Veronica, Veronica: Curated by Andrew Gardner and Emma Safir

HESSE FLATOW is pleased to present Veronica, Veronica, a group exhibition of 33 international artists at its gallery space inside a 4,000 square foot former potato barn in Amagansett. The show, organized by independent curator Andrew Gardner and artist Emma Safir, celebrates the titular patron saint of the image, photographers, linen weavers, and laundry workers, whose legend recounts one of the most exalted examples of image generation and transference in the Western world. A public opening will be held on June 14 from 4-8pm. A performance by writer, choreographer and performer Jack Ferver entitled It’s Veronique will mark the exhibition’s closing on July 26 at 4pm. A private sagra feast performance by artist Adriana Gallo will be held during the course of the exhibition’s run to mark St. Veronica’s feast day.

 

Alex Batkin

Brianna Rose Brooks

Jennifer Carvalho

Cynthia Chang

Megan Cline

Liz Collins

Pap Souleye Fall

Jack Ferver

Adriana Gallo

Douglas Goldberg

Kara Güt

Martine Gutierrez

Jeremy Jacob

Clementine Keith-Roach

Colin Knight

Antonia Kuo

Hannah Levy

Craig Jun Li

Diana Sofia Lozano

Richard Malone

Helena Minginowicz

Lior Modan

Africanus Okokon

Tamen Pérez

Kent Rhodebeck

Emma Safir

Pauline Shaw 

Karinne Smith

Sophie Stone

Jia Sung 

Catherine Telford Keogh

Frank Traynor

Wretched Flowers

 

The story of St. Veronica does not appear in the four canonical gospels; rather than a biblical figure, her’s is a story that has evolved endlessly over centuries, a true Christian legend. The most widely accepted version was affirmed in the 13th century Bible en françois of Roger d’Argenteuil. In this iteration, Veronica encounters Jesus on his journey to Golgotha, where he will be crucified. Seeing Jesus’ suffering, she wipes his brow with her veil, resulting in the transfer of a perfectly replicated image of his visage. The exchange is charged with eroticism; his bodily fluids are quite literally enmeshed in her cloth, an intimate encounter that results in an image that marks one of his final moments in the earthly realm. The Veil of Veronica, held at Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican and said to quench thirst, cure blindness, and raise the dead, would therefore predate the Shroud of Turin, a more widely known relic of cloth imprinted with Christ’s crucified body. 

 

As the tale of Veronica was translated and circulated, the popular imaginary surrounding this remarkable duplicated image grew. Artworks depicting a woman holding a draped cloth imbued with a perfectly articulated reproduction of Christ’s face became widely known, including perhaps the most famous, Hans Memling’s Saint Veronica from c. 1470-1475, held at the National Gallery of Art. Other art forms further canonized her story. Passion plays, a regular feature of medieval European life organized by a moralizing church intent on spreading Christian doctrine, regularly depicted Veronica’s encounter with Jesus as one of the final humane moments before he meets the pain and suffering of death. In the 19th century, the interwinning developments of the industrial revolution, fueled by the mechanized production of textiles, and photography, gave Veronica’s mythic status as a protector and keeper of both cloth and image renewed attention, as her saintly patronage extended to include both the laboring textile worker and the nascent technology of mechanical image reproduction. 

 

Veronica’s name is a transposition of ancient linguistics: veritas, verus, vero—in Latin, truth, true, truthfully—and eikōn (εἰκών)—in Greek, image, figure, or likeness. Veronica, the carrier of truth, one that holds the truest image. She, the keeper of the trace of Christ, the protector of this most intimate encounter with the king of kings, the first indexical record that his body ever existed. Her cloth, imprinted with an image not made of human hands but of human flesh, this veil charged with both eros and faith, its fibers impregnated with the bodily fluids of a man who would die for his belief. Veronica, truth seer, sayer, and protector. Through her veil, she possesses and defends his mortal flesh, a physical manifestation of a body that could never fully be hers (or anyone’s). Her efforts to extend a simple kindness to the zealot who was soon to be punished for his heresy is a resolutely queer gesture, an act of brave defiance in the face of countervailing forces intent on squelching freedom of belief. It is perhaps no accident, then, that during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, it was at St. Veronica’s Roman Catholic church in Greenwich Village that suffering gay men were welcomed with open arms, nursed through their tumultuous descents into death at one of the New York City’s only hospices catering to victims of that horrible disease.

