materiality – Page 2

June 2, 2026June 1, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Run by Artists, Built for Artists: OyG and the Cornell MFA

What does a gallery look like when the artists are in charge? Founded in 2013, Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG) is an artist-run collective with no fixed curatorial line and a non-hierarchical structure shared equally among its eight co-directors. Since 2023, it has become the annual New York home for Cornell University’s MFA thesis exhibition — a partnership built on a simple premise: artist-run spaces value experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking, giving graduate artists the freedom to present work without commercial constraints or curatorial imperatives.

June 1, 2026June 1, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Kosuke Kawahara’s Without Innocence, Dissecting and Reassembling at RAINRAIN Gallery

Stepping into the exhibition Without Innocence at RAINRAIN gallery, you are greeted with a plethora of various mediums, ideas, influences, and experimentations. The paintings carry with them several levels of looking, small details to explore, and multiple dimensions within the edges. The photographs set the scene, allowing you to enter another space just as the paintings do, left to explore the worlds that Kawahara creates and builds within it all. The press release introduces a quote from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, “…we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system—from all work to all play, a deadly game (p 28).” This statement lingers alongside my thoughts throughout the exhibition, as I begin to notice more details, connections, and mechanisms that make this exhibition immensely similar to a cyborg in the making. Kawahara takes pieces of the body and fractions of different spaces within the canvas to build something entirely new out of all of these information systems.

May 26, 2026May 25, 2026, by odeta xheka

The Absence is in the Fingers

There are exhibitions shaped less by what is installed than by what fails to arrive. I did not plan for this to be one of them. Where Form Remembers was conceived as a two-person presentation: Julie Gladstone’s mixed-media works traveling from Toronto, Avani Patel’s drawings from Brooklyn. The premise was a dialogue between two practices in proximity, each distinct enough that the distance between them would produce something worth engaging over time. What it became was different.

May 4, 2026May 4, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Yuyo- Julián Kreimer at the Sarah Lawrence Heimbold Visual Arts Center

Before his artist talk, Julián Kreimer set a small brown valise on the table and opened it. Inside, folders held drawings on paper, each made in response to a photographic slide from his parents’ archive. The valise was not part of the exhibition; it was the working material behind it, a private archive he had been drawing through for years. Encountering it set the terms for the room next door: Yuyo is what happens when that interior is opened out.

April 30, 2026April 30, 2026, by Sivan Lavie

When I Stopped in Feldwood: Jeff Feld at Marquee Projects

Jeff Feld’s invented, minimalist island of Feldwood transports its audience into a tropical, still space that is at once childlike and naive, holy in its fetishizing of the pathetic object and rooted in place.

April 23, 2026April 22, 2026, by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan

Departing From The Flat World: Jong Oh’s Sixth Solo Exhibition At Marc Straus Gallery

“The world is flat” is perhaps humans’ most primitive sense of physical surroundings. It was also a cosmological conclusion drawn from honest bodily perception, because the land beneath our feet is indeed still and level, and the universe unfolds as an infinitely extending plane. This perceptual honesty is where Jong Oh begins.

April 22, 2026April 21, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Cynthia Pareja Dubin at the Oyster Point Hotel

The Artist in Residence program at The Oyster Point Hotel was launched in 2020 and curated by Ellen Martin, with the support of Kevin Barry, the hotel’s President. Its premise is straightforward: contemporary art belongs not only in galleries but in the spaces where people actually live, rest, and move through their days. Each year, a selected artist’s work inhabits the hotel’s guest rooms, common areas, and the fabric of the place itself, encountered by thousands of visitors during their stay.

April 13, 2026April 11, 2026, by Shuhan Zhang

Andrius Alvarez-Backus: I Want to Know, I Need to Know

In Andrius Alvarez-Backus’s solo exhibition, I Want to Know, I Need to Know, at Eli Klein Gallery, the work Are You Still Strong Enough? (2025) emerges as the visual center of the show’s underlying tension. A My Little Pony toy hangs vertically, the surface covered in bronze patina, while the incision along its abdomen is carefully stitched closed. What was once a lighthearted and slightly absurd object becomes, through this treatment, both fragile and solemn. Its form evokes a body after surgery, yet also resembles a preserved specimen. However, the meticulous stitching does not suggest that the wound has truly healed. Instead, the seam runs along the body, leaving the incision exposed and gradually becoming part of the sculpture’s structure. The suturing does not erase the rupture; it keeps the rupture visible. The wound is no longer simply a trace of intervention, but the structural element through which the work sustains its tension.

July 16, 2025July 11, 2025, by Adria Arch

A Gathering: Gardens, Portals, Protests

Why do we need art in this moment? What art sustains both practitioners and audience in difficult times? These urgent questions pulse at the heart of curator and artist Olivia Baldwin’s extraordinary exhibition at the Kniznick Gallery, part of Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Center—and the answers she’s assembled are luminous.

April 3, 2025April 1, 2025, by Riad Miah

Lauriston Avery with Riad Miah

In Dialogue

Displaying — Lauriston Avery, *Small Luminary (w/ Magic Halo )*, 2024, Mixed media construction, 16 x 14.25 x 4 inches
(LAC19)

I am happy to speak with Lauriston Avery following his successful recent exhibition at Dutton. Avery is an artist whose work challenges traditional notions of material and space. Through an intuitive and deeply personal process, he transforms unconventional materials—often those found in everyday life—into evocative, textured works that feel both raw and, at times, meditative. His practice blurs the lines between structure and spontaneity, embracing limitations as a source of discovery rather than restriction. In this conversation, we discuss Avery’s approach to materiality, the role of intuition and experimentation in his work, and how the idea of space has become a vital element in his practice. His work invites us to reconsider what we see and feel in our environments.