https://fjordspace.com FJORD Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:48:43 +0000 https://fjordspace.com en https://fjordspace.com/Start Sun, 12 Nov 2023 15:25:00 +0000 FJORD https://fjordspace.com/Start <img width="1728" height="2304" width_o="1728" height_o="2304" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/259f0fc78c2a0b9a7961acf7499f22e2e1ffb4aa1439cd4fe027e24ca0742293/Copy-of-Exhibitions-Poster-Template.png" data-mid="247718394" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/259f0fc78c2a0b9a7961acf7499f22e2e1ffb4aa1439cd4fe027e24ca0742293/Copy-of-Exhibitions-Poster-Template.png" /> https://fjordspace.com/XYZ-ACCESS Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:48:43 +0000 FJORD https://fjordspace.com/XYZ-ACCESS XYZ ACCESS Logan Elise Crompton, Jocelyn Tsui, &amp; Ryan Scails,&nbsp; 5/9 - 6/13 Opening Reception: Saturday, May 9th, 6-9pm Curated by&nbsp;Sean M. Starowitz&nbsp; ︎ FJORD (1720 N 5th St G2) <img width="1728" height="2304" width_o="1728" height_o="2304" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2f5a5a80b51d61d5ef4dcf0a95edf4a925e6f62e94c817c215a769839f151692/Copy-of-Exhibitions-Poster-Template.png" data-mid="247715200" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2f5a5a80b51d61d5ef4dcf0a95edf4a925e6f62e94c817c215a769839f151692/Copy-of-Exhibitions-Poster-Template.png" /> This May, FJORD is excited to announce XYZ Access, featuring work by Logan Elise Crompton, Jocelyn Tsui and Ryan Scails. This exhibition was curated by Sean M. Starowitz from the FJORD 2025 Open Call submissions and runs May 9th to June 13th 2026. Taking inspiration from perforation logic and the doubling of perception, XYZ Access explores how we navigate boundaries between the body and the spaces it occupies within physical and digital realities. By employing the grid as a framework for recording the familiar, the artists reveal underlying patterns within our domestic and digital lives, suggesting that what often feels like chance is, in fact, deeply structural. Distilling the complexities of 21st-century life into a series of coordinates through image, print and sculpture, XYZ Access invites viewers to look at their own surroundings with a renewed sense of curiosity. Compton utilizes grids as a primary tool for mapping and charting the recurring imagery of immediate life. Tsui's work investigates the geopolitical perforation of space and place, such as the infamous Kowloon Walled City. Scails’ work embodies thresholds in physical forms, interrogating access and the pursuit of empirical knowledge. The community is invited for an opening reception Saturday May 9th from 6-9pm. FJORD is open 1-5pm on Saturdays and by appointment. To schedule an appointment please email fjord.curator@gmail.com. About the Artists: Logan Crompton [b. 2000, Kansas City, MO] is a Black, post-post-internet artist based in Philadelphia, PA. Logan, as an artist, is concerned with Black corporeal and immaterial realities, Black image and the internet, and protection and reclamation of said image. Logan considers the recurring throughlines of African spiritual systems of belief, and reappropriation and reclamation as it appears within their life and practice. Their work explores said themes through mythmaking, memes, magic, matrixes, algorithms, and repetition as mantra. Logan received their BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in Painting and Art History and their MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art and Architecture. They were previously a Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art and an AXA art prize finalist. Logan currently works as a Teaching Artist, educating both at the university and elementary level at Temple University and Coco Academy respectively.https://log3y.neocities.org/ &nbsp;Jocelyn Tsui (b. 2002, Hong Kong) is an artist and printmaker that explores the fluctuating dynamics of ‘print-as-body-as-machine’ as modular yet united forms. Through technologies of the press, the printer, the fold, the software, the knife, she pursues ways in which the terms of production and labor can be redefined through scale-shifts of time. Tsui has been an artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute, In Cahoots Press, and Directangle Press and has exhibited in shows including at The National Arts Club, NY (2024), A.I.R. Gallery, NY (2025), 10 Chancery Lane, HK (2025), and FJORD Gallery, PA (2026). She completed her BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design, and is currently an MFA in Painting / Printmaking candidate at Yale School of Art.https://www.jocelynhyt.com/ Ryan Scails (b.1987) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Southwestern Connecticut. He received a BFA from Cooper Union and his MFA in Fibers &amp; Material Studies at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. His most recent exhibitions include The Frequency at Brood Works (Brooklyn, NY), RAW at Eric Firestone Gallery (New York, NY), To Prepare A Place For You at Temple Contemporary (Philadelphia, PA), Martin's End at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Philadelphia, PA). Ryan has