Chapter NY

In Milk of the Earth, Antonia Kuo continues her engagement with personal histories rooted in alchemical transformation, metallurgy, and Chinese painting. She focuses on an ecology of material extraction—extraction of the body and the Earth—wombs, mines, cavities, milk, and metal. This framework brings our attention to the viscous liquidity of milk and ceramic slurry, the act of mining as milking the earth, and the mine as an excavated void, or negative. The site of the negative is a focal point for Kuo, a vital space activated by protean energies. Kuo utilizes photographic and sculptural technologies to convey aspects of these lineages, including chemical paintings on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper, X-ray film and corresponding photograms, video footage from her family foundry, micrographs of metal alloys, ultrasound video she recorded of her fetus, and sculptures referencing the industrial mold making process. In mold making, a “mother mold” is fabricated as an inverse matrix from which multiples are produced. Kuo’s ceramic mold sculptures are hollow, precisely recording an initial wax form that has been vacated, flushed from the ceramic. As a new mother, Kuo is interested in her body as a transformed and emptied vessel, one that has been mined by her infant, both in vitro and on a daily basis. Kuo’s work is inextricable from her relationship with her own Taiwanese artist mother who has a lifelong Chinese painting and calligraphy practice. Kuo uses the lens of Chinese painting to interpret aspects of landscape through embodied memory and engages the concept of emptiness which is pivotal to the Chinese conception of the universe. Emptiness is not inert or vacuous; it is active, dynamic, and connects the visible world to an invisible one. It is the site of continual becoming. From this emptiness over 10 billion years ago, all metallic elements in the universe were forged in stellar processes. Most of the copper in the Milky Way originated in supergiants, the most massive stars in the universe. In this exhibition, copper appears in several different modalities: as a supportive substrate, an electroplated coating, and a selective chemical sensitizer for her painting Pit Mine, producing chalky iron oxide tonalities. Kuo reflects on her family’s roots in the copper mining town of Butte, Montana, a metalworking heritage that inspired her uncles to start their own foundry. Berkeley Pit is a massive open pit mine in the heart of Butte, which Kuo remembers since childhood to be as breathtaking as an earthwork, a radical mile-long excavation of terrain waterlogged by deep burgundy and startling turquoise water containing high levels of heavy metals and toxic chemicals. At the crux of Kuo’s work is a complex ambivalence in relation to toxicity and awe. Kuo is familiar with collaborating with the caustic, unpredictable nature of chemistry, but is transfixed by its extreme transformative capabilities. Her paintings on paper coated with silver halide crystals are sensitive receptors to light and time. While copper was forged over the course of millions of years, silver was created in the flash of an eye during the intensely bright explosive moment of a star’s death. Antonia Kuo (b. 1987, New York, NY) lives and works in New York, NY. She received an MFA from Yale University in 2018, her BFA from School of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University in 2009, and a one-year certificate from the School of the International Center of Photography in 2013. In 2024 Kuo had a two-person exhibition with Martin Wong at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle. Her work has been exhibited at Metropolitan Museum of Manila, PH; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Chapter NY, New York; James Cohan, New York; Project Native Informant, London; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles; Jack Barrett Gallery, New York; F, Houston; Chart, New York; Each Modern, Taipei; MAMOTH, London; Make Room, Los Angeles; among others. Kuo has performed and screened her work at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; Knockdown Center, Queens, NY; MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; and the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, among others. She has been an artist-in-residence at Mass MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, The Banff Centre, and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Kuo’s work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Centre Pompidou, Paris. In May 2025, Kuo will have a solo exhibition at Adams and Ollman in Portland, OR.

