Exhibitions —

Al Svoboda and Marisa Kriangwiwat share a focus on the conditions that surround photography, painting and sculpture. Meetings (social and architectural); frames (context); and the frictions of content (or less than content).

Each artist guides us toward looking: Al from from to to, and Marisa’s glossy, deflected through. Arrangement is the method that structures such conditions, and ultimately claims economy as an editorial process. Contemporaneity is a manufacturing problem—production, supply chain, and provision (political position).

Al and Marisa navigate this question with ubiquitous physical media for poetic wayfinding. What else is shared is a sensory memory of the margin, the canyon between knowing and wondering: where are the sentences these things were built to hold?

Al’s Arrangements comprise standard, store-bought colored paper and common nails to, if even for a moment, structure vision toward that “embellished or otherwise” line where floor meets wall, horizontal versus vertical. The papers’ positions, convex or concave, conduct a new horizon from ankle, then belly, up to the eye. His work is often spatial and therefore directional, “laying bare [its] own translation and transformation as a site for our curiosity.” Each rendered in a cascading tonal scale, Colloquial View (Empire) and Edges from a Vista, for example, reconstrue long histories of sight—understood then as capture and certainty—as mere minor abstractions.

Marisa co-opts digital life’s formal cues for a kind of high-touch, urgent analog scrapbooking. Destroyed books and found fabrics matte avatar-scaled peepholes. These cutouts contain singular subjects: portraits of friends; her aunt’s shoulder; recent-past Hong Kong infrastructure. The work at once sense-casts personal history by the artist’s own parsing, while mapping the complex affective register of being online. Her frequent use of the passepartout, used in the history of print photography to focus and guide looking, here simmers anxious attachment to stark opacity. In Short Brute Kiss, a mended (once thrifted) book on Caspar David Friedrich is splayed and cut open, revealing c-prints of Diana and Margaux, two of the artist’s friends, wrapped in a final touch of thick, bent acrylic. Fictions of power are easily vexed by “marks of intimacy without any meaningful strings attached.”

Al Svoboda (b. 1991, Syracuse, NY) lives and works in New York. Solo and two-person exhibitions include LOT Paintings, april april, Pittsburgh, PA (2026); Lyndon Corners, april april, Pittsburgh, PA (2025); Meeting, Weatherproof, Chicago, IL (2023); and Landings, 57w57 Arts, New York, NY (2021). Select group exhibitions include Nathalie Karg, New York, NY; Season 4 Episode 6, London, UK; Spencer Brownstone, New York, NY; Dorp, Bath, UK; Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, NY; Wieoftnoch, Karlsruhe, Germany; Tappeto Volante, Brooklyn, NY and 57W57 Arts, New York, NY. He received his BFA from Syracuse University and MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Marisa Kriangwiwat (b. 1991, Hong Kong) lives and works in New York. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Still Thinking About It, double, Milan, IT (2026); Dear Big Hush, Towards, Toronto, ON (2025); Tells, april april, Pittsburgh, PA (2025); Infinity Ball, Unit 17, Vancouver, BC (2022); My Owns, Project Native Informant, London, UK (2021); Everything Leaks, Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver, BC (2020); and Keep Your Eyes On Your Prizes, Calaboose, Montreal, QC (2018). Select group exhibitions include 47 Canal, New York; Unit 17, Vancouver; Iowa Projects, Brooklyn; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; Rose Easton, London; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

In 2022 Kriangwiwat was the recipient of the New Generation Photography Award from the National Gallery of Canada. She was the winner of the second annual Lind Prize in 2017. Holmes received her BFA from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and MFA from Hunter College in New York.