mechanical. Her densely wound, conglomerate forms serve as portals between inner and outer worlds. Her most recent paintings reference man-made objects that the artist observed in a polluted river near her family’s home in Germany. Like Karlson’s paintings, the river embodies the convergence of the man-made and the organic—itself a passageway, or transportive space that mimics bodily function, but one that is punctured by industrial processes. Like Karlson, Zhong constructs unrecognizable convergences inspired by everyday forms and experiences. Her paintings and sculptures are less concerned with bodily sensations, but instead finds energy among unlikely objects with incongruent spatial relationships. She imbues inanimate objects with agency and presence, creating a feeling of otherness and anonymity that pushes against notions of power and identity. Zhong crafts a speculative future where inanimate objects roam freely through open space. Together these artists remind us of our intimate proximity to an ever-present unknown, either incomprehensible or lost to the limits of human perception and memory. They merge inorganic and natural forms with personal and cultural histories to deconstruct learned categorizations and methodical ways of separating and processing information. The alluring quality of their work draws us in, pulling us a little bit closer to an ethereal threshold or void space, allowing us to imagine a limitless world and offering an invitation rather than a warning. Samuel Guerrero (b. 1997, Mexico City, Mexico) lives and works in Mexico City. He received his BFA from Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City. Recent solo exhibitions include LISTE, presented by Lodos, Basel (2022); Destino vas muy rápido, Lodos, Mexico City (2021); Observatorio, Ladrón galería, Mexico City (2021); Flor del valle with Sterling Hedges, Rudimento, Quito (2020); and Samuel Guerrero, Antes de Cristo, Mexico City (2019) Guerrero’s work is currently included in Frontal Sphinx, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo. Maren Karlson (b. 1988, Rostock, Germany) lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is currently completing an MFA in Painting at UCLA. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Cypher, Soft Opening, London (2022); Nodulara, Ashley, Berlin (2021); Counsel, with Kira Scerbin;, Springsteen, Baltimore (2021); Petal’s Path, in lieu, Los Angeles (2020); Rats dream about the places they want to explore, 427 gallery, Riga (2019); Hear the lizards listening, with Claude Eigan, Mélange Gallery, Cologne (2019); and Happy Dark, Interstate Projects, New York (2017). Heidi Lau (b. 1987, Macau, China) lives and works in New York. She received a BS from New York University in 2008. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Gardens as Cosmic Terrains, Green- Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn (2022); Empire Recast, Grand Lisboa Palace, Macau, China (2021); Spirit Vessels, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020); Blood Echoes, AALA Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); The Sentinels, with Rachel Frank, Geary, New York (2018); The Primordial Molder, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2017); and Third Rome, Deli Gallery, New York (2016). Rosha Yaghmai (b. 1978 Santa Monica, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received an MFA from California institute of the Arts in 2007 and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2001. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include Miraclegrow, The Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2019); Postcards & Pipes, Marlborough Contemporary, New York (2017); Night Walker, Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn (2016); Easy Journey to other planets, Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles (2015); Waxworks, Weiss Berlin, Berlin (2016); and Volitionaries, Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles (2013). In Spring 2023 Yaghmai will have a solo exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Stella Zhong (b. 1993, Shenzhen, China) lives and works in New York. She received an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2021 and a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design in 2015. Recent solo exhibitions include (of an object) Synchronized Loss, Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR (2022); Fig. 2 PLOT, Fanta-MLN, Milan (2022); comet with a tail, Chapter NY, New York (2021); nigh, Peninsula Art Space, Brooklyn (2016); Unnameable, Weybosset Gallery, Providence (2015); and Zhong Diming, Guan Shanyue Art Museum, Shenzhen (2004).