Adams and Ollman is pleased to present New Mountains, an exhibition of works by Joan Nelson with Chapter NY, the artist’s first solo show in New York in nearly 25 years. The exhibition’s title references a 1986 quote by Ursula K. LeGuin: “…if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert… all the maps change. There are new mountains.”1 For both LeGuin and Nelson, speaking truth to power can be a seismic event that forges, however glacially, new foundational terrain for change. Featuring new paintings alongside a selection of Nelson’s intricate miniatures from 2013-14, the show will open on Friday, April 18, 2025 from 6-8 pm and will be on view at the gallery through May 24, 2025. Nelson is known for her ongoing exploration of landscape painting rooted in an engagement with feminism, spiritualism, science fiction, and environmentalism since the 1980s. Her works depict fantastical vistas filled with atmospheric and geological phenomena –volcanic explosions, shimmering wetlands, crepuscular rays, ethereal cloudscapes, mist-shrouded mountains, and ancient, entangled trees. Nelson spins these motifs into imagined worlds, utopias that hold true to the word’s literal translation of “no place.” Working within a square format rather than a traditional landscape orientation, she renders her maximally picturesque paintings with a mix of illusionistic detail, stylized mark-making, and painterly abstraction, drawing on historical sources as much as her own speculative visions of the past and the future. Evocative of prehistorical, posthuman or extraterrestrial worlds, the ground in Nelson’s work appears fertile, if always devoid of sentient life. The broad range of pictorial styles and perspectives in Nelson’s work stems from her deep engagement with how landscapes have been represented across time. She references a wide collection of paintings, etchings, exoticized renderings of foreign territories depicted in historical geography books, even amateur travel videos, weaving these varied influences into her work. Particularly generative are the grandiose, imperial visions of Romantic landscape painters like Thomas Moran, Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Cole, and Albert Bierstadt. Nelson exposes their narratives of conquest and extraction, reframing them from a feminist and ecological lens. Illusions of depth and distance in Nelson’s work often break down upon close looking. Nelson revels in the physicality of her materials, expertly harnessing their transformative possibilities while allowing the agency of pigment, ink, and wax to guide the process. In past works, she has incorporated popular and unconventional media like glitter, crayons, and markers, glass beads, make-up, even spices into encaustic, oil and acrylic grounds, pouring, splattering, scratching and carving on and into their surfaces. In the process of painting, she will often lay a canvas or panel flat to allow wax, ink or paint to drip and diffuse across the surface, mirroring the erosion and accumulation of earth itself. Nelson sometimes conjures her imagery from the rivers and peaks that naturally form on a microcosmic scale during the process of establishing her compositions. Included in the exhibition are a series of works on paper depicting miniature landscapes and disembodied eyes arranged in tiny groupings, rows and sometimes stacked pairings—like portals or keyholes, offering glimpses into hidden worlds. Nelson’s engagement with miniatures dates back to the 1980s when, against the backdrop of Postmodernism, she began repainting cropped sections of historic landscape paintings at the exact scale of their reproductions on book pages. The eye acknowledges the implied viewer’s perspective in the landscape painting tradition, as well as ‘lover’s eyes,’ 18th-century mementos that historically depicted the eye or eyes of a spouse, loved one or child. Joan Nelson (b. 1958, California; lives and works in Stamford, NY) has exhibited her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; among many others. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, all New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Minneapolis Museum of Art, MN; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; and Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin, TX. Nelson received her BFA from Washington University, St. Louis, MO. In 2023, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. _ 1. Ursula K. LeGuin, Bryn Mawr College commencement speech, 1986, published in the essay collection Dancing At The Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, 1989.

