Chapter NY

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 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.

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.

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.

Chapter NY is excited to announce Willa Nasatir’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a new selection of paintings and photographs. Nasatir’s practice investigates varied approaches to imaging. In both her paintings and photographs the artist transforms everyday objects to the point of the surreal, collecting and accumulating her subjects before distorting and abstracting their forms through various analog, drawing, and painting processes. Her work dislodges bodies and objects from ingrained associations and preexisting meaning, allowing them to merge into hybrid forms with porous edges. Fragmented compositions suggest both psychoanalytic and psychedelic perspectives, engaging Nasatir’s own subconscious associations. Through abstracted form, she plays with dualities of meaning and proposes an unraveling of perceived boundaries as they relate to gender and power. Informed by her background in photography, Nasatir creates paintings that intentionally evoke the translucency and flatness of photographic images. In the exhibition, embedded visual keys connect the paintings and photographs, further collapsing the relationship between mediums in Nasatir’s practice. Her work exists within a continuum, each one woven in and out of itself in perpetual circulation. Willa Nasatir (b. 1990, Los Angeles, California) lives and works in New York, NY. 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; Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; Gaylord Apartments, Los Angeles; Chapter NY, New York; and the White Room at White Columns, New York. Her work has also been included in exhibitions at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; 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.

Chapter NY is excited to present Stella Zhong’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, and first exhibition of paintings. Zhong’s work suspends existential uncertainty and humor. Through large-scale installation, sculpture, video, and painting, she builds vastly empty spaces punctured by barely visible, nonconforming objects in the periphery—highly idiosyncratic worlds that disorient authority. Immersed in physics and nonhuman elements, her work uses obscurity and lack of reference as the condition to observe strength in smallness, latent life, and moments where alienation and intimacy converge. Like her sculptural work, Zhong’s paintings display vantage points calibrated to both cosmic and microscopic scales. Spheres, desolate corners, grains of rice, buttons, cliffs, and reflective filaments are subjects that she repeatedly and almost obsessively paints into her characteristic muted environments, as if inside a particle or above the atmosphere. Visualizing incongruent spatial relationships is integral to Zhong’s practice, in which she experiments particularly through painting. In this exhibition, the constellation of new works refract Zhong’s personal lens of global shifts and entanglements, and turn to humble yet tactile connections. In one painting, a monumental sphere gravitates towards a minuscule mote to exchange shadows; in others, entities of decidedly different dimensions intersect in a soft, playful touch. The objects foregrounded here are at once potent, helpless, and isolated, but never quite alone. Stella Zhong (b. 1993, Shenzhen, China) lives and works in New York, NY. She holds a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. Selected solo exhibitions include Chapter NY, New York; Fanta-MLN, Milan; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; and Guan Shan Yue Art Museum, Shenzhen. Zhong has exhibited internationally at SculptureCenter, Queens, NY; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Galerie Marguo, Paris; in lieu, Los Angeles, CA; Peana, Mexico City; Mana Contemporary, Jersey City; HUA International, Beijing; M 2 3, New York; and more. Her work has been reviewed on ArtAsiaPacific, Mousse Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, The New York Times, Art in America, among others.