Chapter NY is excited to announce a multimedia, two-person exhibition with Antonia Kuo and Pauline Shaw, both exhibiting at the gallery for the first time. Kuo presents photochemical paintings in alumi-num frames and ceramic sculptures paired with wood and steel support structures. Shaw presents felted wool tapestries—some suspended from the ceiling—and glass sculptures on bronze posts. Both artists cull source imagery from personal histories, considering their own generational lineage and familial influences. Kuo incorporates photographs and formal elements largely inspired by industrial materials and ma-chine parts from a metal casting foundry operated by her father’s side of her family. She combines these more rugged elements with imagined natural forms influenced by her Taiwanese mother’s painting practice in the style of traditional Chinese ink paintings. Growing up mixed race and queer to a Buddhist mother and atheist, ex-Roman Catholic priest turned psychoanalyst father has encouraged Kuo to eschew definitive categories in her work and in herself. In merging these discordant, yet per-sonally familiar, formal influences, she evokes an intensity in her imagery that underlines doubt but retains a reverent attitude toward the chaos and beauty of “natural” phenomena, energies, and mat-ter. As a first generation Taiwanese American, Shaw attempts to reconcile the fragments of her personal memory by supplementing them with imagery borrowed from scientific, cultural, and natural histo-ries. The work conjures domestic space and the feeling of home, safety, caretaking, and nostalgia. Throughout her felted work, Shaw combines source imagery derived from textiles found in various institutional collections, Chinese paper cutting, and patterns from other craft-based techniques, such as lace and marble-making. Shaw is drawn to symbols that convey luck and prosperity that have bol-stered spiritual belief systems and notions of upward mobility. Together, Kuo and Shaw’s wall works set forth densely layered compositions that both selectively re-veal and obscure elements of their wide-ranging subjects. Kuo uses masking techniques to manipulate photographic imagery and painterly actions on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper, layering and com-plicating her source material through an iterative process. Through wet and needle felting processes, Shaw combines wool with silk, bamboo, and viscose to create abstract sculptural tapestries. Building her compositions one layer at a time, she embeds representational elements such as skeletons and birds within patterned surroundings. Both artists compose fragmentary compositions that conjure a formal synergy that destabilizes their representational reference materials. Their sculptures similarly evade immediate legibility. Kuo’s sculptures mimic the forms of machine parts, molded in wax, dipped in a ceramic slurry and silica sand, and then fired. In their current state, they could serve as molds for investment casting, but their playful forms resist any functional end. In-stead, like her photographic works, they are recordings of forms that are lost, obscured, and only par-tially remembered. In Nightlight, Shaw reimagines personal domestic items including zodiac charms, and miniatures of her and her mother’s childhood beds, reconstructed from memory and suspended in glass orbs that rest atop bronze cast bed posts. Within Streetlight Shaw presents a game of marbles tethered to lava rocks that create a fictional archeological looking site, reminding the viewer to ap-proach all the works in the exhibition as traces of lived experience, either directly recorded, or fil-tered through dreams, memory, and lived experience. Antonia Kuo (b. 1987, New York, NY) lives and works in New York. She received an MFA from Yale Uni-versity in 2018, a BFA from School of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University in 2009, and a one-year cer-tificate from the School of the International Center of Photography in 2013. Her work has been exhib-ited at Chart, New York (2022); Each Modern, Taipei (2022); MAMOTH, London (2022); Make Room, Los Angeles (2021); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Rubber Factory, New York (2018); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016). She has been an artist-in-residence at Mass MoCA (2018), Vermont Studio Center (2016), The Banff Centre (2015), and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow (2014), among others. Kuo’s work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Pauline Shaw (b. 1988, Kirkland, WA) lives and works in New York. She received an MFA from Columbia University in 2019 and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011. Her work has been exhibited at Friends Indeed, San Francisco (2022); Downs and Ross, New York (2022); in lieu, Los Angeles (2021, 2019); The Shed, New York (2021); Spurs Gallery, Beijing (2021); Half Gallery, New York (2020); Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (2019); Almine Rech, Paris (2019); Gagosian, Park & 75th, New York (2019); and The Jewish Museum, New York (2018), among others. Shaw has been an artist-in-residence at ISCP, New York (2020) and France Los Angeles Residency Exchange Program (2014).

