Where Air Turns to Fog at Below Grand, curated by Ray Hwang, gathers Sammy Bennett, Anna Gregor, and Jesse Ng in a sometimes cheeky, but overall multivalent and sincere, investigation of visual perception and the machinery of capital-F/capital-A Fine Art presentation. With his characteristic casual abandon, Hwang exploits the gallery’s awkward architecture to its full potential, letting Bennett install an upside-down trompe-l’œil “group show” in the street-facing walk-in window display while reserving the closet-sized back room for a collection of Gregor and Ng’s paintings.
These oils on canvas and panel, each small enough to carry in a tote bag (which, custom screen printed by Bennett, were for sale outside at the reception), are arranged in secret dialogue with a pinhole aperture tunneled in from the exterior wall. When darkened, the back gallery space (tucked within the corner of a downtown restaurant supply store) becomes a camera obscura, its ghostly projection of the street outside mapping onto the dutifully arranged oil paintings.
Bennett’s installation, for which he has renamed the gallery Above Grand, features dye-sublimation printed textile reproductions of paintings by Martin Wong and James Bertucci, hung upside down at 58” eye level measured from the ceiling, alongside an authentic Carl D’Alvia bronze secured hopefully to some studs lingering above the Lower East Side drywall. These works are lit by track lights installed on the floor, announcing to everyone passing down Orchard Street that Below Grand has been inverted. But as with any project by Bennett, the magic lies in the details: a power outlet from his formerly brick-and-mortar curatorial outfit, Bob’s Gallery; a small “library” of burning books; and a fabric door revealing an illustrated sightline of the restaurant supply store’s Allen Street view, visible if you walk through the narrow aisles of pots and pans to the other entrance.
As a counterpoint to the playful curatorial shenanigans of Hwang and Bennett, Gregor’s paintings dissect the subject-object divide with a kind of dead-seriousness that few of her contemporaries can get away with. They are works of observational rigor, painted from her compositional studies: gold-leafed glass constructions that double as master copies of works by buried or cremated painters, from Botticelli to Guston. The reflection of this living painter, fresh out of graduate school, and her bright electric studio clamp lights fracture and visually scatter in the gilded surfaces, merging painter and the painted, the artist and the ancestor, art history and nerd.
Interspersed with Gregor’s pieces, Ng’s meticulous oil paintings show us crystal clear renderings of her workplace at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she photographs the institution’s treasured objects for cataloging. In her dynamic overlapping compositions, the artifacts themselves recede, eclipsed by the apparatuses of art documentation: large lamps and provisionally arranged light reflecting paper. Ng’s measured approach to observational painting, and her meta subject matter, drive home this exhibition’s message that the alchemy of looking is the real treasure; and, viewers, it has been buried out in the side yard this whole time.
Despite deftly articulating his complex curatorial concept through the polyangular positioning of three quite different artists, not to mention the structure of the gallery itself, Hwang’s exhibition title remains obscure. His press release arrived in inboxes without a single paragraph of explanation, only a grease-stained diagrammatic sketch, its edges discolored by last month’s Popeyes.
As we parse this drawing for meaning, we would do well to return our gaze upward to the waste bin Bennett has nailed to the ceiling, littered with fake press releases and image lists he made for his own show-within-a-show. Squint into that debris, viewer, and perhaps you will catch whispers through the fog. For those of us with two working eye sockets, peeking out and making sense of the confusion is our birthright. May nothing by this group of scrappy downtown artists and artist-curators stay unseen for long.
Where Air Turns to Fog
Curated by Ray Hwang
Featuring: Sammy Bennett, Anna Gregor, and Jesse Ng
Below Grand
53 Orchard St., New York, NY
May 24 – Jun 28, 2025
Window: Monday – Saturday, 10 AM – 7 PM Backspace: Friday & Saturday, 12 PM – 6 PM
About the writer: Jan Dickey is a painter, writer, and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. He earned an MFA from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and a BFA from the University of Delaware. Dickey has participated in residencies including the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation (NY), ARTnSHELTER (Tokyo), Kimmel Harding Nelson Center (NE), and Vermont Studio Center. In 2025 he will attend the TUR residency in Riga, Latvia. He has presented solo exhibitions across the U.S. and internationally in Japan. His work has been reviewed and featured in Two Coats of Paint, ArteFuse, Impulse Magazine, Whitehot, and Art Spiel.