attended residencies at MASSMoCA, Textile Arts Center - Brooklyn, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center Arts/Industry program. https://www.ryanscails.com/ https://fjordspace.com/In-pursuit-of-a-drifting-rear-view Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:26:23 +0000 FJORD https://fjordspace.com/In-pursuit-of-a-drifting-rear-view In pursuit of a drifting rear view a collaborative exhibition Ava Hassinger, Christina Kerns 21 March - 25 April 2026 Opening Reception: Saturday, March 21, 6-9pm&nbsp; Curated by Natessa Amin ︎ FJORD (1720 N 5th St G2) &nbsp;<img width="3300" height="5100" width_o="3300" height_o="5100" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b2e2731badd250a0a5ee99022ca98c104fa537a02b8ff7eaeef3e6749ae780e9/Inpursuitofadriftingrearview3.jpg" data-mid="246273956" border="0" data-scale="70" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b2e2731badd250a0a5ee99022ca98c104fa537a02b8ff7eaeef3e6749ae780e9/Inpursuitofadriftingrearview3.jpg" /> In pursuit of a drifting rear view begins with a shared departure—an impulse to move outward and travel the road into diverse landscapes. The photographs in this exhibition were made during a road trip taken by Ava Hassinger and Christina Kerns in May 2025. Much of their drive was spent traveling across the American interior, exploring the landscape, memories and a sense of drift. The exhibition presents an installation of images of various scales as they gather into an immersive field where perspectives pool and overlap without settling into a single view. As distance accumulates, perception begins to shift. Landscapes change, time compresses and stretches, and attention flickers between what lies ahead and what is already receding. The accompanying text extends this structure, moving between the artists’ voices in a back-and-forth that echoes the layering of images in the gallery. What emerges is a record of a shared physical experience felt, and therefore seen, differently. Together, image and language hold possibilities open—spaces where memory, place, and perception continue to shift long after their return home. – Natessa Amin, Curator - Fjord Gallery The land transitions from lush green to sweet brown, cinnamon ash. Sometimes it is red or burnt umber. Sometimes it is white or yellow. It is dry. It is hot. Is this the edge of civilization? The front of the car and windshield are matted with bugs. Naturally, because there is so much driving, the road becomes redundant. The mind wanders - highway hypnosis. We listen to music or some audiobook to pass the time. With the coastline now behind us, a quiet unease feels present. . The sky opens up in Oklahoma, but the world becomes flat- sort of. It gets flatter as you go west. Then mountains appear. Our burning eyes adjusted to the dry heat around 2000 miles into the trip, somewhere between New Mexico and Arizona. We were far enough away from home to drift in the liminal space between our thoughts and the unfamiliar landscape. Looking out through the windshield, our focus softened to glance in the rear view, and ahead again. Another luggage cart overflowing with camera bags, tripods and suitcases, continental breakfast, refuel, shoot, click click click, download, charge, gas station snacks, water, audiobook, silence, cruise control, new time zone. What time is sunset here? If you are facing north, there is a part along the Grand Canyon that looks like it repeats infinitely-a Droste effect in rock. A most majestic abyss. It might be altitude sickness or just general delirium from traveling - our sense of self begins to slip. We are time-traveling: first forward, then backward- wandering, and getting lost. We find a black widow spider hibernating in the grill. I think every hole in the desert ground are homes for snakes ready to leap out and bite. We unwind in the Airbnb hot tub, watching “Satellites?” cascade in unison across the night sky, wondering if this is it. The aliens have finally come to take us. We drove together on the same road, two women from Oklahoma and New York. Our disparate histories reflected on the landscape. Once in a while our lenses converged on the same voids and mounds surfacing the country: Memphis, OKC, Roswell, Sedona, Joshua Tree, Vegas, Moab... Memories floated in and out of our consciousness as we created new ones, attempting to make the juncture tangible through a photograph. You are drawn to the landscape while I gravitate to the constructed. You to natural vibrancy, and me, the artificial. On occasion, the definition becomes indistinguishable. About the Artists: Ava Hassinger’s interdisciplinary practice joins photography, video, and sculpture to explore the relationship between the body, technology, and screen-based experiences. Her work has been featured in exhibitions including Composed Matter at FJORD, Philadelphia; Slow Burn at the John H. Baker Gallery, West Chester University; Extra Parts at Good Children Gallery, New Orleans; and Descent at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Hassinger is an Assistant Professor of Visual Art at Lincoln University, where she teaches courses in