Chapter NY is excited to announce, image as a burden, death as a womb, Kaveri Raina’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a new series of paintings and drawings. Guided by her material choices and formal subjects, Raina establishes parameters for moments of confluence and resistance throughout her practice. Her abstract compositions, derived from reoccurring forms that she creates while drawing, emerge as triumphant and monumental. Applying graphite to paper with great pressure and repetition, she builds dense vessel-like forms and abstract figures, which she refers to as image inventions. She carries these shapes and drawing materials into her paintings, in which she combines acrylic, oil stick, pastel, charcoal, and graphite—forcefully applying these mediums to rough and unprimed burlap surfaces that resist saturation. Raina sources inspiration from Rani Lakshmibai, the former Queen of Jhansi and a symbol of powerful resistance in India. A leading figure in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, she died in battle while leading her army to defend her city. In tandem, Raina habitually reflects on the 2012 gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in Delhi, which sparked public protests, received widespread international media coverage, and was commonly referred to as the Nirbhaya case —Nirbhaya meaning the “fearless”. Contemplating the unfathomable struggle and sacrifice of these two women allows Raina to consider the questions: what happens when given an opportunity to resist? The artist’s raw, burlap surfaces provide sites for artistic battle, both physical and internal. They bare vestiges of aggression or slow rage built and contained within their frames. Her faint, fugitive materials, such as charcoal and graphite, require vigorous application in numerous layers—often both to the front and back of her surface—to balance the solidity of her painted acrylic shapes. The compositions also reflect the frustrations of this arduous process. In Full of Revolt, Blue Blue Blue, Raina’s central vessel erupts, reverberating outward from the tightly woven seam at the center of the composition. Bifurcated by this stitched linear element, the composition performs a doubling, which reappears in various iterations across the exhibition. Always supported by the presence of another and perpetually in-flux, none of Raina’s forms exist in isolation. The nature of their dependency, however, is not inherently harmonious. Two paintings in the exhibition each include two discreet elements: a stretched burlap painting and an accompanying small wooden panel covered in graphite, installed above it. The hovering presence of the panels, despite their comparably diminutive scale, exudes more weight than the paintings themselves. Together, they mimic the feeling that one is never truly alone, always tied to one’s shadow or surveilled by someone or something unknown. Kaveri Raina (b.1990, New Delhi, India) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. Select solo and group exhibitions include image as a burden, death as a womb (2022), Chapter NY, New York, NY; Heft (2022), PATRON, Chicago, IL; E/Merge: Art of the Indian Diaspora (2021), National Indo-American Museum, Lombard, IL; Partings, Swaying to the Moon (2020), PATRON, Chicago, IL; NO LACKS, ME AND MY SHADOW (2020), M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; A Space for Monsters (2021), Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson and Kaveri Raina (2020), Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, OH; Linger to Gaze (2019), Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy; Linger Still (2019), Assembly Room, New York, NY; Here or There (2019), Paolo Arao, Rata Projects, New York, NY; Sarah.Canright / Kaveri.Raina (2019), Permanent Collection/Co-Lab Projects, Austin, TX; spaceless (2019), Deli Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Paint School (2019), Shandaken Projects, Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York, NY; garcia, raina, shore, tossin (2019) at Luhring Augustine, New York; Pleasure at a Distance (2018), Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine, CA. Raina has received several fellowships and awards including the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship, the Ox-bow Residency Award, and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture Fellowship Award.

