Face to Face: August 2025
SARAH MARTIN-NUSS
Portrait of the artist.
Musical terminology pervaded my studio visit with Sarah Martin-Nuss, who envisions painting as a choreography that unfolds in space and time. Across the walls of her light-filled Williamsburg space, her latest abstractions reverberated with certain gestural continuity. Martin-Nuss often eschews paintbrushes in favor of pastels and powdered pigments applied directly with gloved hands in sweeping gestures that lend physical immediacy. Marks spill over onto the edges of each canvas, denying the ontological flatness of the picture plane. Martin-Nuss, a trained vocalist, cultivates rhythm through the layered accumulation of marks, with short dashes tempered by still pockets of color. Through each composition as a record of layered movements, she channels the potential of painting, like music, as a time-based medium.
Martin-Nuss’s intuitive process often starts with graphite drawings on notecards that render apparent her attunement to subtle shifts in the atmosphere. These quick, portable sketches function not as fixed blueprints, but rather as provisional building blocks within a broader improvisational scheme. Within her larger works, each mark emerges in a relational constellation as each gesture shapes the next. Her color choices likewise feel instinctual: unexpected combinations of earthen shades with more vibrant, seemingly synthetic hues evoke the affective potentials of color.
Through abstraction, Martin-Nuss denies the representational logics of landscape painting premised on “nature” as a discrete, containable realm somehow separate from humanity. Within these fluid arrays, glimpses of manufactured order—for example, painted imprints of bubble-wrap—deny the false binary of the organic versus the inorganic. Without horizon lines, human proxies, or clear-cut distinctions between the foreground and background, Martin-Nuss channels the instability of ever-shifting environments teetering toward formlessness. These atmospheric vignettes, which seem both micro and macro in scale, push back against expectations for visual certainty, instead privileging sensing over seeing.
— Aidan Chisholm
LIZA JO EILERS
Liza Jo Eilers, If you weren’t coming back here, this won’t exist, 2024. Acrylic, pigment transfer, glitter, and hydrochromic ink on linen. 39 x 54 in. Courtesy of the artist.
“I was thinking about the question: How did we get here?” Says Liza Jo Eilers when asked about what propelled her to examine female sexuality, subjectivity, and performance in her work. I say, “How did we get where?” She responds, “Well, I think there are three parts to this: What’s a good time? Who is a good time? And who is the good time for?”
Eilers’s irreverent paintings seemingly indulge in the noise and hedonism of popular culture. But in essence, they tap into what it means to live as a bystander, observer, and participant in a society where women’s bodies are relentlessly associated with entertainment, desire, and consumerism. And even more so, as a woman, she questions the mechanisms of participating in this revelry—a dizzying celebration of hotness imposed via media onto people’s psyches. In Eilers’s works, photos of beautiful women shot for mass consumption are reproduced via airbrushing techniques, their bodies presenting the pinnacle of sex appeal and sun-bathed perfection. The polished yet somewhat hazy skin texture adds to the summertime fever-dream-like atmosphere—surreal, unreal, conducive to a form of secular idolatry.
In her most recent body of work—what Eilers calls “wet T-shirt paintings”—the artist utilizes hydrochromic ink to tease and to introduce an element of burlesque. The viewer is encouraged to violate the established sense of distance from the artwork itself by splashing water onto white bands visible across these paintings. Upon contact with water, the opaque ink turns transparent, revealing parts of the underpainting as if performing a striptease. In the end, the viewer has participated in an act of undressing—the undressing of not only women dubbed as sex symbols but also the alleged caution and austerity associated with experiencing art. There’s also a subtext commenting on censorship, invisibility, and hypervisibility as they relate to the past and present of sexual liberation. Through the gesture of undressing, transgression has happened on multiple fronts: the messy image—the exquisite corpse—gets messier; the viewer engages the image through a dubious power dynamic; the artist risks being (mis)interpreted as gimmicky.
Recently, Eilers has been incorporating thermochromic ink, activated by warm breath and touch, into a new series to establish a heightened level of intimacy between the viewer and the picture plane. In this continued exploration of allure and denial of subtlety, Eilers keeps the terms and conditions of perceived access ambivalent. She says, “There’s a difference between the pornographic and the sensual, and I tend to think that my work is about the latter.”
— Xuezhu Jenny Wang
LIZZY CHOI
Lizzy Choi, SIDON’S CLASPER, 2025. “Double-penetrative thong inspired by Yaoi hentai of the character Sidon from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Fit to my ex-girlfriend 😝✌️✌️✌️✌️” Image courtesy of the artist.
ALIEN UNDERWEAR! Yes, you heard that right: coming from a previous practice in painting, something in working with fabric, sitting, and stitching has gripped Lizzy Choi’s attention. They’ve envisioned a series of soft sculptural underwears that evoke a very pop otherworldliness—something that your in-game character could wear in a sci-fi cyberpunk sex club, or perhaps at home today.
Each set is unique and quite different from the rest, involving a different mode of looking at a body and envisioning the possibilities of expanding the scope of what is normal. None of it is, though, normal. Lace, plastics, denim, leather—nothing is off bounds in terms of materials. The works are geared towards an aesthetic that shocks at first yet almost immediately becomes known, playing within the liminality of the foreign yet not unacceptable.
Each work is actually wearable, modeled on a friend’s underwear, which has been worn and will hopefully be worn again. Choi’s friends become both the point of origin and the end goal for each of these pieces. Some of these friends then extend that work into the realm of performance and interactive art.
The performances are oriented to the specifics of each underwear, some needing more than one body to interact with them. One such performance is described on their website as “a striptease, copulation, friendship, mitosis, bursting, rebirth, insectuous [sic] act.” The “insectuous” persists through the works, whether in the pre-performance potential, the live and performative, or the post-performance fetishized remnant. Foreignness is highlighted, yet in the interactive acts, there is an understanding of foreign bodies, however distant from one’s own existence. Then the alien that is adorned with vizors, laces, dildos, and antennas becomes an agent of tolerance.
Choi wants people to give in to the silliness—have fun, laugh, and enjoy the situation without being transported to realms of academic rigor. This is not to say that their practice is devoid of a depth of intellectual sustenance; rather, there is an availability of a choice on the viewer’s part of whether or not to engage with what lies beyond the presented, which is colorful, cheeky, and quite engaging.
Their works exist in a zone of convergence between fine art and fashion, seasoned with a pinch of satire. At its core, Choi’s work speaks about acceptance, intimacy, care, and friendship, but they are, above all, a beacon for a joyfully queer future.
— Abbas A. Malakar
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