Editors’ Selects: August 2025
Fragments of Presence
Praxis | 501 W 20, New York
July 10 – August 30, 2025
Installation View. A moment of silence or a millennia of silencing (2022) by Elisa Lutteral. Courtesy of Praxis Gallery.
If you’re wandering on 20th Street and 10th Avenue in Chelsea, the Praxis window strikes your attention immediately. A fiber membrane stretched within a raw wooden frame is displayed carefully in the window. Embedded within are limbs made from carefully stitched fabric scraps, a constructed female torso held together with medical suture, a wool glove, textured patterns, vegetal forms, and strands of horsehair, all stitched, woven, and assembled throughout the piece. The use of natural fibers and the meticulous details of the composition evoke an organic sense of a body caught in mid-transformation. A moment of silence or a millennia of silencing (2022) by Elisa Lutteral is a striking introduction to Fragments of Presence, a group exhibition that explores the intricate relationship between inner perception and external reality through different mediums.
Entering the space, Sofia Quirno’s group of sculptures is displayed in the middle of the gallery. These works, assembled from objects part of the artist’s daily life—a brush covered in scraps of canvas, a pot found in the artist's studio, a wood beam from her side job—are a new body of work that translates the collages and associations of her inner world, present in her paintings, into three-dimensional objects.
Quirno’s sculptures and Lutteral’s textile installation are a dynamic pairing. Lutteral’s almost anatomical piece, which could be a surreal study of the human figure, functions as an archive of the body and its many possibilities, while Quirno’s sculptures bring to the surface a more abstract side of a person’s life.
On the walls, colorful but subtle sculptural paintings by June Canedo de Souza dialogue with other textiles by Lutteral and a painting by Quirno. Canedo de Souza’s paintings, which hover between abstraction and figuration, rich in texture and character, originate from initial drawings she makes on the canvas that are quickly covered by multiple layers of oil, obscuring their original form. For the artist, painting is a spiritual experience that also requires a physical engagement.
By the time you leave the gallery, the elegant dialogue and connection of mediums, materials, and approaches to art will have conveyed a deep sense of wholeness.
— Montserrat Miranda Ayejes
The Gatherers
MoMA PS1 | 22-25 Jackson Ave, Queens
April 24 – October 6, 2025
Selma Selman. Flower of Life. 2024. Construction grabs, acrylic on steel, metal, electric motor, engine oil, tubes, and cables. Installation view of The Gatherers, on view at MoMA PS1 from April 24 through October 6, 2025. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Kris Grave.
Like the rest of The Gatherers, Selma Selman’s Flower of Life (2024) comes together only after you’ve spent intimate time with it. The upended grab attachment—in a previous existence, a blunt instrument of construction—blooms, revealing and animating a few evocative painted eyes.
This international survey is in part composed of offcuts from other shows—an embedded meta-commentary on the art market’s economics of securitization, i.e., how do we assign value? Why should the cast-offs of any industry lose that value? Its sprawl speaks to the inherent problem of accumulation: the impossibility of establishing and maintaining control over a ballooning ecosystem of objects. Its disjunctions are uncomfortable but deliberate; relationships with materials diverge roughly along borders.
The Americans do their own thing even as they survey the rest of the world: Ser Serpas’s soft sculptures (and one experiment in detritus-ikebana that buttresses Japanese artist Miho Dohi’s buttai, chimerical object-bodies that—in line with Shinto tradition—linguistically and auratically elide the boundaries between “living” and “non-living”) get an entire room, while Samuel Hindolo collage-paints warped, temporally ambiguous urban landscapes with isolationist detachment.
Regional identities manifest not just as products of culture or geography, but of material histories of exploitation. Klara Liden’s linear assemblages and Nick Relph’s poppy aluminum prints are appealing, uncomplicated. In British-born Nigerian Karimah Ashadu’s didactic Brown Goods (2020), an Igbo trader in Hamburg straddles the line between industrialized countries and countries from which resources were extracted to construct said industries.
This is not a perfect dichotomy; much of the Eastern European and Asian contingent, rooted in ex-communist regimes that used the strong arm of the state to leapfrog developmental stages, occupies the in-between, alternating between brutalism and nostalgia for that earlier time (nations often cannibalize their land in the name of progress). Still, the networked flow of capital connects us all—sometimes as a well-oiled mechanical system like the twin scanners that generate the biologically suggestive rhythms of Tolia Astakhishvili and Dylan Peirce’s two-channel video so many things I’d like to tell you (2025), but more often as a composite, deracinated mess of parts like Jean Katambayi Mukendi’s Trash TV (2022): a false screen that represents digital clutter through readymade analog bricolage. Without going too far, you can see Serpas’s scrap painting Backdrop (2025) in the real screen of Zhou Tao’s The Axis of Big Data (2024): a reflection on marginalia. What defines the valued object? And what constitutes its cost?