 

In an era of “alternative facts” and AI-generated imagery, it feels almost quaint to venerate a saint known for her fierce protection of the truth. But as her story, which has continuously evolved to meet the needs of the present moment, shows, truth can be a slippery and elusive thing. Sure, the literal transposition of blood, sweat, and tears onto cloth can result in one kind of image making, but it’s still a gesture towards truth, the contours of a man’s face, but hardly the real thing. Painters like Memling were religious propagandists, paid handsomely by the church to depict religious gospel with life-like reality, but based on stories that only existed in oral or textual form. With the advent of photography, reality could be easily captured and circulated with the sheer manipulation of light and shadow. But the endless glut of imagery, increasingly disseminated by wealthy and powerful politicians and media barons who were quickly displacing religious figureheads as the proliferators of image-based propaganda, proved that owning the means of truth distribution was as meaningful as the truth that was being depicted. Fidelity to the truth is hard to come by, it seems.

 

Veronica, Veronica therefore considers image generation, transference, and exchange in a post-truth age, one marked by pessimism and disillusionment, as postpandemic social isolation and widely-circulated internet misinformation have fueled a crisis of faith in just about every corner of modern life. The exhibition draws together artists who play with ideas of artistic doubling, replication, and the inherent contradiction of the “perfect” copy, sometimes creating works that intentionally manipulate or distort imagery. Systems of ritual, care, worship, and devotion are also centered, as works rendered in a wide range of materials tease out ideas of fact and fiction, resulting in objects imbued with commitments to beliefs both personal and collective. Many of the works featured play up the material vernacular of ancient traditions, employing the time intensive processes of hand weaving, sewing, metalsmithing, and slip casting, creating works steeped in virtuosic care for making. Here, artists are considering systems of faith anew, reimagining image reproduction and veneration for an era short on hope for just about anything. 

 

Andrew Gardner is a writer, curator, and historian based in New York. His work focuses on a wide range of topics that grapple with the socio-political dimensions of the human-made world and where art, design, history, technology, and the natural world converge. He has contributed to a wide range of publications, organized numerous exhibitions, and commissioned public art across the U.S. and around the world. He has held positions at the Museum of Modern Art, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Meta Open Arts, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Arts & Design team, and the Bard Graduate Center.

 

Emma Safir (b. 1990 NYC) Safir makes paintings that utilize fabric manipulation, lens–based media, smocking, rasterization, upholstery, and digitization. Her paintings function as screen simulations, proxies and portals. Safir is interested in hierarchies of labor in relation to gender and digitization, and in image making apparatus and distribution. Safir holds a BFA from RISD in Printmaking and an MFA from Yale in Painting & Printmaking. She has had solo exhibitions at Blade Study, Baxter St at CCNY, SHIN HAUS at Shin Gallery and Bunker Projects; and has participated in group shows at HESSE FLATOW, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Charles Moffett, Jack Barrett, Lyles & King, among others. She has upcoming solo exhibitions with HESSE FLATOW (September 2025) and Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (April 2026). Safir lives and works in New York City.

 

Alex Batkin (b. 1989) is an artist and somatic practitioner based in New York City. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College and a Masters of Science in Acupuncture. 

 

Brianna Rose Brooks (b. 1997) received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and their MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art in New Haven in 2021. In 2023 they were a resident artist at Skowhegan School of Painting Sculpture. In 2023, they were a resident artist at Skowhegan School of Painting Sculpture. Recent one and two-person exhibitions include Morning Pages at Ruby Dakota NY; Come Back as a Flower at Deli Gallery, NY; A Requiem For Benevolent Beasts, curated by Arianna Nourse, at Lindon & Co., London, UK (with Leyla Faye); Deli Gallery Presents: The Way Things Go at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Love You Coz You Always Tell the Truth, at Deli Gallery, New York, NY. With recent exhibitions at Collaborations, Copenhagen, DE, Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY, and Half Gallery, New York, NY. They were born in Providence, Rhode Island and currently live in New York, NY.