Chapter NY is excited to present Entwined, Asal Peirovi's second solo exhibition with the gallery. Peirovi’s practice explores the ambiguities of myth and imagination. In her mostly unstretched paintings, she interlaces elements of nature and architecture derived from her own personal memories and lived experiences. Her fragmented perspectives and layered forms—including mountains, bridges, vegetation, and architectural structures—allude to the tradition of Persian miniature paintings and present simultaneous narratives that poetically unfold across both time and space. Persian miniatures became a significant genre in Persian art in the 13th century, expanding the art historical tradition of illuminated manuscripts. Unlike Western visual conventions that use one-point or multi-point perspective, these paintings follow a distinct approach. Receding objects are rendered with parallel lines that deliberately omit visual depth. Consequently, the horizon line is often positioned at the top of the image. This method allows artists to depict multiple events within a single frame, a technique known as simultaneity. Drawing on the traditions of her art historical predecessors, Peirovi embraces this multi-dimensional approach in her own work. In Entwined, Peirovi presents a new series of paintings that recollect vague memories of her childhood home in Iran and its surroundings. The title of the exhibition refers to the blurred and entangled images that remain in the artist's mind but also invokes the way a grapevine wraps itself around fences and structures. Using a tie-dye technique for the first time, Peirovi begins each painting by dyeing her canvases to create an abstract pattern reminiscent of Tash'ir—floral or zoomorphic motifs that form the borders of some Persian paintings. The tie-dyeing process inherently relinquishes full control over the artist’s materials, allowing for a level of spontaneity that aligns with the behavior of nature itself. From these forms, Peirovi creates compositions that interweave architectural structures inspired by Persian-Islamic monuments and her own photographs of modern buildings and objects taken along nearby roads and mountains. The discordance between these lifeless structures and organic rock formations reflects the contrast and contradictions of the artist’s imagination. In The Quince Tree’s Visage (2024), Peirovi’s composition extends beyond the standard rectangle, which in Eastern culture often symbolizes the terrestrial realm. According to some scholars of Eastern art, when artists break or transcend the square or rectangle, it may signify a transition from the material world to the unknown celestial realm. Peirovi’s work operates within this liminal space, leaving room for multiple interpretations. Asal Peirovi (b.1985, Sari, Mazandaran, Iran) received her BA in Painting from Shahed University in 2009 and her MA in Painting from the University of Art in Tehran in 2014. She has had solo exhibitions at STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo; Chapter NY, New York; Dastan Gallery, Tehran; and Shirin Art Gallery, Tehran. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Yavuz Gallery, Redfern, AUS; STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo; Assar Art Gallery, Tehran; The Edinburgh Festival, Edinburgh; among others.

Chapter NY is excited to present Terran Last Gun: Visual Reaffirmation, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City. The exhibition will feature a new series of abstract drawings on antique ledger sheets, further expanding this element of Last Gun’s practice. Last Gun considers relationships between color, form, land, and the cosmos, influenced by his own experiences and cultural heritage as a member of the Piikani Nation. His geometric abstractions combine visual references to ancient Indigenous North American culture with a contemporary artistic approach informed by his background in printmaking, painting, and photography. Simultaneously engaging with history, the present, and optimism for the future, his works constantly shift across timelines. Ledger drawings emerged in the late 19th century, primarily created by Plains Indians to document aspects of daily life such as hunting and battle scenes. Artists depicted representational subjects on repurposed paper sourced from accounting ledger books, partly due to its accessibility. Last Gun’s abstract compositions, however, depart from traditional narrative ledger drawings, deriving formal inspiration from the aesthetics of Blackfoot painted lodges, hides, war shirts, and archaeological artifacts throughout Montana and Alberta. The exhibition features two recurring compositions: individual works with square forms symbolizing doorways and diptychs with rectangular forms representing windows. Both doors and windows serve as gateways to new ways of thinking, offering a transportive quality that invites exploration. Last Gun’s individual works expand his ongoing interest in the square form and its symmetry. In these compositions, he fills the squares completely with color, allowing the ledger paper to remain visible through the colored pencil. These doorways reference Blackfoot painted lodges, specifically doorways painted on the back of the lodges, which were often considered spirit doors and positioned to face the sunset. Last Gun’s diptychs, with their extended horizontal orientation, evoke the feeling of landscapes. By combining two separate sheets of paper, he explores the duality and energy created through their connection. Last Gun distinguishes each work through his use of color, exploring both monochromatic and complementary palettes. His practice remains firmly rooted in color theory and color relativity, with a continuous interest in understanding why people are drawn to specific colors. The color wheel plays a central role in the artist’s process, guiding him to select color schemes that create harmony and engage the viewer. In his work Important Ideas Come Into Existence (2025), he focuses solely on various shades of white, investigating the subtlety and depth that can be achieved within a single color. A notable feature of Last Gun’s exhibition is the use of ledger paper dated 1923 and 1924, gifted to the artist by his father and an anonymous donor from Tucson. The dates remain legible within the artist’s work and reference the historical context of those eras of hardship for all Indigenous communities. By using historical paper, he breathes new life into it, reintroducing and emphasizing the history of his people in the broader, mainstream narrative of North America. Terran Last Gun, Saakwaynaamah’kaa (Last Gun), (b. 1989, Browning, Montana) is an enrolled citizen of the Piikani Nation (Blackfeet) of Montana and a visual artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Piikani are one of four nations that make up the Blackfoot Confederacy, collectively called the Niitsitapi (Real People). Last Gun received his BFA in Museum Studies and MFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2016. Last Gun has had solo exhibitions at University of Northern Colorado, Greeley; Hockaday Museum of Art, Kalispell, MT; University of Montana Western, Dillon; K Art, Buffalo, NY; Missoula Art Museum, MT; and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM; among others. His work will be included in the upcoming 12th International SITE SANTA FE and has been exhibited at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO; Bates Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME; Newberry Library, Chicago, IL; The 8th Floor, New York, NY; Museum of the Plains Indian, Browning, MT; and Contemporary at Blue Star, San Antonio, TX; among others. His work is included in the collections of several museums across the United States. In 2024, Last Gun was awarded the Biennial Grant by the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.