Collectively, The Gatherers demand a sensitivity to material legacies that have been deadened by apathetic, accelerationist global capitalism. Objects arranged in conversation tell their own stories; though a series of texts (including an essay by curator Ruba Katrib locating the works in relation via art historical slipstreams from Ruskin to Rauschenberg) sits just outside the exhibition, these works don’t require explicit captioning. That’s the point of Andro Eradze’s Flowering and Fading (2024), in which a household comes to life in elegiac long shots that mirror the films of Russian Soviet political exile Andrei Tarkovsky. The objects are speaking. Will you listen?
— Matilda Lin Berke
Holly Chang: Garden into Infinity
Blouin Division Project Space | 45 Ernest Ave, Toronto
July 4 – August 16, 2025
Holly Chang, Fuk Luk Sau (2024). Cyanotypes toned with walnuts and black tea, quilting techniques, naturally dyed textiles. Garden into Infinity at Blouin Division Project Space, 2025. Photo by Darren Rigo.
It’s early August in Toronto, and for a fleeting time, the city’s gardens are in bloom. In contrast to the hues of pink, purple, green, orange, yellow, and blue outside, at Holly Chang’s exhibition Garden into Infinity at Blouin Division’s Project Space, we are confronted by a much more muted palette. The exhibition opens with Father (2024) and Mother (2024)—a pair of quilts featuring a large panel surrounded by patchwork frames rendered in tones of brown, tan, and beige. The white outlines of the leaves and stems in the middle panels are ghostly, like reverse silhouettes of a shady patch of ground. The images, though still, contain the possibility of movement, their soft edges whispering of the breeze.
Chang, whose practice started in photography, has recently expanded to include textiles, ceramics, and other craft-based techniques. For this series, cyanotypes on fabric are stripped of their signature indigo-blue hue, toned with walnuts and black tea to produce deep and dark shades of brown.
Fuk Luk Sau (2024) is a series of knotted quilts picturing three large stalks from Chang’s garden. The long rectangular quilts with domed tops measure approximately the size of a small human form, and are reminiscent of church windows or burial boxes. Each plant life Chang documents has been pulled from the ground–separated from its life source, and therefore in the process of slow decay. The works were created last summer, during a period when the artist was experiencing intense grief. Chang turned to the manual labour of gardening as a way to process loss—the repetitive tasks of care that the garden required allowed attunement to the cyclical rhythms of the living beings she tended to.
The largest work of the series, Scrapbook (2024), splices together multiple unlined images on fabric with raw edges. Dandelion leaves, stalks of amaranth, grape vines, coreopsis, nasturtiums, clovers and grasses, peppers, and oak and maple leaves provide a snapshot of the ecosystem of the garden in which native plants, weeds, and invasive species co-exist. Its irregular grid-like pattern is interspaced with circular cut-outs—each akin to its own moon, sun, or planet, and part of the constellation of unknowable matter which contributes to cycles of life, death, and rebirth.
A quiet meditation on grief, care, and the interconnectedness of all living things, Garden into Infinity transforms the garden—a site of growth, decay, and renewal—into an environment of healing. Turning to slow and tactile methods of making, Chang invites us into a space where time stretches. The result is an archive that allows us to consider what it means to care, grieve, and remain present with what is impermanent.
— Lodoe Laura
Daisies
Tempest | 16-42 Weirfield St, Queens
July 31 – August 23, 2025
Installation view of DAISIES, 2025. Image courtesy of Tempest Gallery.
Daisies, the group exhibition currently on view at Tempest Gallery, takes its name from the 1966 Czech avant-garde film by Věra Chytilová. Described in the press release as “a presentation of rare & covetable art design objects,” the exhibition considers the space where art, design, and commerce converge using the aesthetics and whimsical subversions of its namesake film as a touchpoint.
A sculpture of a single cherry in powder-coated cast bronze by Miguel Bendaña positioned in a niche opens the show, followed by Logan Blaag’s playfully dejected pastel soft sculpture of a sea snake. The exhibition is full of small discoveries: a weaving by Amalya Meira reveals confetti-colored specks when considered closely and a wearable sculpture by Asya Yaschenko hides pussy willow buds inside pistachio shells. In a more literal nod to the exhibition’s title, Samhita Kamisetty’s Galaxy series (2024) silks are dyed with flowers, including chamomile, safflower, rose, marigold, and goldenrod, and displayed under actual petals. For an exhibition that takes its name from a film that uses hedonistic nihilism to poke fun at constructed social norms, the works on view have a decidedly hopeful bend.