 

Jennifer Carvalho graduated from University of Guelph in 2013. Recent exhibitions include Helena Anrather, New York; Franz Kaka, Toronto; Palmer Gallery, London; WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong; Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Montreal; and The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. In 2020 Carvalho was an artist in residence at The Banff Centre, Banff, AB. Carvalho has been awarded numerous prizes including Toronto Arts Council Visual Artist Program, Toronto Arts Council; Research and Creation Grant, Canada Council for the Arts; and The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Carvalho is in the public collection of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, ON. Carvalho lives and works in Toronto.

 

Cynthia Chang (b. 1990, they/them/theirs) is a multimedia maker living in Queens, NY. They are the founder of defunct fashion brand Something Happening and perform as a dollar store budget popstar under the moniker boiled wool.

 

Megan Cline (b. 1991) is a visual and culinary artist living and working in New York. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has participated in residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Ox-Bow School of Art, VCU SSP Program, and Ne’-Na Contemporary Art Space. Her work explores the disruption of patterns and language through the lens of minute ecosystems. She recently created the food and research project Ant Supper, an evolving study on the history, display, and performance within collaborative dining. 

 

Liz Collins is an artist known for pushing the boundaries of art and design in innovative and experimental work in fabric, yarn, and other materials and techniques associated with textile media. Whether in the form of textile, painting, drawing or installation, Collins frequently explores the dichotomy of structure and entropy—qualities inherent to textile that speak to the fissures present in broader architectural, political, and social structures. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Touchstones Rochdale, England (2022) and Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York (2015–17), and been featured in a range of international exhibitions and within a broad range of galleries and institutions, including at the 60th Venice Biennale exhibition (2024) and in the Woven Histories exhibition presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2023), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2024), and Museum of Modern Art (2025). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the USA Fellowship, MacColl Johnson Fellowship, Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo and MacDowell Fellowships, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Her work is held in a range of public and private collections, including the RISD Museum, Museum of Arts & Design (New York, NY), Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC), Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Brazil), Leslie-Lohman Museum (New York, NY), and FIT Museum (New York, NY), among others. Collins was the Inaugural Artist in Residence at Longhouse Reserve in 2024.

 

Pap Souleye Fall is a Senegalese-American artist described as a media mixer, working across sculpture, installation, performance, cosplay, digital media, and comics. Growing up within the African Diaspora, Fall defines their approach as non-Western-centered, creating immersive environments that are joyful and evoke the Black imaginary. They are interested in how to embed art in daily life, and use common, everyday materials to explore themes of diaspora, post-apocalypse, utopia, identity, and notions of masculinity, as well as Africanisms and Afro-futurism.  

 

Jack Ferver’s genre defying performances, which have been called “so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms” (The New Yorker),interrogate and indict psychological and socio-political issues, particularly in the realms of gender, sexual orientation, and power struggles. Weaponizing spectacle and stark naturalism, character and self, humor and horror, their performance practice is rooted in the shattering effects of trauma, and the numerous selves that can arise from that shattering. Their work has been presented throughout New York City, domestically, and internationally. Their 16th full-length performance work, My Town, a queering of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, will be at NYU Skirball in Fall of 2025. Ferver teaches at Bard College. 

 

Adriana Gallo (b. 1993 Milan, Italy) is an artist, independent researcher, and culinary practitioner. Her practice deals with ecologies of labor, metabolic sublimes, dialectics of conviviality, and speculative production through installation, sculpture, text, workshops, lectures, and meals. Gallo holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently pursuing an MA in Art & Ecology at Goldsmiths University of London. She has participated in residencies and programs including the inaugural cohort of the Postnatural Independent Program (2023, online and Madrid, Spain), Marble House (2024, Vermont, USA), the Nature, Art & Habitat Residency (2022, Taleggio Valley, Italy), and Pocoapoco (2019, Oaxaca, Mexico). She has contributed to publications such as MOLD Magazine, Sali e Tabacchi Journal, Robida Magazine, and the Are.na Annual and has been published by Cthulu Books, Desuetude Press, and lucky risograph. Gallo lives and works between New York City and London. 