Chapter NY is excited to announce, Sick Joke, Em Kettner’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a new series of miniature, figurative sculptures and small-scale drawings on glazed tile. Kettner’s practice celebrates the power of mutual dependence, both in her subject matter and chosen materials. By referencing familiar moments of physical fragility and mutual support, she revises problematic stereotypes about the disability community and illuminates instead what makes each figure desirable, funny, and powerful. Assembled from separate or broken porcelain limbs, Kettner’s spindly sculptures approximate human forms—twisted and stretched to merge with their surroundings. She weaves costume coverings from cotton and silk thread to cover, embellish, and bind their delicate surfaces. Returning to motifs such as the hybrid body and the bedridden body, her figures intertwine in erotic and assistive gestures, knitted to each other and their furniture supports. Her drawings on small tiles expand the narrative of her sculpted characters, depicting imagined origin stories and future scenes from their fictive lives. She embeds these tiles within various surfaces, allowing them to combine with the architectural features that reinforce them. The tongue-in-cheek title of the exhibition, Sick Joke, embraces the thematic intermingling between comedic performance, medical procedures, and accessibility policies present in Kettner’s new body of work. The artist designed a grouping of pedestals scaled to accommodate and prioritize viewing from a seated position or shorter stature. Their varied, multi-layer surfaces aid Kettner’s sculptures in moments of implied movement upward, forward, and downward. In The Eternal Worm, a slithering figure embarks up steps that cave to gently support its undulating body. An accompanying railing— typically a utilitarian device—serves to display her tiles in a linear formation that encourages sequential, serial viewing. The subjects suggest the potential theatricality of clinical spaces, drawing connections between bodies that elect to entertain, perform, and jest and those who are put on display for medical study. The small scale of Kettner’s work alludes to votive objects that were historically placed on altars by the devout as pleas for relief from pain, illness, or deformity. Kettner, however, insists that nothing is too sacred to be comical, or to be shared. She invites her viewers to peer into her works with intimate proximity by moving their bodies along railings or adjusting themselves to observe the intricate geometric pattering of her woven forms presented at a low height. She rewards those who feel compelled to slow down and look closely. Em Kettner (b. 1988, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in Richmond, CA. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and her BFA from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia in 2011. Kettner has had solo exhibitions at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA; Specialist, Seattle, WA; Goldfinch, Chicago, IL; and Harpy, Rutherford, NJ. She is the recipient of the Wynn Newhouse Award, the MIUSA Women’s Institute on Leadership and Disability, an SAIC Teaching Fellowship, and the 2019- 2020 AAC Diversity and Leadership Fellowship. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Contemporary Art Review LA (CARLA), Hyperallergic, and Sixty Inches From Center, among others. Her work is in the public collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, the DePaul Art Museum,Chicago, IL and the Joan Flasch Artist’s Book Collection, Chicago, IL. Kettner is represented by François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY and Goldfinch, Chicago, IL.

One night … I awoke in a room in which a cage and the bird sleeping in it had been placed. A magnificent error caused me to see an egg in the cage instead of the bird. I then grasped a new and astonishing poetic secret, because the shock I experienced had been provoked precisely by the affinity of the two objects, the cage and the egg, whereas I used to provoke this shock by causing the encounter of unrelated objects. –René Magritte The title of the exhibition, Elective Affinities, originates from an 18th century scientific term describing the merging of disparate chemical compounds. The phrase took on greater metaphoric meaning in Johann Wolfgang von Goethes’ 1809 novel of the same name, in which Goethe applied the theory to unlikely romantic partners. In 1932, it appeared again in the title of a painting by René Magritte that prominently features a large egg inside of a birdcage. The subject of the painting came to Magritte in a momentary hallucination and prompted his realization of the poetic value in pairing two related objects despite their immediate incoherence. Chapter NY presents a group exhibition featuring artworks made within the past year that express an elective affinity to one another. Although the works in the exhibition display a wide range of mediums and subjects, they are latently connected through the artists’ shared experience of the present moment. The artists concurrently delve into their own memories and dreams to imagine new forms and subjects. Some allow literary and filmic references to guide their practices, while others repurpose everyday materials and objects to build unusual surfaces. Together, their works showcase the predilections of a moment in time, notably synergistic despite their formal and conceptual disparity. Quoted in Paquet, Marcel, Magritte. Cologne, Germany: Taschen (2006), p. 26.

Chapter NY is excited to announce, High-Rise, Cheyenne Julien’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, which will debut a series of equally scaled drawings depicting elevator scenes. Julien’s practice explores cultural and collective histories reflected through her own lived experiences. Often derived from memory, Julien’s paintings and drawings portray intimate subjects inspired by her closest relationships and life in New York City. Her work highlights the interdependency of bodies and their contexts, asserting the power of built environments to dictate racial perception. For High-Rise, Julien focuses on the elevator as a site for communities to converge and interact. The artist grew up in a high-rise apartment building in the Bronx where elevators played a central role in her daily life. Due to a lack of maintenance, they were regularly out of service, both inconveniencing the building’s residents and accentuating their importance. Her work spotlights these often overlooked, yet highly frequented spaces, reimagining the brief encounters that bring people together within them. The title of the exhibition references J. G. Ballard’s 1975 novel, High-Rise, which examines class divisions within a luxury skyscraper, centering elevators as a site where tensions appear. Julien’s elevators enclose a wide range of interpersonal dynamics within their claustrophobic interiors. Romantic partners lean affectionately into one another, parents intuitively wrap arms around their children, individual passengers peer into their cellphone screens, and in one scene, white passengers cower away from a black woman with her dog. Julien’s narrative vignettes extend beyond the passengers, focusing on the architectural settings and inanimate objects that impact their daily experience. Historically, the advent of elevators facilitated a cultural progression towards a lifestyle of convenience and comfort. They have played a crucial role in the trajectory of urban development, allowing cities to expand vertically to greater heights. In Julien’s works, the upward ascent of her passengers metaphorically enacts a form of racial uplift. She emphasizes glimmering light throughout her compositions—particularly reflected in the metallic surfaces of the elevators—to suggest the proximity of a divine presence. Julien, however, tempers this optimism by casting sharp beams of light onto her subjects and settings. Their shapes mimic searchlights and maintain an eerie sense of surveillance that grounds her scenes in the darker side of reality. Cheyenne Julien (b. 1994, Bronx, New York) lives and works in the Bronx, NY. She received her BFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. She has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York; Smart Objects, Los Angeles; and Water McBeer, New York. Julien’s work has also been included in group exhibitions at Hotel Europe, Zurich; Carl Freedman Gallery, Kent, GBR; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; the Schlossmuseum, Linz, AUR; The Jewish Museum, New York; Gladstone Gallery, New York; Public Art Fund, New York; the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; The Harvey Gantt Center, Charlotte, NC; Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise/Unclebrother, Hancock, NY; Karma, New York; Loyal Gallery, Stockholm; and White Cube Bermondsey, London. Julien’s work is included in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; RISD Museum, Providence; University of New Hampshire Museum of Art, Durham, NH; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Chapter NY is pleased to present The Depression of Belgium, a new work by Adam Gordon and his third solo exhibition with the gallery. Each day there are two different phases of the work. Phase 1 is on view from 11am to 4pm. Phase 2 is on view from 4pm to 6pm. The exhibition is on view from July 5 through August 19, 2022, at 60 Walker Street, Monday through Friday, from 11:00 am to 6:00pm. Adam Gordon (b. 1986, St. Paul, Minnesota) lives and works in Jersey City, NJ. He has had solo exhibitions at Gandt, Astoria; ZERO…, Milan; Chapter NY, New York; The Power Station, Dallas; Hunter/Whitfield, London; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Gordon’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Project Native Informant, London; New Gallerie, Paris; Andrew Kreps, New York; National Exemplar, New York; and Boates Fine Arts, São Paulo. His work is currently on view in the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept at The Whitney Museum of America Art, New York through September 5, 2022. He has upcoming solo exhibitions at ZERO…, Paris in 2022 and Project Native Informant, London in 2023.