Chapter NY is excited to present 41 Floors, a solo exhibition of paintings by Cheyenne Julien. Through portraits, landscapes and still lifes, Julien’s practice centers around architectural spaces, revealing the power of built environments to dictate racial perception. The artist’s most recent body of work draws inspiration from famed architect Paul Rudolph and his richly imaginative drawings that offer an idealistic vision of architecture’s potential to positively impact and guide urban renewal. In the early 1970s Rudolph designed Tracey Towers in the Bronx, the only subsidized housing project of his career. An apartment within one of these two Brutalist skyscrapers later became Julien’s childhood home. The striking presence of Tracey Towers remain both a predominant part of the Bronx skyline and a reoccurring subject in Julien’s work. For her exhibition at Chapter, Julien focuses on the outdoor spaces in and around Tracey Towers that were part of Rudolph’s original vision to foster community engagement within the building complex. Many of these courtyards and gardens were never realized in the final construction, but Julien copied and redrew elements of the architect’s drawings to channel his specific viewpoint, merging his perspective with her own gestures and lived experience. In one painting a reclining female figure lies over subway cars in the adjacent trainyard, originally intended to become a platform for townhomes and recreational facilities. Julien adopts Rudolph’s creative spirit in her own work, envisioning a limitless and futuristic architecture; but unlike Rudolph, Julien reveals the darker realities learned from living within one of these visionary projects ultimately riddled with inefficiencies and oppressive features. Julien’s resulting paintings hold greater depth than her earlier works, with more expansive and layered spaces. Contrasting artificial and natural light sources emphasize the complexity of these stacked urban environments. Stark beams of light cast from glowing windows and distant headlights penetrate Julien’s compositions, either suggesting a possible divine presence or invoking the paranoia of a surveilled state of being. Julien emphasizes the interdependency of bodies and these contexts by merging building materials such as brick, metal, and concrete with her imagined figurative subjects. Although directly referencing Tracey Towers, Julien’s paintings dislocate the viewer from identifiable space and time, instead favoring a world in which body and architecture become inextricably intertwined.

