Editors’ Selects: June 2025
Chloë Bass: Twice Seen
Alexander Gray Associates | 384 Broadway, New York
June 13 – July 26, 2025
Installation view, Chloë Bass: Twice Seen, Alexander Gray Associates, 2025.
You enter the conceptual architecture of Chloë Bass’s Twice Seen through a kind of foyer. On one side, there are low-hung mirrors that superimpose koans over your reflected image; on the other, sheaves of paper sourced from Bass’s mother’s practice printed with mysterious fragments of language. Like contemporary fossils, these latter excerpts document a missing piece of media, an archival home movie from the 1960s. The entire introductory section functions as a thesis: a text-based framework that guides you—viewer, participant—to look first at yourself, then outside.
Films are tyrannical; they hold you captive and demand your attention. We turn to time (2024), the four-channel installation at the heart of Twice Seen, is not a film in that typical sense. It is a true video work: frictionless, hyper-contemporary shortform drift hybridized with more archaic content (the broader genus outlined in the print works). Bass’s surround-sound chimera is at once eternal and instantaneous.
Great curation is a PSYOP: the ambient whirr that goes unnoticed, priming and sanding the ground of experience. Though the footage was produced in and by four separate multicultural and intergenerational households, Bass choreographs the individual segments to mirror one another: food, dogs staring at food, overlapping conversations. These are domestic gestures and rituals that anyone can understand; they are universally legible, deliberately shown rather than told. The nature of the work inverts the pale, koanic platform at its center into a family room, a space within the space, a conversation pit. The background hum of other people’s lives makes talking easy. It renders you a part of something.
Lorraine O’Grady’s influence colors Bass’s meticulous attention to the canon as archive: the positionality and construction of the historical record. Bass’s mother is an immigrant; so is mine; so are most of the people whose homes and lives you come to know on-screen; so were this country’s founders. This is readily available information, but it bears repeating. Information doesn’t automatically exist in perpetuity, and neither do our lives, ideas, and memories, unless they’re actively encoded.
Regardless of your feelings on the aesthetics and politics of representation, America is a nation of immigrants. There will be resistance so long as that fact remains visible. Regimes that deny or destroy their own historical realities invariably set themselves on fire. But history is not guaranteed; it does not emerge fully formed. It must be preserved, observed, recorded, curated into durable forms and informatic repositories. It depends on the quotidian work of archives and collections and collective accountability. It depends on what you choose to look at and remember and protect, where you direct your attention. It depends on you.
— Matilda Lin Berke
Michelle Im: Hello, Goodbye
Dimin | 406 Broadway, Floor 2, New York
June 6 — July 11, 2025
Geum-Bi (金 費), 2025. Ceramic, epoxy, acrylic. 42 ½ x 12 x 12 in, 108 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of Dimin.
When faced with the task of spending an artful afternoon in SoHo, you’d be wise to avoid the Bansky Museum and instead turn downtown on Broadway toward Dimin. After passing up a short flight of stairs, you’ll be greeted by a series of friendly faces in white and pastel blue uniforms—their fingernails painted to match—made to resemble Korean Air flight attendants.
Hello, Goodbye features eight ceramic sculptures by Michelle Im, each low-fired in two parts in a method based on the construction process of Joseon Dynasty moon jars. The finishes of the sculptures also vary; some faces and uniforms are rendered in an unglazed matte, while others are Maiolica- or commercial-glazed. Referential duality is rife in Hello, Goodbye: the physical construction of each piece, the posed duo of Ju-Bi Eun-Bi (宙飛 恩飛) (2025), the artist as a Korean-American, the exhibition title itself. Within these dualities, Im’s works sit in a comfortable limbo—here, we are in the air, between places, being welcomed, offered immaculate service and solace.
Referencing yet subverting the form and function of the Terracotta Warriors, the figures stand in a U-shape, creating an aisle for the viewer to traverse under their warm, unblinking gaze and vaguely archaic smiles. The viewer becomes an active participant, a client, upon entering the space, yet the sculptures’ totemic nature lends itself to a ritualistic atemporality—a certainty of constant vigilance. In the artist’s sanctum, her sculptures are realized as unified paragons of hospitality, duty, and labor.