The strongest parts of this show, however, are when the “design objects” aren’t treated as such at all. Glazed porcelain bowls by Nava Derakhshani are stacked on a concrete altar below an occult-like sculpture by Levani, taking on a ritualistic aspect and harking back to a time more mystical than commodified. Yaschenko’s four reworked quarters point to a self-aware and performative evaluation of art, design, and value, priced at $250 each and displayed on a blue ribbon. Does sanding the quarters down really increase their market value a thousandfold?
Daisies seems to at once affirm and push up against this assertion, leaning into mediums that are easily accessible while challenging visitors to think through their potential acquisition. Taken from an anonymous writer, the press release ends with a series of direct questions to visitors: “Where’s it made? Who brought it here? How much were they paid? Who makes it? Is it made in separate parts and put together? How much were they all paid to do this? Where do they get the materials? Who paid for that? Who brings it there? How much were they paid? Who streamlined the base materials? How much were they paid? Who gathered the base materials? Where? How much were they paid? Is it good for them? Is it good for us? Is it good for the land? Is it necessary? Is it biodegradable? How much does it hurt? Do I need it? Do I even want it?”
— Taylor Bluestine
Harris Rosenblum: Hybrid Moments
Foreign & Domestic; SARA’S | 24 Rutgers Street, New York
July 9 – August 9, 2025
Installation view of Harris Rosenblum: Hybrid Moments, 2025. Image courtesy of Harris Rosenblum and Foreign & Domestic. Photography by Stephen Faught.
There’s a kind of haunted-house quality to Hybrid Moments, Harris Rosenblum’s exhibition recently presented jointly between Foreign & Domestic and SARA’S. On the walls are spectral images of skeletal corpses, clutching each other in pairs; in the center of the gallery, a horde of goblins stands atop a table, flash-frozen in scenes of bloodshed and bacchanalia.
But it’s an unassuming black box affixed to the gallery wall that is perhaps the closest thing here to being haunted, in the true sense of that word. Inside of it is a simulated consciousness: a nematode’s neural network, recreated in code, that is continually undergoing jolts of pain. Gilbert Ryle once used the phrase “ghost in the machine” to ridicule the notion that consciousness could exist separately from its physical components. Here in this box, which he has titled Infinite Pain (2025), Rosenblum has reanimated that machinic “ghost,” along with its mind-body debate: it may not be a nematode in there being tortured, but a series of synapses by any other name is still something. Isn’t it?
Autonomous systems and self-possessed processes abound in Hybrid Moments, a compelling display of the kind of conceptual, computation-based sculpture that Rosenblum has excelled at for some time now. Take the tabletop goblins of Bacchus (2025), which are actually based on a single form, a digital mesh that Rosenblum put through the choreography of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video to get the various poses on display. The skeletal couples of the Lovers series (all works on view 2025) are based on actual photographs of exhumed corpses from burial sites around the world, but their shimmery, silvered effect is the result of a custom printing code Rosenblum created to specifically simulate the pigment-less “structural coloration” of butterfly wings.
These technical details are dazzling and add to the overall feeling that the show is the product of that synaptic something: a networked consciousness, an invisible series of forces at work. Sentience, in one word, or maybe geist—intelligence, spirit, ghost. The worm-brain of Infinite Pain goes on in its torture circuit, with or without our viewing. The goblins of Bacchus may be dancing on a hard drive somewhere, still possessed by the spirit of “Thriller,” even if for us they are stuck in plastic pose. Maybe they are haunted—or maybe it’s just their programming.
— Justin Kamp
Sehee Kim: Chromatic Echoes
A.I.R. Gallery | 155 Plymouth St, Brooklyn
August 9 – September 7, 2025
Exhibition view, Sehee Kim, Chronomatic Echoes, 2025, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Photography by Matthew Sherman.
At first, while looking at the abstract paintings in Sehee Kim’s exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery, Chronomatic Echoes, I couldn’t help but liken her work to Alma Thomas’s for their mutual, poetic rhythm of colors, or even to gestural painters like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollack. What separates Kim from these makers, though, is an obsessive attention to detail and her perceptible, painstaking labor. The artist attends to the idea of color to its utmost boundaries, the very edges that are felt in the borders of each deliberate layer of paint. The show’s title is thus central to each painting’s capacity to reverberate a sense of time through color.