Chapter NY is excited to present Sylvie Hayes-Wallace’s solo exhibition, Locked from the Inside. The exhibition includes three artworks installed around the periphery and thresholds of the space in a site-specific installation. Driven by a desire to map her inner self onto the spaces and structures of her surroundings, Hayes-Wallace explores the architecture of self. She mimics aspects of her own interiority in external space and form, often using the measurements of her own body as a guiding parameter. Her works evolve from memories, layering personal ephemera and familiar materials at various densities that correspond to her own psychological weight and its levels of inscrutability. The artist combines these delicate, often intimately-scaled materials with an overt sense of precarity. Whether in the form of cages, curtains, or collage, her sculptural compositions all convey elements of portraiture without direct representation, probing the question: how does one make a self-portrait without showing oneself? The title of the exhibition, Locked from the Inside, emphasizes a sense of claustrophobia and containment felt throughout the work in the show. Almost imperceptible at first, a delicate curtain of steel wire and obsessively hand-cut orange peels spans the windows of the gallery. Reminiscent of beaded curtains that might adorn the doorframe of a girl’s bedroom, Hayes-Wallace’s Security similarly performs a false sense of privacy, ineffectually shielding the viewer from the outside world while symbolically enclosing the exhibition space. Caryatid (Self-Portrait) furthers this element of confinement with three wall-mounted cages that reflect the proportions of the artist’s head and two feet. Installed to match her own height, the work references ancient Greek columns in the shape of women’s bodies. Inspired by their wet drapery, Hayes-Wallace lines each cage with tulle, a stereotypically feminine material intended to veil the female figure while accentuating her skin and nakedness. The translucent tulle within Hayes-Wallace’s cages both reveal and conceal the void spaces they hold. Forming an architectural skin at the entrance/exit of Hayes-Wallace’s exhibition, My Interiority (My Dictator) compiles collaged ephemera on two walls in a vertical orientation that doubles as a second, nonfunctional column. As teen girls decorate their spaces with collaged images as an outlet of self-expression, the artist charts numerous cultural references that comprise her own sense of self. She lays bare the contents of her inner mind, creating a spatialization of the fragmented experience of the interior. Hayes-Wallace’s works cling to the periphery of the gallery, reiterating the enclosure of the space. Confined within the show but crowding the exterior walls and thresholds, the works mimic how one’s internal self inhabits one’s physical body—trapped but permeating the exterior world in traces and fragments. Sylvie Hayes-Wallace (b. 1994, Cincinnati, Ohio) lives and works in New York, NY. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. She has had solo and two-person exhibitions at In Extenso, Clermont-Ferrand, France; A.D. Gallery, New York; Bad Water, Knoxville; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; and New Works, Chicago; among others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York; Simone Subal Gallery, New York; King’s Leap Fine Arts, New York; Annex de Odelon, Ridgewood; MX Gallery, New York; and Frontera 115, Mexico City; among others. Hayes-Wallace will have a solo exhibition at Silke Linder, New York, opening September 2024.

Chapter NY is pleased to present a three-person exhibition with works by Thornton Dial, Kahlil Robert Irving, and Leslie Martinez. All three artists explore the notion of embeddedness. They recombine found and replicated objects tied to personal and cultural histories, dislodging them from ingrained associations to allow space for reflection and imagination. Often incorporating detritus within their mixed-media compositions, their work fosters new life from discarded materials, which—once molded and reconfigured—suggest resilience and regeneration with broader symbolic significance. The surfaces of Martinez’s abstract paintings recall scorched topographies or the mineral formations that form the strata of earth’s time. Their new work stems from an ongoing interest in naturally occurring materials that have existed in this world long before human laws and prejudices. For this exhibition, Martinez combines three paintings to form a towering stack resembling a cross section of the earth. Layers of vibrant color and texture emerge from within their compositions, as if newly excavated gems and minerals. Their defamiliarized materials function as structures of transformation, achieving a resilient beauty that holds the promise of futurity. Irving’s interest extends beyond the natural world, with an almost archeological approach to the surfaces and materials prevalent throughout our built environment. Irving’s sculptures comprise handmade stoneware tiles that reimagine the asphalt used to make city streets, an often-overlooked urban topography. Also reminiscent of ancient Greek mosaic floors, his sculptures contain reimagined historical objects and replicated, enameled fragments of urban detritus. These discarded artifacts—particularly those that are left to accumulate in some neighborhoods more than others—offer evidence of sustained hierarchies and aspects of societal oppression part of everyday life. Dial also manipulated manmade materials from his surroundings, particularly those with which he had direct contact. His practice was one of resourcefulness, creating from what was available and recontextualizing those objects as a way of rewriting history. In his late work, The Rich Man’s House (Tsunamis Don’t Discriminate), Dial combines discarded furniture and various domestic items to convey a universal experience of loss—but with the destruction caused by a massive flood comes the possibility of a new beginning. Thornton Dial (b. 1928, Emelle, Alabama; d. 2016, McCalla, Alabama) has had numerous solo exhibitions at museums and institutions across the United States. Dial’s work is included in the permanent collections of the American Folk