 

Douglas Goldberg was born in Englewood, NJ, in 1971. He earned his BA in Art at Messiah College in Pennsylvania and received his MFA at the Maryland Institute’s Mount Royal School of Art in Baltimore, MD. His work has been exhibited for the past two decades in a variety of private and public spaces in Philadelphia; Baltimore; Washington D.C.; Laholm, Sweden; Portland, ME; and New York City. Goldberg has also been included in art fairs including the Dallas Art Fair, and The Armory Show. He lives and works between New York City and the Hudson Valley and is represented by Ulterior Gallery in New York, NY.

 

Kara Güt is an Ohio-based artist whose primary focus is image-based, digital media. Her work investigates the shape of human intimacy formed by internet lifestyle, constructed detachment from reality, and the power dynamics of the virtual. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, most recently at The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Singapore Art Museum; Hybrid Box, Dresden, among others. She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and is an alumni of Pioneer Works Tech Residency and the Institute of Electronic Arts at Alfred University. She is a 2023 Knight Art + Tech fellow.

 

Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989 Berkeley, CA) is a transdisciplinary artist, performing, writing, composing and directing elaborate narrative scenes to subvert pop-cultural tropes in the exploration of identity—both personally and collectively intersectional to race, gender, class and nationality. Her amass of media—ranging from billboards to episodic films, music videos and renowned magazine, Indigenous Woman—produce the very conduits of advertising that sell the identities she disassembles. Challenging binaries through the blurring of their borders, Gutierrez insists that gender, like all things, is entangled—and argues against the linear framework of oppositional thinking. These complicated intersections are innate to Gutierrez’s own multicultural upbringing. Her malleable, ever-evolving self-image catalogs the confluence of seemingly disparate modes, conveying limitless potential for reinvention and reinterpretation. Gutierrez received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012 and lives and works in New York. Her work has been the focus of other solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2022); Philbrook Museum of Art, OK (2022); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO (2022); Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, IL (2021); Rockwell Museum, NY (2020) and more.

 

At the intersection of memory and imagination, Jeremy Jacob weaves together the strange and familiar through devotional artworks made of books. Jacob transforms found words and images into new narratives that speak to both personal experience and collective memory. Jacob's new worlds invite reflection on the fragility of existence and the enduring power of stories shared and reordered. Drawing inspiration from figures such as Walter Pater and Henry David Thoreau, shuffled into and against the works of Walt Disney, Jacob employs the material intimacy of paper to queer and destabilize the viewer’s relationship to materials often assumed to be fixed or predetermined to make space for new possibilities.

 

Clementine Keith-Roach (b. 1984) received a BA in Art History from University of Bristol, Bristol, UK and now lives and works in Dorset, UK. She has exhibited at Ben Hunter Gallery, London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Blue Projects, London, UK; Centre Regional D’art Contemporain, Sète, France; Villa Lontana, Rome, Italy; Open Space Contemporary, London, UK; Pervilion, Palermo, Italy and London, UK; and Public Gallery, London, UK; among others. Works by Keith-Roach have recently been included in Wonder and Wakefulness: The Nature of Pliny the Elder, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Milk, Wellcome Collection, London, UK; Slip Tease, Kasmin, New York, NY; Present Tense, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton, UK; Mother Lode: Material and Memory, James Cohan, New York, NY; and Body of Work, Mrs. Gallery, Maspeth, NY. Her work was featured on the cover of Art in America’s September 2022 issue illustrating Glenn Adamson’s article Monuments for the Moment, which contextualizes her vessels alongside other influential sculptors including Baseera Khan, Julia Kunin, and Martin Puryear. Keith-Roach is also an editor of Effects, a journal of art, poetry and essays. She presented Knots, a two-person exhibition with Christopher Page, at P·P·O·W in 2022. Keith-Roach is co-represented by Ben Hunter Gallery, London, UK.