Chapter NY is pleased to present a group exhibition including drawings by Lee Lozano and multimedia works by contemporary artists cameron clayborn, Adam Gordon, Sylvie Hayes-Wallace, Sam Moyer, Dala Nasser, and Ang Ziqi Zhang. The exhibition will consider Lozano’s early practice—in particular, her drive to seek and define form—as a jumping off point and inspiration to the living artists in the exhibition. Two drawings from her early tool series center functional implements as bodily and erotically charged subjects. With great emphasis on process, each artist in the exhibition explores the capacity and potential of the creative act. They work within self-assigned rules and parameters to guide their artmaking and recontextualize objects and structures from their physical environments. Set within a wall, Gordon constructs a small-scale installation that reveals an improbable space just beyond grasp. Across all mediums, his work visualizes deeply uncanny spaces, training our attention towards the subtle ambiguities of human existence. In contrast to Gordon’s embedded work, Hayes-Wallace presents wall-mounted cages scaled to the size of her own head. Her precarious constructions interweave everyday materials and ephemera that reveal fragments of her interior self. Both Hayes-Wallace and Moyer reference the accumulation of time in their work. Hayes-Wallace includes a calendar in one of her sculptures that reveals her own ritualistic patterns. Moyer photographs the erosion and degradation of man-made constructions by natural forces. In a new series, she captures images of eroded sea walls that have devolved into free-formed shapes and lost their protective function. They exist as sculptural collaborations between the human hands that made them and the forces of nature that have been breaking them down. Framed in the same concrete aggregate material, they represent the history of lost forms. Nasser, too, addresses the intermingling and deterioration of the human and nonhuman, but from a historical and ecological perspective that reveals the effects of colonial erasure. Using landscape as medium, Nasser dyes her wall-based fabric works with Cochineal. With branches and bark sourced from her grandparents’ village, she layers rubbings within her compositions that point to her own history and hold many traces of being. clayborn’s practice similarly pulls from personal history and lived experience, creating multivalent sculptures that are tender and intimate, abject and erotic. In dialogue with the artist’s performance practice, their sculptures convey a bodily presence of implied motion. These recent works, created under tight time constraints, embrace an element of intuitive spontaneity. With a more slowed-down approach, Ziqi Zhang’s paintings evolve incrementally through carefully considered gestures and looping forms. Unusually proportioned panels constrain and inspire her abstract imagery that seeks to capture the artist’s personal subjectivity. cameron clayborn (b. 1992, Memphis, Tennessee) lives and works in New Haven, CT. They have had solo exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Simone Subal Gallery, New York; and Boyfriends, Chicago; among others. Their work is included in the collections of the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. This year, clayborn will be included in an upcoming group exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. Adam Gordon (b. 1986, St. Paul, Minnesota) lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey. He received his MFA from Yale University in 2011. He has had solo exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York; Gandt, Queens; Project Native Informant, London; Galleria ZERO, Milan; and The Power Station, Dallas. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Andrew Kreps, New York; High Art, Paris; National Exemplar, New York; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. His work is included in the collections of the Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 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 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. Lee Lozano (b. 1930, Newark, NJ) lived and worked in New York before retreating from the art world and moving to Dallas, TX where she died in 1999. Her work has been exhibited extensively around the world. She has had notable solo exhibitions at institutions including Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Sam Moyer (b. 1983, Chicago, Illinois) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2007. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Bass Museum, Miami; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; the Drawing Center, New York; the FLAG Art Foundation, New York; the Hill Art Foundation, New York; LAND, Los Angeles; MoMA PS1, Queens; the Parrish Art Museum, New York; Public Art Fund, New York; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; and White Flag Projects, St. Louis. She has had solo exhibitions at Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles; Sean Kelly, New York; 56 Henry Gallery, New York; JOAN Los Angeles, Los Angeles; SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin; Galerie Tom Christoffersen, Copenhagen; and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; among others. Her work is included in the collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; the Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley; the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston; the Morgan Library, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; among others. Dala Nasser (b. 1990, Tyre, Lebanon) lives and works in Beiruit, Lebanon. She received her MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2021. She has had solo exhibitions at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany; V.O Curations, London; and Deborah Schamoni, Munich. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Sharjah Biennial 15, Sharjah, UAE; Musée d’Art de Joliette, Quebec; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Antenna Space, Shanghai; Shahin Zarinbal, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Yale School of Art, New Haven; Lyes & King, New York; Beirut Art Center, Beirut; and François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; among others. Ang Ziqi Zhang (b. 1994, Brampton, Ontario) lives and works in New Haven, CT and Brooklyn, NY. Zhang received their MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale School of Art in May 2023. They have had solo and two-person exhibitions at Iowa, Brooklyn; LVL3, Chicago; and Produce Model Gallery, Chicago. Their work has been included in group exhibitions at YveYANG Gallery, New York; Jan Kaps Gallery, Köln, Germany; Apparatus Projects, Chicago; Yale School of Art, New Haven; Good Weather Gallery, Chicago; Night Club Gallery, Minneapolis; Logan Center Exhibitions, Chicago; Each Modern, Taipei; and Fonda, Leipzig, Germany; among others.

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 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.

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.