graphic design, branding, and professional art practice seminars. She holds a BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. https://avahassingerresearch.cargo.site/ Christina Kerns is a photographic artist working with alternative printing techniques, net art, and printed matter. She received her BFA in Photography with a minor in Art History from Pratt Institute and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Pennsylvania, PennDesign. She has presented solo exhibitions at The University of South Carolina, Marshall University, Lyon College, and Hope College, where she was the 2024 Borgeson Artist-in-Residence. Her work has also been exhibited in two-person and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Kerns’s work explores the role of photography in constructing and preserving personal identity. Her work often references the translation from virtual to physical space through material gestures. She is currently an Associate Professor at Lincoln University, PA, and lives and works in Philadelphia. https://www.christinakerns.com/ https://fjordspace.com/Diorama-of-a-Sunrise-Setting Wed, 28 Jan 2026 23:36:05 +0000 FJORD https://fjordspace.com/Diorama-of-a-Sunrise-Setting Diorama of a Sunrise Setting Zach Hill 31 January - 07 March 2026 Opening Reception: Saturday, January 31, 6-9pm ︎ FJORD (1720 N 5th St G2) <img width="5000" height="3336" width_o="5000" height_o="3336" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d8a94efa1e6b25e0c4e3d029a0dae66af7f6c42367fa852553d4f442ca4c1c9a/SmileyFaceCockerSpanielw_200Eyes_2024.jpg" data-mid="244118900" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d8a94efa1e6b25e0c4e3d029a0dae66af7f6c42367fa852553d4f442ca4c1c9a/SmileyFaceCockerSpanielw_200Eyes_2024.jpg" /> <img width="3700" height="3800" width_o="3700" height_o="3800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b7084e0244b1f1ecd928192fd3cb65a18407670d086b95b5dc7a28929b2498b7/diorama.jpg" data-mid="244118897" border="0" data-scale="91" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b7084e0244b1f1ecd928192fd3cb65a18407670d086b95b5dc7a28929b2498b7/diorama.jpg" /> <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0dc033261c632c06664bff449b4f023abecc109d9ca1b7ad48bc47f664a17c1f/IMG_7172.JPG" data-mid="244118898" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0dc033261c632c06664bff449b4f023abecc109d9ca1b7ad48bc47f664a17c1f/IMG_7172.JPG" /> <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/87e0911811dfa9b30bc26ed84112621f239ea052f4fae7a9866c2acc34df43d5/first-image_.JPG" data-mid="244118899" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/87e0911811dfa9b30bc26ed84112621f239ea052f4fae7a9866c2acc34df43d5/first-image_.JPG" /> Through formal and material abstractions, Hill presents a scene with its toes confidently grounded on the edge of a cliff. Using drawing as point of origin to create multidimensional works that play with material identity, visual perception, and speculative utility, he hones a queer logic of assemblage to anthropomorphize various devices, infrastructures, and iconography. Like any proper diorama, this exhibition depicts landscape, the human figure, animality, and implements, all blurred through a literal giant lens. A sunrise setting is not only a refusive action, but a time and place that is frozen in the infinite blue, orange and pink of a shifting horizon line. About the Artist: Zach Hill is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator working between sculpture, drawing, and moving image. He has been awarded the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship, a Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, two Illuminate the Arts Grants, and a Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award along with a full fellowship to Vermont Studio Center and has attended other residencies such as Bunker Projects, Elsewhere Museum, and Stove Works. His work has been exhibited at The Haggerty Museum of Art, Flux Factory on Governors Island, The Luminary, Co-Prosperity, Peep Projects, Grizzly Grizzly, All Street Gallery, and VisArts among other spaces. He has also created nightlife visuals for various queer parties such as Sonidero, Virtues, and LYLAS and has completed multiple sculptural commissions for Honcho Campout. Hill holds a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art &amp; Design, an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Haverford College, teaching sculpture and drawing. Zach Hill is currently based in Philadelphia, PA. https://zach-hill.com/ https://fjordspace.com/Conversation-with-a-Stone Tue, 09 Dec 2025 01:29:46 +0000 FJORD https://fjordspace.com/Conversation-with-a-Stone Conversation with a Stone Ruth Jeyaveeran, Esther Podemski 6 December 2025 - 17 January 2026 Opening Reception: Saturday, December 6, 6-9pm Curated by Todd Stong ︎ FJORD (1720 N 5th St G2) <img width="1000" height="1333" width_o="1000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a496934f7bfb7e4e46c606125dc51b97235fc730a8e4e47283977edfb70a4113/Show-Poster-1.jpg" data-mid="241582739" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a496934f7bfb7e4e46c606125dc51b97235fc730a8e4e47283977edfb70a4113/Show-Poster-1.jpg" /> FJORD