 

Colin Knight’s (b. 1998) work exists as a microcosm of correlations, references, and mythology of the past. The work investigates historical conflicts’ ties to design, a familial survival of war, and a continuation of lineage in post-war art. Using materials such as leather and wood, Knight pulls from his background as a furniture maker to create a material language speaking of human survival and referencing stories of both the traumatic and the triumphant. After graduating from VCU Arts Department of Craft/Materials as a Windgate Fellow in 2020, Knight has attended residencies such as Anderson Ranch in Aspen, CO, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Knight currently resides in Richmond, VA, exhibiting his work in both Virginia and New York.

 

Antonia Kuo is an artist based in New York City. Her work incorporates photography, painting, sculpture, and film and engages the intersection between technological image-making and experimental methodologies. The objects she creates act as recording devices for time, light, materials and process. Kuo received her 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; 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. 

 

With spare gestures and skilled execution, Hannah Levy (b. 1991, New York City, USA) manipulates texturally incongruous materials, such as silicone, glass, stone, and polished metal, to create tactile sculptures that provoke sensory experience. The artist appropriates commonplace objects and defamiliarizes them by using unexpected materials and warping their formal properties.  Stretched flesh-like expanses of silicone are held taught or perched precariously on rigid armatures, zoomorphic forms that invite comparison to insect legs, household fixtures, clothing, and exercise equipment. Levy’s recent addition of glass into her material lexicon continues her exploration of the material encounter of two seemingly opposing mediums. A mix of traditional and experimental processes are used to alter, slump, swell and sag the glass as it submits to its metal opponent. Levy makes that which is familiar, deeply strange and magnetic, creating objects that exist in a fleeting limbo of what the artist calls “design purgatory.”  Matching the allusions of 20th century design with fleshy casts, the artist imbues the modernist ideal of immaculate geometry with a jarring return to organic matter, accentuating the pre-existing sensuality hidden in modern design. While her linear, metallic forms draw our attention to the subtle details of construction that mark the mid-century aesthetic, their skin-like sheaths resist this comparison, confusing the separation between living and dead, animal and prosthetic. Levy’s work is indebted to the Surrealist fascination with the uncanny and the abject while taking a retrospective and ambivalent view on the material culture of the past century. Hannah Levy received a BFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, US (2013), and a Meisterschüler title from Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2015). With recent and upcoming institutional solo exhibitions at Museo Nivola, Sardinia, Italy (2026); The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), US (2022) and the Arts Club of Chicago, US (2021). The artist has been included in exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, US; Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund, Germany; CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson, US; the Rennie Museum, Vancouver, Canada; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield CT, US; MoMA PS1, New York, US; among others, and was invited to participate in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) and the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art (2022). Levy’s work is included in public collections including Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Odunpazarı Modern Museum, Eskişehir, Turkey; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, Ireland; the Philara Foundation, Dusseldorf, Germany; and the Nevada Museum of Art; Reno, US.

 

Craig Jun Li is an art worker and artist based in New York City. Li’s work has been shown in various solos and collective exhibitions, at Taon, Ivry-sur-Seine (2025), Ulterior, New York (2025), ROMANCE, Pittsburgh (2025), Chris Andrews, Montréal (2024), RAINRAIN, New York (2024), September Sessions, Stockholm (2024), Parent Company, New York (2024), hatred2, New York (2024), Prairie, Chicago (2023), Canal Projects, New York (2023), lower_cavity, Holyoke (2023), Weatherproof, Chicago (2023), Home Gallery, New York (2022), and more. Li operates a nomadic curatorial project “Benny’s Video”. The first season of programming is currently hosted in a temporary studio sublet in Bushwick, New York.

 

Diana Sofia Lozano (b. 1992, Cali, Colombia), is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work uses the language of botanical hybrids; the naturally occurring, genetically modified, and the imagined. Lozano presents biomimicry as metaphors for identity construction at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the politics of difference. She is interested in the deconstruction of botanical taxonomic failures in order to reveal and redefine the boundaries of colonial identificatory practices and geopolitical borders. Lozano has exhibited at Company Gallery, Deli Gallery, Proxyco Gallery, Venus over Manhattan, Rachel Uffner Gallery, and Wave Hill Gardens in NYC; Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco; New Image Art in Los Angeles; Casa Prado in Barranquilla, Colombia; Örebro Konsthall in Örebro, Sweden; Parallel in Oaxaca, Mexico; Arto Kyoto in Kyoto, Japan; and Capsule Gallery in Shanghai, China, among others. Lozano holds an MFA in sculpture from Yale University.

 

Richard Malone (b.1990, they/them, he/him) is an Irish artist from Wexford. Malone’s practice explores ideas of queerness, class and place through sculpture, performance, textiles and installation. Malone’s research is concerned with the material language and markers of gender, class and identity, and the lack of visible record in permanent museum collections. Malone’s ongoing research investigates perceived “truths” in relation to gender ideology, sexuality and working class labour. Their work often explores complex ideas through invisible labour practices,such as welding, stitch techniques, woodwork, drapery, weave and painting.

 

Helena Minginowicz (b 1984, Poznań, Poland) Graduate of the Faculty of Architecture and Design at the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznań (2011). Finalist of the Bielska Jesień 2023 contest, she lives and works in Poznań.

 

Lior Modan (born 1983) lives and works in Queens, New York. His practice exists in constant slippage between distinct territories: painting and object, abstraction and figuration, gestural and surreal. Modan received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University's Sculpture + Extended Media program (2013), and his BFA with honors from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, Israel (2009). Modan’s work has been exhibited in venues domestically and abroad. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Dinner Gallery, New York (2025), CPM, Baltimore (2024), Make Room, Los Angeles (2021), Triumph, Chicago (2017), Golconda Gallery, Tel Aviv (2016), and NURTUREart in Brooklyn (2015).

 

Africanus Okokon works with moving image, sound, performance, installation, painting, assemblage and collage to explore the dialectics of forgetting and memory in relation to mediated cultural and shared and personal histories. He is interested in questions around language, translation, cultural transformation, decay and death as they relate to recorded media. He has had solo exhibitions and presentations at Von Ammon Co and Helena Anrather Gallery. Group exhibitions, and performances include Lyles and King, Sean Kelly Gallery, Perrotin Gallery, Helena Anrather Gallery, Microscope Gallery, Contemporary Arts Center Gallery at UC Irvine, the International Print Center in New York, Mass MoCA and The Kitchen. Africanus has screened films at various festivals including the BlackStar Film Festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, True/False Film Festival, Ottawa International Animation Film Festival, the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation and the Chale Wote Street Art Festival. His work has been featured and reviewed in publications such as Artforum, The Washington Post, National Public Radio (NPR), New American Paintings, PopMatters, Electronic Sound Magazine and The Wire: Adventures in Sound and Music. Africanus was awarded the prestigious NXTHVN Fellowship in 2021–22. He is an Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and is based in Providence, Rhode Island.

 

Tamen Pérez (b.1987, Costa Rica) works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where she is a Ground Floor Resident at I.S.C.P. (2023-25). Recent solo exhibitions include Sara’s, New York; Marais Moeras, Belgium (2024); Y2K Gallery, New York (2021); and Stadium Galerie, Berlin (2018). Select recent group exhibitions include Blade Study Gallery, New York (2023); Miriam Gallery, Brooklyn (2022); Lyles and King, New York; Horse and Pony, Berlin (2021); Rootcanal, Amsterdam (2019); Between Bridges, Berlin (2018).

 

Kent Rhodebeck (b. 1991 Mount Gilead, OH) received his BFA from Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, OH. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Kent’s work comes from an interest in collage, carving, and techniques that stem from bookmaking. The work touches on worn surfaces, an urge to contain things, elusive images, and the artist’s ongoing relationship with homemade, hand-bound sketchbooks.

