Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in August 2025

HIGHLIGHTS

Installation images of WARP Wood 2025: A Plank in a Shipwreck. Photo credit: John Carlano

Across the city, artists are focused on the meaning of visible labor and extracting the potential in the most innocent of found materials. Through unconventional mediums and reclaiming disregarded items like paper or rubber bands, artists are able to tap into universal experiences that inject value and sacredness into everyday objects. At PEEP Projects, Maria Ah Hyun constructs layered paper vessels to serve as ritual objects and gateways into cultural landscapes. Gabrielle Constantine transforms Blah Blah Gallery into a romantic archive of working class textures and sensibilities that honor the excesses of labor. Museum of Art and Wood presents the 2025 cohort for their Windgate Arts Residency program, inviting experimentation and individual perspectives in wood in A Plank in a Shipwreck.

Maria Ah Hyun Stracke: Votive at PEEP Projects @peepprojects
On view through August 23
Featuring Maria Ah Hyun Stracke

Maria Ah Hyun Stracke, “Mourning Routes” 2025, pencil, paper, and hanji. Photo by Peep Projects

Stracke’s solo exhibition, Votive, is a visual representation on the precarity and reconstruction that surrounds visual mythologies. In highly compressed graphite drawings, Stracke documents the stylized characters, landscapes and patterns that build onto each other to create an all-encompassing landscape of cultural preservation. Stracke expertly layers drawings of humans, fish, flowers, and deities seamlessly as if it were a continuous line drawing. These friezes are then cut and pieced with shards of hanji and other textured papers until they create new architectural forms.

Although Stracke’s forms are primarily made of paper, their broken forms evoke images of eggshells or broken ceramics, like a flattened amphora still demanding to tell its story even when it is in pieces. Its fragile nature still offers itself as a vessel waiting to display more significance, like a cross-section of a cultural hub. The sculptural element is heightened with Stacke’s choice of a hued mounting for each of the works. The red or green backs softly glow on the bright white walls of the gallery, adding a magical element to the forms. Stracke’s work creates a new discussion on the drawing format, while also reminding audiences of the transformative power of paper to “highlight the feeling of emptiness within the votive.”

Gabrielle Constantine: The Blossoming of Aspartame at Blah Blah Gallery
@blahblahgallery
On view through September 14, 2025
Featuring Gabrielle Constantine

Gabrielle Constantine, *Whether Sauce or Blood,* 2023, Steel, foam, vintage tablecloth. Photo by Blah Blah Gallery

Gabrielle Constantine’s The Blossoming of Aspartame makes sacred the trivial objects that mark time, sweat, and labor, creating a new definition of homemaking. Constantine demonstrates a keen intuition of identifying the sentimental value of functionally “unbeautiful” moments like rusted iron tools or taped produce box floor covers. She builds a catalog of working-class textures: cork, rubber bands, cardboard, rust, quilts, and dried paint splotches, to create an environment that is authentically curated, lived in, and lovingly worn.

With humor and care, Constantine transforms these humble materials into assembled totems, sculptures, and altars honoring the labor they symbolize. The exhibition boasts wall-hanging assemblages, sculpture, and pendant lights in an immersive installation that tugs at your heartstrings with its raw emotion and empathy. Anyone who has ever had to use a milkcrate for an impromptu stool, wear nonslip shoes, or would have to empty their pockets from pens and rubber bands at the end of a long day will find comfort in Constantine’s textures.

She takes the time and effort to mine her materials until they are almost unidentifiable from their often single-use purpose. Here, the layered objects become a narrative for labor and excess. Constantine romantically contrasts the soft feel of foam and silk scarves with pins and steel in a performance that encourages resourcefulness and play in a world of softened lamp light.

A Plank in a Shipwreck at Museum of Art and Wood @museumforartinwood
On view through October 26, 2025
Featuring: Asem Kamal, Klara Knutsson, Allen Laing, Holly Gore, Arden Carlson, Edgar Orlaineta, and Nifemi Ogunro.

Fragment series by Klara Knutsson. Photo by writer

By establishing that their medium is a fragment that belonged to an expansive and multi-faceted landscape, the artists can inject their own sensibilities into the treatment of wood to create a nuanced definition of wood sculpture. The work featured in the exhibition spans across decorative furniture, wall-hanging pieces, conceptual pieces, collage, book arts, and kinetic sculpture. Encountering each piece requires a new order of operation, and some are able to be experienced in the round and others ask for gentle meditation, ready to absorb new meaning with every viewer.

Arden Carlson’s recreation of objects in basswood, maple, and pine feel like they are from a far off memory in their light hues. Klara Knutsson’s Fragment series are a showcase to the possibilities of wood veneer in creating detailed landscapes. Asem Kamal combines his craft with his documentary practice in flipbook machines that capture each Fellow as they work. Allen Laing’s Delawarean Red-Bellied Woodpecker Plume Mask commands attention with the unique characteristics of found wood in a three-dimensional scale. Nifemi Ogunro confidently creates a visual poetry with her bent and found wood sculptures that stop you in your tracks. Edgar Orlaineta’s play between the functional and the decorative invites slow looking for visitors to notice the precariousness of the assembly and the significance of its accompanying objects.

About the writer: Jessica Aguilar is a writer and arts professional from Hyattsville, MD. She holds a BA in Art History from Temple University where she fell in love with the murals, mosaics, and wheatpastes of Philadelphia. She was a 2023-2024 participant of the Arts Writing Incubator at The Black Embodiments Studio, in Seattle, WA and has been published in several art publications across the U.S. Guiding both her writing and creative processes are interests in nostalgia, identity, and gender expression through Latine perspectives. She aims to make the art world accessible to all communities while working at Paradigm Gallery + Studio. @jesswiththe_mess