is pleased to present Conversation with a Stone, an exhibition of Brooklyn-based artists Ruth Jeyaveeran and Esther Podemski, curated by Todd Stong. The exhibition borrows its title from Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, in which a speaker repeatedly asks a stone for entrance. Each time, the stone refuses: “‘You shall not enter,’ the stone says./ ‘You lack the sense of taking part./ No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part. / Even sight heightened to become all-seeing / will do you no good without a sense of taking part.’” The poem stages a paradox: the desire to enter where entry is withheld, and the persistence of that desire despite the certainty of refusal. “‘Go away,’ says the stone. / ‘I’m shut tight / Even If you break me to pieces, / we still won’t let you in.’” Broken in half, a stone is not entered; it is made into two. Both Podemski and Jeyaveeran evoke stone—and the unknown—in different registers and degrees of explicitness. In her Wooly Cairns, Jeyaveeran intuitively builds boulder-like forms from wire and plaster, then encases and stacks them in felted wool, each layer carrying the residue of her touch. The cairn becomes a marker of passage and presence, a gesture of community among travelers who may never meet. Other works engage stone directly: wool cords descend from the ceiling and tether hollow felted forms to rocks at their base. These suspended shapes, suggestive of branches, seedpods, shells, or vertebrae, respond to gravity, tension, and drift, moving like things that have lived alongside the natural world even when their cores have long been removed. In many of Podemski’s geometric abstractions, a recurring oval, smooth, dark, and stone-like, anchors the composition but never resolves into a single meaning. It derives partly from tantric painting, where such forms serve as sites of contemplation or cosmological orientation. But another source for Podemski’s imagery lies in distorted screenshots captured from color-correction software while she edited her 2011 documentary The Peasant and the Priest. The film follows two elderly Italian men—one resisting corporate agriculture, the other ministering to trafficked women—whose lives intersect with opaque global systems of labor, migration, and precarity. Podemski manipulates these screenshots, then screenprints them directly onto panel, using their digital artifacts as scaffolding. She paints over and through these printed architectures until the compositions evoke airports, stadiums, mapping interfaces: spaces shaped by forces far larger than the individuals moving through them. Neither artist seeks a singular truth. Jeyaveeran wraps and massages wool with warm water and soap until fibers interlock, threading yarn through surfaces as if drawing across terrain. The resulting lines suggest veins, migration routes, and geologies—a mapping not of place but of pressure, history, and the felt sense of distance. Podemski’s hard-edge abstractions emerge from images already mediated, already strained through documentary practice. She builds spaces that hold multiple temporalities at once, where a line might shift scale abruptly—a boundary becoming a conduit, a conveyor, a horizon. Conversation with a Stone returns, quietly, to Szymborska’s image: a stone addressed, entreated, turned in the hand, never opened. The works of Jeyaveeran and Podemski rest at that threshold, shaped by touch, labor, and the desire to approach what cannot be fully entered. Their forms linger at the surface, not resigned, but in recognition that the surface is where the world meets us. About the Artists: Ruth Jeyaveeran, born in Lusaka, Zambia, and raised in the Midwest, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her first solo show, Soft Remains, was exhibited at Field Projects in 2023. Other recent exhibitions include Felt Experience at the Brattleboro Museum, Communion, a solo installation at Main Window Dumbo, and Amplify, a public sculpture at the Queens Botanical Garden. Jeyaveeran has exhibited at various venues in and around New York, including Smack Mellon, All Street Gallery, ABC No Rio, Westbeth Gallery, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, The Border Project, Paradice Palase, Bronx Art Space, The Yard, and the Art and Design Gallery at FIT. Her work has been featured in Two Coats of Paint, The Arcade Project, and Art Spiel. She has been awarded residencies from the Ucross Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Governors Island,&nbsp; Residency Unlimited, Lighthouse Works, Marble House Project, Jentel Foundation, Willapa Bay, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and PADA Studios. Jeyaveeran has taught courses in textiles and fibers at Parsons School of Design, and she frequently leads workshops on felting and the therapeutic benefits of craft. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Textile Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Esther Podemski is a filmmaker and visual artist whose work has been exhibited in galleries, film festivals, and academic venues. Paintings and drawings have appeared at the Jersey City Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Jewish Museum (Portland), as well as galleries in New York and other cities, both nationally and internationally. Her work is included in private and public collections. Grants include the New York State Council on the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Soros Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Yaddo Residency, The Virgina Center for the Creative Arts, and Ucross Residency programs. She has taught fine arts graduate and undergraduate courses at Parsons School of Design in New York, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Sarah Lawrence College. Of her work in film, a two-screen installation titled “Five Days in July,” revisits the Newark riots of 1967. This installation has shown at numerous museums, galleries and colleges including The Tisch School of Art at NYU, The Birmingham Civil Rights Museum and The Sate Museum in Trenton New Jersey. It won the Director’s Choice award at the Black Maria Film Festival and the Jury Award for the Best Short at The Langston Hughes African American Film Festival.&nbsp; “House of the World,” her documentary about the aftermath of the Holocaust, was shot in Poland and has been showcased in European and American art centers and festivals, including Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, Lincoln Center, and Los Angeles International Jewish Film Festival. Discovery Communication and Jewish Broadcast Network purchased the film for broadcast.Her most recent documentary, The Peasant and the Priest, tells the story of two men in their eighties who are engaged in traditional occupations in modern day Italy. Sergio, a peasant, still works in ancient olive groves; Oreste, a priest, ministers to women caught in global sexual slavery. The point of departure for exploring these parallel lives is a 14th century fresco, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. https://fjordspace.com/Foul-Territory Sat, 11 Oct 2025 13:14:38 +0000 FJORD https://fjordspace.com/Foul-Territory Foul Territory Alexandria Nazar, Amira Pualwan, Sean M. Starowitz 11 October - 22 November 2025 Opening Reception: Saturday, October 11, 6-9pm Curated by Alexandria Nazar, Amira Pualwan, Sean M. Starowitz ︎ FJORD (1720 N 5th St G2) <img width="2947" height="3869" width_o="2947" height_o="3869" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5f2112b3519ca444748af0628573d841e8d7828a55157e16b29d682ebf1880e8/FoulTerritoryweb.jpg" data-mid="239266675" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5f2112b3519ca444748af0628573d841e8d7828a55157e16b29d682ebf1880e8/FoulTerritoryweb.jpg" /> <img width="1846" height="1030" width_o="1846" height_o="1030" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a62911fa274f11a137c1535a62db763b22c2542e21db68a3b1ef8d0332bb6217/Screenshot-2025-10-11-at-9.36.44AM.png" data-mid="239268175" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a62911fa274f11a137c1535a62db763b22c2542e21db68a3b1ef8d0332bb6217/Screenshot-2025-10-11-at-9.36.44AM.png" /> <img width="1462" height="2047" width_o="1462" height_o="2047" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bb0cfb494ada129e99770798105895b4850b01010d88d255c6e214b8d54729d2/5809202368717238834.JPG" data-mid="239268177" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bb0cfb494ada129e99770798105895b4850b01010d88d255c6e214b8d54729d2/5809202368717238834.JPG" /> <img width="2400" height="1728" width_o="2400" height_o="1728" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9ecffca2380c02aeaeab7e3930ceaef77033dac0b36217290346c55c874bc0da/IMG_9808.JPG" data-mid="239268178" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9ecffca2380c02aeaeab7e3930ceaef77033dac0b36217290346c55c874bc0da/IMG_9808.JPG" /> FJORD presents a three-person show with works by new co-directors Alexandria Nazar, Amira Pualwan and Sean M. Starowitz. The artworks move across arenas of history, sport and myth to probe how images shape collective identity and personal perception. We ask what it means to watch, to be watched and to resist capture. Being through invisibility, transformation, or the undoing of power itself – the flattening of image and reduction to “stone” Images:&nbsp; Sean M. Starowitz Untitled (A Study After Washington) detail 2025 slip-cast ceramic&nbsp; variable sizes Alexandria Nazar penalties of espionage&nbsp; 2025 oil on canvas 48 x 40 in Amira Pualwan Sea Wall (Running Spiral)&nbsp; 2025 ceramic screenprint on tile 43 x 30 in About the Artists: Alexandria Nazar is a painter and curator in Philadelphia. She received her MFA Painting and Drawing from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, her BA in Fines Arts and History from UC Davis. She was co-curator for the show Testing Grounds at the Cherry Street Pier in Philadelphia, PA. She has previously shown her work at the Temple Contemporary in Philadelphia, PA, Information Space in Philadelphia, PA, the Dorchester Art Project in Boston, MA, Fowler-Kellogg Art Center in Chautauqua, NY, Onkel Olga’s Atelier Odense, Denmark and Gæsteatelier Hollufgård in Odense, