Exhibitions —

at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

a broad private wink, the gallery’s first New York off-site show, borrows its namesake from an essay by Maria Fusco, which honors the idea that art may only be able to speak to us in riddles, and that we must speak around art in riddles to achieve any sophisticated understanding of it. The show continues the gallery’s overarching interest in work that demonstrates an essential secrecy, privacy, and obscurity: essences against slick apprehension.

A wink conveys shared, hidden knowledge, or interpersonal intent; a broad, private one expands the scope of its code, paradoxically. The work assembled here, like a wink, a riddle or a mist, relegates inwardness to display, intending the public to, in turn, riddle the void. A wink connotes a momentary absence of vision—a kind of silence—signaling what Fusco refers to as art’s “nothing,” or what Sontag deems a model of “sensual speech.” Authoritative tongues are humbled to stammer, directed to speak in strange hues or start humming.

Beverly Buchanan’s Untitled (Miniature Architectural Construction) (1983) explores the aesthetics of architectural collapse as converse self-construction. A languid, enameled perimeter mutates the boundary of inner and outer space, as if formed by the ocean. Its mystery wonders if distinction serves entrapment. The work of Luz Carabaño unsettles description in a similar murmur, at once assembling and dissolving an image in oil over linen. nocturna’s (2023) earthen shape implies its origin. A sleet of paint holds weightless dreaming.

Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes’ work softens the drone of image circulation. Here a selection of collaged photographs from the artist’s archive—of bunnies and koi fish—bubble up within a vintage advertisement for speakers. Matted like a family photo display, the larger spread appears with a small companion image of a sesame dessert at the bottom center. The effect, as writer Emile Rubino put it recently, is like “hearing someone sing through a door…” In Jeneen Frei Njootli’s Lisa (2022), out spills a ribbon of flowers from the sheath of a green tarp, an embroidered citrine tail. Objects often arrive in Njootli’s practice as a residual of performances, defining a political urgency through their process of making, and a privacy embedded in their material choices. In this way Lisa holds all that it unravels.

The alphabetical, the chronological, the notational and the serial closely inform the work of Bronson Smillie. Debris Flow #6 (2022) comprises bar rags, felt pads, pvc pipe, rings, springs, and brass fasteners in a dense ground of paper pulp and postage stamps, held delicately within a decommissioned metal shelf. As in the nearby Recording Chart for Industrial Monitoring (2023), the artist makes metaphor of these systems, spinning symbols from pre-existing auction-lot and street-side things to conspire with the grid and its image-making potential. Scott Keightley’s music stands belie their function: laser-printed sheet music competes with baroque accumulation, adornment, and the weight of decoration. La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin (2021), a fixture of fixtures, and Amid A Place of Stone (2021), a glittering mass that drips hundreds of collected pendalogues, knobs, pulls and keys, are scores for fantasy instruments.

Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) was born in Fuquay, North Carolina. She was the recipient of numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1980) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1980). Her work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. The work has been exhibited widely, including solo shows at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, Steinbaum Krauss Gallery in New York in 1996 and ‘98, Shackworks, a traveling mid-career retrospective hosted by the Montclair Museum of Art (New Jersey), and most recently, a posthumous solo retrospective, Ruins and Rituals, curated by Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2016-17.

Luz Carabaño (b. 1995, Maracay, Venezuela) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA Studio Art, New York University (2017) and recently completed her MFA in Painting and Drawing, University of California, Los Angeles (2022). Solo exhibitions include encuentros, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023); sombras, Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico (2022); rastros, Larder, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Unfoldings, april april, Brooklyn, NY (2022); an echo, a shadow, a shape, New Wight Gallery, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Ni Aquí, Ni Allá, Dimensions Variable, Miami, FL (2019). Group exhibitions include Cove(r), in lieu, Los Angeles, CA (2022); of this world (two-person with Sydney Acosta), CASTLE, Los Angeles, CA (2022); A Minor Constellation, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer, Make Room, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Glower, Larder, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Reimagined Landscapes, Calderón, New York, NY (2022); Mid Trip, Winton’s, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Fragments (two-person with Annette Hur), Shin Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Vignette, False Cast at BRUCE, Los Angeles, CA (2021); El papel aguanta todo, Capitulo 5 (refugio), Diablo Rosso, Panama City, Panama (2021).

Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes (b. 1991) is a Hong Kong-born artist based between “Vancouver, Canada” and Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Infinity Ball, Unit 17 (2022); My Owns, Project Native Informant, London (2021); Everything Leaks, Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver (2020); Open Heart Run Off, Sibling, Toronto (2019); Keep Your Eyes On Your Prizeˆ, Calaboose, Montreal and ddmmyyy, Artspeak, Vancouver (both 2018). Select group exhibitions have been held at the National Gallery of Canada (2022); Royal Academy Antwerp, Access Gallery & Centre A, Vancouver (all 2017). In 2020, Holmes was longlisted for the New Generation Photography Award from the National Gallery of Canada and received the award in 2022. She was the winner of the second annual Lind Prize in 2017. Holmes graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography & a Curatorial minor in 2017.

Jeneen Frei Njootli is a 2SQ Vuntut Gwitchin, Czech and Dutch artist and lives and works in their home territory of Old Crow, Yukon. They have gotten to work with many mentors and knowledge holders over the years in addition to holding an MFA from the University of British Columbia and a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Invested in Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization and concerned with the production, dissemination and embodiment of images, Frei Njootli’s practice takes the forms of performance, sound, textiles, images, collaboration, workshops and feral scholarship.

Represented by Macaulay & Co. Fine Art in Vancouver, Frei Njootli’s work has been presented in many galleries, museums and artist-run centres around the world. Some recent exhibitions include Indian Theatre, curated by Candice Hopkins at CCS BARD Hessel Museum, NY (2023), I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality at UB Art Galleries, Buffalo (2023), Transmissions at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (2022), Early Days: Indigenous Art at the McMichael at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (2021), Soft Water Hard Stone an exhibition at the New Museum Triennial in New York (2021), Listen Up: Northern Soundscapes, Anchorage Museum (2021), Where Do We Go From Here? At the Vancouver Art Gallery (2021), Kunstverein Braunschweig in partnership with the Contemporary Art Gallery in Germany (2021), PLATFORM centre, Winnipeg (2020); Remai Modern, Saskatoon (2019); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2018); Fierman Gallery, New York (2018). Selection of group exhibitions, biennales, and conferences include Yukon Arts Center, Whitehorse (2016-2020); The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2019-2018); Vancouver Art Gallery (2018-2016); Anchorage Museum, Alaska (2020); Gallery TPW, Toronto (2018); Toronto Bienniale of Art (2020); MOMENTA Biennale de l’image and Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal (2019); Encuentro, Mexico City (2019); Native American & Indigenous Studies As- sociation, Hawaii (2016); among others. In 2017 they were recognized for their work by the Vancouver Contemporary Artist Society.

On the board of directors of Or Gallery, and a member of BUSH gallery, Frei Njootli is currently an Assistant Professor and committee member of VISA Graduate Committee in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia.

Bronson Smillie (b.1992, Calgary, Alberta) currently lives and works in Montréal, Canada and holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University. Solo presentations include A Place For Everything, april april, New York (2023); Tempo 85, Espace Maurice, Montréal, Canada (2022); NADA New York, with april april (2022); and Forever is Closing in, MoMAPS311, Ottawa, Canada (2019). Group exhibitions include LVL3, Chicago, IL (2023); AXENÉO7, Gatineau, Canada (2022); Petrohradská Kolektiv, Prague, Czechia (2021); Five AM, Calgary (2019); Untitled Arts Society, Calgary (2018); and Eastern Bloc, Montréal, Canada (2017), among others. Smillie was recently awarded the ARTCH Emerging Artists Grant.

Scott Keightley (b. 1987, Boston, MA) currently lives and works in Atlanta, GA. Solo exhibitions include Response, Metropolitan Structures, Baltimore, MD (2016); Tomorrow is Already Here, 247365 Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2016); and Daybreak, Lana’s, Brooklyn, New York (2015). Select group exhibitions include Burning the Wheel of the Year, curated by Erin Jane-Nelson, HiLo, Atlanta, GA (2021); Look Again, curated by Mike Mosby, Hudson Opera House, Hudson, NY (2021); Well/Being: An Exhibition on Healing and Repair, University Art Museum, Albany, NY (2021); Field Report 11: In Case of Emergency, Incident Report, Hudson, NY (2019); The Dose Makes the Poison, Baba Yaga, Hudson, NY (2019); Group show at Grand Buffet / 90 Green, Hudson, NY (2019); Simile Stone, La KAJE, Brooklyn, NY (2018); and Crane Game, Cul De Sac, Brooklyn, NY (2018). Keightley was a recipient of a Basilica Hudson grant in 2020. He is the founder of Baba Yaga in Hudson, New York and co-founder of Violet’s Cafe in Brooklyn, New York (2013–16). His work is in the Rare Prints and Manuscripts collection of the New York Public Library.