Art Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Washington D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others. Kahlil Robert Irving (b. 1992, San Diego, California) lives and works in Saint Louis, Missouri. He received an MFA from Washington University Saint Louis in 2017 and a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute in 2015. Irving has had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, among others. Irving’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; RISD Museum, Providence; Riga Porcelain Museum, Latvia; Foundation for Contemporary Ceramic Art, Kecskemet, Hungary; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Leslie Martinez (b. 1985, McAllen, Texas) lives and works in Dallas, Texas. They received an MFA from Yale University in 2018 and a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008. Martinez has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Queens; Blaffer Art Museum, Houston; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; and And Now, Dallas. Martinez’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Speed Art Museum, Louisville; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Chapter NY is excited to present Yesterday’s, Milano Chow’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Chow’s intricate drawings combine graphite renderings and collaged photo transfers to create imaginary sites. Inspired by the patchwork architectural styles of her native Los Angeles, Chow embraces the city’s unabashed use of imitation and revivalism. Neoclassical, faux-Italian, and Spanish-revival facades and features coexist to create a disorienting sense of era. Chow uses ornament from these disparate periods as shorthand for a past time. She punctures her surreal compositions with framing elements such as windows or doors that suggest pictures within pictures. Within these void spaces, objects and figures emerge and recede, as if fading in and out of recollection. The exhibition title comes from a defunct 1980’s restaurant in the Westwood district of Los Angeles. The business’ former location at 1056 Westwood Blvd. is now a vacant storefront. Milano Chow (b. 1987, Los Angeles, California) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BA from Barnard College in 2009 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. She has had solo exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT; Bel Ami, Los Angeles; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; and Mary Mary Gallery, Glasgow; among others. Her work has been included in the Whitney Biennial 2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and other group exhibitions at Jeffery Deitch, New York, NY, and Los Angeles, CA; Chapter NY, New York; Venus Over Manhattan, New York; STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; The Drawing Center, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and the Drawing Room, London, & Modern Art Oxford, Oxford; among others. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The bus driver’s windshield is a painting in the rain. I have been watching the wipers beating left, right, left, right, smearing red and purple and green against the night. I know it’s an impossible painting because as soon as the brush hits those colors, they turn to brown. I have been driving all night, my thumb counting the ribs on the steering wheel, over and over. I know it’s an impossible painting because I am staring straight at the road and giving into astigmatism, not really seeing anything. I am completely focused on my thumb’s task, its blindness. I have been waiting at this intersection, the cars blurring past, and all of a sudden, I have to cross the street. I know it’s an impossible painting because the lights stuttered, green, yellow, red, in three directions at once, and I have never understood why pedestrians need icons of themselves to cross the street when drivers get pure color. There is a leak in two of my tires. It is silly, to try to measure their slow flattening with the eye instead of cutting to the chase, pressing the gauge to the valve and watching the needle rev up and flutter. There is something about the roundness of the gauge and the tire and the wheel, the way that you think you can feel deflation in a sharp turn, the way that you slide quarters on a track to turn on a hose to make these circles more perfect. * Janine Iversen knows that these are impossible paintings, but she starts them anyways. They have to do with the gulf between feeling and facture, not only in the uncomfortable misregistration between eye and hand, but also the productive distance of the refraction back to the viewer. There are vortices sweeping across their surfaces like weather. There are coy openings, portholes, pupils constricting. It is not that Iversen’s paintings just look back at you, but that they disassemble the musculature of looking, so that the movement of a wrist is like the focusing of a sight, and the just-there borders in the paint are like the clinking of billiards or the ticking of a timepiece. They tempt you toward recognition, but up close each winking gesture deflects back into the paint. The ovals become nostrils, then thumbprints, thumbing their nose, jeering mouths with eyebrows, things that chew on vision. What is undeniable is the speed that these canvases are worked on in the studio—how they are rotated, retouched, and obliterated. The speed that you can see in the frayed end of a brushstroke, like the engine’s kick that you feel in your toes. The paintings are small and large. They are each finished for a moment. They get at perception in bursts that reward those willing to see with the force that they require. – Louis Block Janine Iversen (b. 1981, Cleveland, Ohio) lives and works in Upstate New York. She earned a BFA in painting from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2009. Recent exhibitions include a two-person exhibition with Peter Shear at Clearing, New York (2024), and solo exhibitions at David Petersen Gallery, Minneapolis (2023) and Marvin Gardens, Ridgewood, NY (2021). Iversen's work has also been included in group exhibitions at David Petersen Gallery, Minneapolis (2023), Sarah Brooke Gallery, Los Angeles (2021), and Left Field Gallery, Los Osos, CA (2022).