One might expect an exhibition centered around images of stewardesses to comment on the hardships faced by women in these roles, of the fragile pursuit of perfection and the perfect facade of a customer service smile. Instead, Im makes a deliberate choice to position the labor of service through the lens of care and an observation of ritual.
Several pieces were named by the artist’s mother using gwansang, the ancient Korean technique of face-reading. Geum-Bi (金 費), for example, means “gold expense,” implying a character of “big ambition.” The figure holds a coffee pot and sports a colorful updo of orange, yellow, and blue, a palette that adheres to Obangsaek, the five cardinal colors which carry symbolic associations with specific seasons, elements, and directions in Korean tradition. Each figure’s name approximates their appearance; with Hyo-Soon (孝順), whose name translates to “filial piety” and “purity,” Im humorously sculpts the attendant’s legs crossed. Most of her sculptures’ names correspond to Korean cultural values: grace, humility, intelligence, familial duty.
These longstanding principles set into the country’s cultural fabric, in addition to the use of hanja, the classical Sino-Korean script rarely used anymore outside educational and official settings, reaffirm Im’s omnipresent and layered indices of Korea throughout the exhibition. Indexicality is inherently in limbo. Not fully detached from the signified but never as intimate as the icon, the index is relegated to pointing: “Here is the thing that made me.” Hello, Goodbye travels between here and there, tradition and contemporaneity, othering and belonging. Here, we are in the air—are we moving toward or away from the signified?
— Katya Borkov
Roses of Heliogabalus & The Opulence of Ruin
Mriya Gallery | 101 Reade St, New York
May 31 – June 11, 2025
Installation view of Roses of Heliogabalus, courtesy of Mriya Gallery.
Marking the curatorial debut of Aidana Bergali, Roses of Heliogabalus is a tightly composed group exhibition that deftly examines the seductive interplay between beauty and brutality. Inspired by Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 1888 painting of the same name—where revelers are smothered by a deluge of rose petals—this exhibition unfolds as both a visual feast and a sobering critique of the violence cloaked in aesthetic splendor.
Bringing together the works of six artists—Michael Alexander Campbell, Nina Hunter, Shantaye McMorrow, Petra Schott, Gianna Tesone, and Kevin Watson—the show is united through a formal and thematic cohesion. With nods to classical symbolism and myth, each piece delves into femininity, excess, and the thin line between pleasure and harm. Roses recur as a leitmotif, evoking not just romance and delicacy but the thorns of objectification, control, and inherited trauma.
The influence of Cy Twombly’s gestural abstraction is palpable throughout: smeared textures, lyrical marks, and muted palettes evoke a kind of restrained emotional fervor. Bergali curates with a reverence for antiquity but also a sharp eye for contemporary urgency. Tesone’s digital manipulations, for instance, destabilize the romantic gaze with glitch and fragmentation, while Schott’s painterly softness conceals simmering unease beneath layers of brushwork.
There’s a dreamlike haze to the exhibition, as if each work exists in the moment just before waking from a fevered sleep. This atmosphere invites prolonged looking—an echo of Bergali’s initial encounter with Alma-Tadema’s painting—and with it, the slow unraveling of surface beauty to reveal violence lurking beneath.
Roses of Heliogabalus is a compelling debut for Bergali, who curates with a poetic hand and a philosophical edge. By linking classical references to contemporary discourse, she constructs a haunting meditation on femininity, indulgence, and power. The exhibition doesn’t just show us beautiful things—it asks what beauty can conceal, and at what cost.
— Xuezhu Jenny Wang
Jo Shane: Lilies Into the Void
Blade Study | 17 Pike Street, New York NY 10002
May 29 — June 29, 2025
Installation view from Lilies Into the Void by Jo Shane. Photo by Kunning Huang, courtesy of Blade Study.
When I stepped into Blade Study’s gallery space, I was immediately struck by a familiar fragrance that recalls a high-end spa or luxury cosmetic store. The scent, reminiscent of Aesop or essential oil, sets the tone for the exhibition: health, beauty, and wellness. Beneath this calm and soothing surface lurks a colder, more clinical undertone. Neon blue lights illuminate cabinets filled with prescribed medications and beauty products, casting an eerie glow that evokes the sterile ambiance of a sci-fi laboratory or surgical room.