Chapter NY is excited to announce Cabeza de mango, Dalton Gata’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. In his newest series of paintings, Gata expands his characteristic fantastical world, devoting most of his canvases to portraits of male figures. Although their strikingly chiseled features appear distinctly masculine, they merge with animal and insect forms to create unrecognizable hybrid species. Through elements such as stylized hairdos, bulging muscles, and exaggerated facial expressions, Gata explores the vast spectrum of appearances, continuing to celebrate the beauty in diversity. For Cabeza de mango, Gata presents various types of mangoes in different stages. He associates mangoes—his absolute favorite fruit—with childhood memories growing up on a fruit farm in Cuba. He does not discriminate against those that are already rotten or those that have not yet ripened, prominently presenting each mango with a sense of individuality in the company of his imagined characters. In The forgotten banquet, Gata displays an array of mangoes on a lavishly draped table within a vast landscape, evoking a sense of grandeur and nostalgia. Reimagined throughout the exhibition, Gata’s serenely vacant landscapes provide ample space for his subjects to roam free and express themselves.

Chapter NY is excited to announce Ancient Gloss, Kelsey Isaacs’ first solo exhibition featuring a new series of paintings. In Ancient Gloss, Isaacs manufactures imagery through a multistep process that begins with collaging rhinestones onto plastic photo album covers. She dramatically lights and photographs these reflective stages before remaking them in oil paint, recasting her mundane source material as fantastical fetish objects. Collaged together and replicated in her work, her subjects create formal relationships and distinct geometric compositions that assume a new identity. In line with art historical trompe l’oeil techniques, Isaacs manipulates representational imagery within a shallow space that both emphasizes and plays within the limitations of a two-dimensional plane. She builds slick surfaces with considerable attention to detail while allowing subtle imperfections to reveal the painting’s own materiality, visually recording its own history as an object. Her forms draw the viewer in, but, upon closer viewing, traces of the artist’s hand unravel the artifice of their creation. Isaacs develops each painting sequentially, using repetition to push her subject matter through multiple controlled iterations. With subtle cropping shifts and lighting variations, she disorients their perspective, pushing her works closer towards abstraction. Through these multiple interventions, the paintings become removed from their original sources and take on a logic of their own. In pink&black6, the surface of a garishly pink album cover reflects a hazy portrait of the artist and a friend as they stage and photograph the album in her studio. Isaacs collapses the gleaming reflection of background lights and glittering rhinestones onto a glossy painted surface, rendering reflection within a reflective painted surface. The result is irresistibly, and unsettlingly, alluring. Kelsey Isaacs (b. 1994, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in New York, NY. She received her BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI in 2016. Her work has been exhibited at Bungalow Earth, New York; Harkawik, New York; and King’s Leap, New York.

Chapter NY is excited to announce The Temple of Sleep, Cole Lu’s first exhibition with the gallery. Combining literary and historical reference with autobiographical experiences, Lu’s practice builds new mythologies that carry echoes of trauma, transformation and regeneration. Lu questions the theistic concept of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothingness), proposing a more complicated interspersal of time and human existence. Presented as a compilation of gestures or a collection of brief anecdotes, Lu’s work unfolds serially, following invented characters through a parallel world of his creation. Each exhibition or body of work reveals another element, broadening his narrative to incorporate new sites and characters. He (re)invents, (re)names, and (re)writes his subjects, composing each work with an elaborate fragmented title – a literary device that further subverts conventional linear narratives and amplifies his poetic vision.

Chapter NY is excited to present The Solemn and Dignified Burial Befitting My Beloved for All Seasons, Dominique Knowles’ first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will feature a suite of related and equally scaled paintings throughout the exhibition space. Knowles’ paintings conjure the emotion, shared glances, mutual care, and loss experienced during a lifetime of caring for an animal companion. The immediacy of the paint presents the often rapid transition of death despite a lifetime of labored prevention. Warm ochre tones, pigments that embody the melding of being with soil, harken to memory eternal — like the first visions of animals painted across caves.