 

Informed by genealogies of craft, Pauline Shaw’s (b. 1988) sculpturally rooted works intertwine personal histories, cultural inheritance, scientific inquiry, and mysticism. Best known for large-scale felts and installation, her abstracted imagery draws from diverse sources including MRI scans, ancestral textile patterns, early cartography, and ornate motifs to create dually fluid and fragmentary compositions with mythopoetic narratives. Recently, she has exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts; Boston, MA; Frost Museum, Miami, FL; The Shed, New York,  NY; Chapter NY, New York, NY; Naranjo 141, CDMX, Mexico; and Newchild Gallery, Antwerp, BE. Her work is held in international public and private collections including at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) and JP Morgan Chase Collection.

 

Karinne Smith transforms the peripheral objects of everyday life–water jugs, plastic chairs, laundry–as an invitation to linger in the mysticism of the mundane. Her work encompasses a wide range of media, including photography, print, painting, and sculpture. Each piece carries the impression of some other time or place, now absent; a haunting somehow both familiar, yet strange. This tension between congruity and splitting is what defines her works as Smith bends our vision to a world somehow both ignored and omnipresent, a mirage which can only arise in the stillness of the ordinary. Karinne Smith (American, b. 1992) holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University, New Haven, CT (2020). Recent exhibitions include her first solo exhibition, Melon Skin (2021), at M23 gallery in New York City; Girl You Want at ArtYard, Frenchtown, NJ (2021); Viscera, at Simone Subal Gallery in New York City (2022); and Shapeshifting: Or , Synonyms for Skin at the Hessel Museum of Art of Bard College (2023).

 

Sophie Stone (b. 1987, Massachusetts) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2009). She has been featured in exhibitions at Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery (2025), Europa (2024, solo), The Philadelphia Art Alliance, Felix, (2023), White Columns (solo), Halsey McKay (2022), Safe Gallery, Company Gallery (2019),The Whitney Museum of Art, New York, Nina Johnson, Miami, M+B Los Angeles (all 2018), Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles (solo), Romeo, New York, James Fuentes (all 2017), Johannes Vogt, New York, Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles, Shoot the Lobster, New York (all 2016), Eli Ping, New York (2013), and Nicole Klagsbrun, New York (2012). Sophie has been written about in T Magazine, Architectural Digest, Art News, Artforum, Artsy, Frieze Magazine, and Hyperallergic. She lives and works in New York.

 

Jia Sung (b. 1992, Minneapolis, MN) is a Singaporean Chinese artist and educator whose practice spans painting, artist books, textiles, printmaking, writing, and translation. Drawing on motifs from Chinese mythology and Buddhist iconography, Sung uses the familiar visual language of folklore to examine and subvert conventional archetypes of femininity, queerness, and otherness. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as Wave Hill, the Hessel Museum, and EFA Project Space, has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and the Poetry Foundation, and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and the Special Collections at Yale, RISD, and SAIC. She is the author of Trickster’s Journey, a Chinese mythological tarot deck and guidebook, published with Running Press in 2023, and has taught with organizations like the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, NYU, and RISD.

 

Catherine Telford Keogh (b. Toronto, Canada; lives and works in New York) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with sculpture, installation and contingent materials. Following materials and ideas that generate curiosity and a sense of unknowing, Telford Keogh examines the desires embedded in commercial objects as they transform through biological and material processes. Her work investigates what is seen and unseen, exploring how things held in the body change, accrue, and diminish over time. Drawing from environmental histories and product life cycles, her sculptural assemblages use industrial materials alongside commercial language to question our interactions with mass-produced design. Selected exhibitions include: Carriers (Gravity-Fed) in GTA24 Triennial, MOCA Toronto, Toronto (2024); Shelf Life, Helena Anrather, New York (2023), Circuit Trouble, Erin Stump Projects, Toronto (2022), Nervous System, Helena Anrather, New York (2020). Selected group exhibitions include those at Galeria Fidelidade Arte, Lisbon; Franz Kaka, Toronto; Public Gallery, London; Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris; Someday Gallery, New York; Bronx Museum, New York; Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; Thkio Ppalies, Cyprus; and Interstate, New York among others. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art and a MAR in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Yale University. 

 

Frank Traynor was born in Miami and has worked as an art teacher, sailor, pumpkin carver, costume maker, and Christmas tree salesman.