Goya Contemporary

Silverman’s recent work draws upon scroll-like photographs discovered while sorting through decades of materials within various archives. These images—group portraits of early 20th-century schoolchildren, summer campers, banquet attendees, and military recruits—were originally captured with large-format panoramic cameras. Recovered from obsolescence, they serve both as subject and object in Silverman’s conceptual, transformative investigations. “Given the relationship a photograph inevitably has with the past, my desire is to focus on the act of remembering. The contortions of the scrolls—the twisting, curling, and blurring during exposure—mirror the fragility of memory,” explains Silverman. “My manipulation of the scrolls attempts to evoke how the gap between the photograph and memory continues to widen as the time when the picture was taken recedes further into the past. This is also true for the near-obsolete technology used to make these panoramas.”

In Living With It, Davis examines how objects—particularly those found in the landscape—act as intimate companions in the face of time’s vast and disorienting passage. Drawing visual and conceptual parallels between domestic space, time, and geological matter, the exhibition poses a central question: how do we make sense of things too large to grasp? And by extension, how can something as immense as a landscape, a nation, or even time itself be encountered meaningfully from within the four walls of a single room? Referencing 19th- and 20th-century American landscape photography, Davis turns that tradition on its head. “Where early photographers compressed the sublime expanse of the American West onto 8x10-inch sheets of film—rendering the land legible, safe, and ownable—these new photographs reverse that gesture” says Davis. “In them, rocks from disparate locations—a stone found in Baltimore, a fragment of iron ore purchased online from the West—are placed atop scans of large-format film. Rather than reducing the vast to the knowable, these images expand the familiar, rendering the small into something monumental.” The photographs act as counter-landscapes—“portals that challenge assumptions of ownership, scale, and the idea that human perception is the proper measure of understanding the world.”

Our 2025 Armory Show presentation brings together works by Alfred Jensen, Amalie Rothschild, Joyce J. Scott, and Madeleine Keesing, to explore how systems—mathematical, linguistic, cultural, or social—shape visual expression and meaning. Each artist engages structured methodologies as a foundation for intuitive, emotional, and conceptual exploration, revealing the profound ways systems inform contemporary and historical art practices. Alfred Jensen (1903–1981) fused numerology, ancient cosmologies, and abstraction to create vibrant compositions that bridge logic and intuition. His use of the Fibonacci sequence, astrology, and the I Ching reflects a belief in systems as both formal structure and metaphysical language. Amalie Rothschild (1916–2001) worked across painting and sculpture, integrating organic and mathematical forms. Her structurally innovative works emphasize balance, tension, and spatial clarity, challenging gendered expectations and asserting system-based abstraction as a site of discovery and tactile engagement. Joyce J. Scott (b. 1948) employs the peyote stitch—a meticulous off-loom bead weaving technique—to explore systems of race, identity, and power. A MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellow, her sculptures interrogate social structures through mathematics and craft, merging political urgency with visual complexity. Madeleine Keesing(b. 1941) creates intricate, meditative paintings built from accumulated marks and repetitive gestures. Her work balances control and chance, using structure as a gateway to spontaneity, inviting quiet contemplation and sensory depth. Together, these artists reveal how systems function not as constraints, but as catalysts for meaning—transforming color, form, and content into layered visual languages that resonate across time, identity, and experience.