Chapter NY is excited to present Misshape, a group exhibition of abstract paintings and sculptures by Willa Nasatir, Erin Jane Nelson, Douglas Rieger, and Carrie Rudd. Each artist deconstructs their subjects through various material processes that convey tactile evidence of their own lived experiences. They break down references to mechanical and everyday objects, literature, and the natural world, transforming them into anthropomorphic compositions with uncanny bodily presence. Willa Nasatir (b. 1990, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2012. She has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Chapter NY, New York; Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; Gaylord Apartments, Los Angeles; and White Columns, New York, among others. Her work has also been included in exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; Hester, New York; David Zwirner, New York; Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles; Company Gallery, New York; and Drei, Cologne, among others. Erin Jane Nelson (b. 1989, Neenah, WI) lives and works in Atlanta. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2011. 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 has been included in exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; the Moss Art Center, Virginia Tech; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, NLD; and La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain, Noisy-le-Sec, among others. In May 2024, her work will be included in an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Douglas Rieger (b. 1984, Pittsburgh PA) lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Yale in 2016 and BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2008. Rieger’s work has been exhibited at Capsule Shanghai (Shanghai, China), Helena Anrather Gallery (New York, NY), Thierry Goldberg Gallery (New York, NY), 67 Ludlow Gallery (New York, NY), New Discretions (New york, NY) and Fahrenheit (Madrid, Spain). His works has been featured in Bomb Magazine, Art in America, Artforum, Artsy, The New Yorker and FAD Magazine. Carrie Rudd (b. 1994, Hastings on Hudson, NY) lives and works in New York. She received her MFA from Hunter College in 2021. Her work has been included in exhibitions Polina Berlin Gallery, New York; Hunter College, New York; Hauser & Wirth, New York; and the Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, NY.

Chapter NY is excited to present Ann Greene Kelly’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. My Pussy’s A Giant Computer includes new sculptures and drawings that engage materials and subjects sourced from the artist’s immediate surroundings. Distinctly not abstract, each work contains recognizable objects that hold their own meaning and language. Those layers of association saturate and shift within the works as they are filtered through varied materials, labor, and compulsions. Ann Greene Kelly (b. 1988, New York, New York) lives and works in New York, New York. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, MD in 2010. She has had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Chapter NY, New York; Michael Benevento, Los Angeles; Paul Soto, Brussels; AND NOW, Dallas; and White Columns, New York. Her work was included in the 2021 New Museum Triennial and Made in LA 2020: A Version at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and The Huntington, San Marino, CA. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at Matthew Brown, Los Angeles; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Paul Soto, Los Angeles: Galleria Zero, Milan; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; David Zwirner, New York; Maisterravalbeuna, Madrid; and Stems Gallery, Brussels; among others. She is included in the collections of The AKG Buffalo, Berkely Art Museum, Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Drop Scene brings together five painters who pursue narrative proposals with simultaneous, superimposed, and often divergent actions in the space of a single picture plane. Meaning, search, action, and pleasure occur with adjacent intentions and effects, as with a theatrical scrim in which atmosphere or storyline plays out before an audience, while a different tableau or scenario is occurring off stage. The exhibition includes new paintings made specifically for exhibition by an international group of artists, including: Jin Han Lee, Kathryn Kerr, Jacob Littlejohn, Yu Nishimura, and So Young Park. Drop Scene is organized by New York based advisor and curator Augusto Arbizo, of Schwartzman& | S& Projects. Jin Han Lee (b. 1982, Seoul, South Korea) lives and works between Seoul, South Korea, and London, United Kingdom. She received her PHD in painting from Slade School of Fine Art, and MFA from Goldsmith’s College. Recent group shows include Union Pacific, London and BB&M, Seoul. Lee’s solo exhibitions include Gallery ISU; Together Together; and Nook Gallery – all in Seoul. Her work is included in the collections of Hyundai Capital, Seoul; Sarabande Foundation, London; and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Art Bank, South Korea. Kathryn Kerr (b. 1984, Los Angeles, California) lives and works in New York, NY. She received her MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2018. She