Jo Shane’s work confronts the cult-like pursuit of immortality, eternal beauty, the dream of staying forever young, pure, and immaculate, like lilies in perpetual bloom. This imagery materializes literally in Lilies Into the Void (2025), installed behind the gallery’s front window. Fresh lilies are sealed and preserved in a cryotherapy chamber, their delicate petals trapped behind frosted glass. Set on a plastic sheet of an artificial green hue eerily reminiscent of surgical gowns or latex gloves, the work assumes the unsettling form of an MRI machine or a coffin. A wall label informs viewers that these lilies “have been exposed to cryotherapy for 10 seconds and will remain in refrigeration for the duration of the exhibition.” Both dreamy and morbid, the lilies serve as a metaphor for suspended life: can science, or consumer products, truly freeze time?
Toward the back of the space, The Treatment Suite (2025) features a customized beauty chair and a cryotherapy machine, flanked by a tray of red pills and a lab coat hanging on the wall with “Facilitator” crudely handwritten on the back, a nod to the pseudo-authority of wellness influencers and unverified practitioners in advertisements. On the opposite wall, Declaration of Modalities (2025), a rolling LED panel mimics monitors in storefronts and lists a series of absurd treatments: “red light therapy,” “hormone replacement therapy, “plasma exchange, “low-dose naltrexone,” “mitochondrial rejuvenation.” The list reads like a surreal commercial, imitating the pseudo-medical language used to sell miracle treatments to anxious consumers in the luxury wellness industry.
During the opening performance, simulated patients of various ages and ethnicities took turns seated in the treatment chair. They flipped their bodies and twisted their limbs as if possessed, clutching themselves in gestures of anxiety and self-doubt. The performance recalls images of female hysteria in the 19th century, connecting the historical pathologizing of women’s bodies to contemporary anxieties around beauty and aging, mocking the promise of instant transformation by consuming magical products that guarantee eternal youth.
Shane’s exhibition critiques the commodification of health and the luxury branding of medical treatments. It challenges the illusions sold by the wellness industry and the cultural pathological obsession with extending youth at all costs. Echoes of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Eternally Yours (2023), with its anti-aging powders, syringes, and refrigerated display, resonate through the show, suggesting a futile promise of longevity. In this haunting, dystopian, and anxiety-laced dream, one can’t help but wonder, who wants to live that long anyway?
— Gladys Lou
Wen Liu: Antidote
Gaa Gallery | 4 Cortlandt Alley, New York
May 9 – June 28, 2025
Wen Liu, In Light, Where Edges Yield, 2025, Prescribed herbal medicine, epoxy clay, resin, acrylic, varnish, stainless steel. Photographed by Adam Reich. Courtesy of the gallery and the artist.
Wen Liu’s Antidote presents a sculptural cabinet of curiosities. At a glance, Liu’s sculptures appear as unsettling forms of future beings or frankensteined fragments of long-extinct plants, animals, or minerals frozen in time. The allusion to fossilized forms lends a familiarity of prehistory to Liu’s work despite its polymorphic appearance. Contorted spinal structures are bound together with snake-like ceramic ropes that encircle panels of Chinese medicinal herbs encased in amber-like resin. In material and motif, Liu fabricates an expansive exploration of embodiment, evolution, and balance.
For Liu’s mirrored figures and forms, the assumption of symmetry feels, at first, obvious. A yin-yang is easily invoked, but the emblem feels either inadequate or reductive. Time allows the imagined perfection to mutate. The inconsistencies are subtle—an exchange of colors between resin panels, ribs that curve up on the left and down on the right—but the physical is simply a portal. In Liu’s work, the question of harmony is far more complex than simple congruence, something that is hinted at even in the exhibition title.
A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square. A poison without an antidote is still a poison, but an antidote without a poison is just another herb. An antidote balances, corrects, cures, and by necessity, follows. Inherently relational, without the catalyst of poison, an antidote doesn’t exist. And yet, the relationship between poison and antidote is harmonious. In her sculptures, Liu finds harmony beyond the conventions of equality and stasis that so often define balance. Dichotomy, duality, transition, opposition: existence demands connections and dynamism. Change is the only constant.
— Corinne Worthington
Qiana Mestrich: The Reinforcements
BAXTER ST at CCNY | 154 Ludlow, New York
June 4 – August 13, 2025
Qiana Mestrich, The Crown Act, 2023. Mixed media collage on vintage computer punch cards. 13 in x 7 3/8 in. Courtesy of BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York.
In 2024 BAXTER ST resident Qiana Mestrich’s The Reinforcements, the first show to be presented at the non-profit’s new location on the Lower East Side, the artist’s use of everyday office ephemera—folders, envelopes, staples and paper clips, filing cabinets and reinforcement stickers used to keep torn pages intact in binders—turns corporate detritus into symbolic placemaking tools.
Throughout these works, images of women of color with perfectly coiffed hair, crisp button-downs, and manicured nails are carefully excised from the vintage fashion and office supply magazines they came from. These figures are superimposed onto outdated computer punch cards, as seen in The Crown Act (2023) and The Ideal File Clerk II (2023), and wrapped in landline telephone wires as in Untitled (Phone Cord III) (2024). These materials tell a story: while these technologies are now defunct, conditions for women of color in the workforce have not progressed so quickly or radically. Still today, women of color experience discrimination in the workplace at alarming rates (57% of Black women surveyed by California Black Women’s Collective Empowerment Institute reported they “experienced racism and/or discrimination at work”), face barriers in equitable play, and are expected to maintain hyper-perfect images in order to command the same respect as their white colleagues. In Handheld Calculator (2023), a woman’s back is lined with a row of red reinforcement stickers, both suggesting the weight she carries in the workplace and gesturing to the support that she needs to go on.
The collection of multimedia collages grew from Mestrich’s ongoing project of maintaining @WorkingWOC, a digital archive that locates Black and immigrant women of color in American labor histories, focusing on their presence in corporate offices. Among these archival photographs are images of the artist’s mother, who worked at Rugol Trading Corporation in the late 1960s. Through her collage practice, Mestrich re-inserts these women into the histories from which they were erased, and in doing so brings to light ongoing practices of racial discrimination which continue to affect the absence of fair pay and equal representation in positions of leadership. Her medium of choice adds dimension to her message: collage in and of itself is an often overlooked art form, undermined for its ability to express layered symbolism through the use of repurposed materials.
Four of Mestrich’s works are presented on sculptural stands in the center of the room, whose broken rungs allude to the impassable nature of “the corporate ladder” and false promises of progress and mobility. The backsides of these pieces feature mirrors that hold family photos in their corners, suggesting how these works may invite the artist and other women of color to see themselves in these histories.
— Katya Borkov
Ibuki Minami: Gei-Kaku Ichinyo (Art Core Oneness)
GOCA by Garde
Courtesy of Ibuki Minami and GOCA.
In Gei-Kaku Ichinyo (Art Core Oneness), Japanese artist Ibuki Minami offers a meditative and multilayered investigation into the origins of artistic expression in the digital age. Now on view at GOCA by Garde in Chelsea through June 28, 2025, the exhibition presents a new body of abstract paintings that harmonize minimalist form with algorithmic precision.
What distinguishes Minami’s work is the interplay between hand and system—his brush guided by logic yet never entirely mechanical. Each painting begins with an algorithm written directly onto the canvas, an invisible scaffold that shapes the visible result. This convergence of intuition and computation mirrors the exhibition’s deeper inquiry: how can art, in an age of endless mediation, still touch the essential?
Curated by Kenta Ichinose and presented in GOCA’s serene, light-filled space, Gei-Kaku Ichinyo unfolds with meditative clarity. Minami’s work doesn’t shout—it invites stillness, asking viewers to slow down and reflect on the nature of creativity itself. As GOCA’s second exhibition since launching in January, it affirms the gallery’s promise to be a thoughtful platform for cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue in contemporary art.
— Xuezhu Jenny Wang
Edited by Jubilee Park