Commanding attention due to its impressive scale, On the Edge (2024–2025) takes up a whole gallery wall, surpassing thirty feet in length over multiple panels, and presents like a kaleidoscopic waveform. Contained within these undulating peaks and valleys, deliberate, popping colors creep out in front of equally contrasting colors behind them. Each paint stroke stains into the background color, creating an endlessly fascinating viewing experience that warrants investigation both from afar and up close, rooted in contrast. Kim’s massive work uses motion to convey a sense of time; the way these colors move in the space created by the artist is felt at an almost aeonic pace.
While the surrounding paintings made between 2017 and 2019 can’t have the innate “oomph” of the massive On the Edge, their orbiting presence complements and fills out the rest of Kim’s presentation. They consist of smaller multi-panel compositions that follow a consistent scheme of colorful vortexes with paint splattered across. When viewed from afar, the careful color selections blend and pulsate outwards with a remarkable, explosive energy. While the frenetic nature of these paintings might seem charged, they promote a sense of ease as your eyes gently follow their movement.
Although authoritarianism and often horrific technological advancement around us seem to be unfurling at a speed beyond our control, maybe even to a numbing point, Sehee Kim jolts us with her careful and empathetic use of color as an exploration of time in a non-aggressive application. In doing so, perhaps she even opens up the possibility of engendering more considerate ways of seeing the world.
— Bryan Martin
SCRIBBLE
The Watermill Center | 39 Water Mill Towd Road, Water Mill, NY
July 26, 2025
Performance of Lina Lapelytė and Thuthuka Sibisi, Children’s Games, 2025. Courtesy Madison McGaw/BFA.com.
On one hot summer afternoon, I waited on the Lower East Side for the shuttle bus to Long Island, en route to the Watermill Center’s annual benefit and performance festival. This year’s edition, SCRIBBLE, held on July 26th, honored artist and actress Isabella Rossellini and architect Francis Kéré, both highly respected in their respective fields.
The bus arrived just before sunset, transporting me from the sweaty city into crispy and enchanted air. As I walked uphill along a path lined with torch flames and leafy trees, classical music drifted through the crowd of newly arrived visitors, casting an atmosphere of grandeur. While the last shimmering rays of sunlight filtered through space, two entangled bodies appeared, performing Children’s Games by artist Lina Lapelytė and composer Thuthuka Sibisi.
Further into the grounds, another performance revealed itself: a figure in vivid red latex balanced on a white ladder that extended into midair. Set against the lush green of the surrounding landscape, the contrast rendered the performer an almost otherworldly presence. At the top of the ladder, they moved through a series of poised, acrobatic gestures, opposing gravity. The surreal theatricality, slightly unhinged, evoked the Queen of Hearts in Christopher Wheeldon’s Royal Ballet Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (2011).
Spread throughout the outdoor grounds were performances by twenty-two multidisciplinary artists. In the courtyard, artist Ugo Rondinone presented sunrise. East. (2005), a circle of twelve large cast-bronze figures. The sculptures resemble oversized heads with childlike expressions. In the woods, Isabella Rossellini exhibited a series of short films titled Green Porno (2008). Displayed in a circular arrangement, viewers were invited to peep into small holes to watch each piece—a playful experience that echoed the theme of SCRIBBLE with both humor and curiosity.
Installation view of Isabella Rossellini, Green Porno, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Madison McGaw/BFA.com.
One of the highlights of the evening was the restaging of Pope.L’s Under the Milk, originally performed at Watermill in 2007. The piece featured Lydia Grey reprising their role, using Pope.L’s original script—a homage to the artist’s recent passing.
The night’s final performance came from Kelsey Lu, a cellist and multidisciplinary artist. On a foggy garden turned into a stage with a rocking chair and a sleeping mattress as props, Lu delivered a mix of spoken word, song, and ambient electronic tones—a dreamy closing to an evening.
And as many already know, Robert Wilson, the founder of the Watermill Center and a pioneer in the performing arts and theater, passed away just a week after this year’s festival. It felt special to witness his legacy in motion. As night fell, I felt reluctant to leave the grounds, still surrounded by dancers and musicians, sound and light. With a sting of melancholy, I kept wondering: What’s next?
Wilson once shared that whenever he was asked this question, he recalled Gertrude Stein’s simple reply: “I think I’ll have a glass of water.” In that same spirit, Wilson would answer: “I will put on my socks.” A humble response from a person whose vision built worlds.
— Anna Ting Möller