has had solo exhibitions at And Now, Dallas; Lomex, New York; Papa Projects, St. Paul; and Essex Flowers, New York. Group exhibitions include Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Magenta Plains, New York; and Galerie Lisa Kanlhofer, Vienna. In Spring 2024, Kerr will have an exhibition with Antonia Kuo and Leslie Martinez at Project Native Informant, London. Jacob Littlejohn (b. 1995, Edinburgh, Scotland) lives and works in New York, NY. He received his BFA in painting and printmaking from The Glasgow School of Art in 2018 and is currently an MFA candidate at Hunter College, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Half Gallery, New York; The Rafiki Gallery, Edinburgh; and Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh. Group exhibitions include Pippy Houldsworth, London; 526 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles; Kutlesa Gallery, Switzerland; and The Biscuit Factory, Edinburgh; among others. Yu Nishimura (b. 1982, Kanagawa, Japan) lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. He received his BFA in painting from Tama Art University in 2004. He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Crèvecœr, Paris; KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo; David Radziszewski, Warsaw; Echigo-Tsumari Art Field, Tōkamachi; Le Quai, Monaco; Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, JP; and Kiyosu City Haruhi Art Museum, Aichi; among others. Group exhibitions include Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; The Warehouse, Dallas, TX; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo; and Braunsfelder, Cologne; among others. His work is included in the collections of Musee d’Art Moderne de Paris, France; MWoods Museum, Beijing; and Kanazawa 21 st Century Museum, Japan. So Young Park (b. 1971, Seoul, South Korea) lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. She received her BFA from University of the Arts, Berlin in 2009. She has had solo exhibitions at Til Richter Museum, Buggenhagen; P21, Seoul; PS Salubia, Seoul; Hapjeong District, Seoul; and Gallery E105; among others. Group exhibitions include Simone Subal, New York; Aram Art Museum, Ilsan; frontviews, Berlin; and Uferhallen, Berlin; among others. Her work is included in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Art Bank, Korea; and the ESMoA Museum, California.

Chapter NY is excited to present a new body of work by Patrick Berran for Chromazones, his fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Collage reveals a physical decision, one that disrupts the existing content of a picture plane, conceals elements of what came before, and asserts its own physicality. Berran combines paper and canvas, turning to various drawing materials and techniques to expand the materiality of his surfaces. His earlier paintings conveyed texture through layers of painted and silkscreened patterns, but for this show, Berran interrupts the inherent smoothness of his previous works and plays with the dichotomous convergence of implied and actual texture. The incorporation of paper on his painted surfaces nods to earlier stages of Berran’s practice in which he creates patterns that resembled static noise by repeatedly photocopying pages of his own sketchbooks. Beginning as line drawings derived from the artist’s memory or objects in his surroundings, his source imagery evolves into abstract form through a serial process. Although less prominent than before, fragments of his distilled drawings punctuate each painting. Vibrant blues reverberate throughout Berran’s recent paintings in translucent swaths, transferred patterns, or drawn lines. His expanded palette of deep reds and purples suggest the rising and setting sun, a shift following his move from New York City to the Outer Banks where he experiences natural light and color with greater immediacy. All horizontally arranged, his paintings hint at layered landscapes but never reveal any recognizable sense of space, veering always in favor of abstraction. Flirting with the art historical legacy of modernist abstraction, Berran interweaves and repeats formal elements, namely stripes, bleeding stains, and characteristic layered shapes, intuitively carving out paths within and around them. He allows his forms to disappear beyond the edges of the canvas and emphasizes the tension of his cropped edges with hand-made artist frames that pictorially bind his densely concentrated compositions. Imperfectly made, they reassert the artist’s hand with a decisive gesture. Patrick Berran (b. 1980, Woodbridge, Virginia) lives and works in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. He received his MFA from Hunter College, New York in 2006. He has had solo exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York; Vault Gallery, Manteo, NC; College of The Albemarle, Elizabeth City, NC; Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA; One River School of Art + Design, Englewood, NJ; HUNTER / WHITFIELD, London; and White Columns, New York; among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Chapter NY, New York; Over Under, Brooklyn; Rod Bianco, Oslo; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis; and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; among others.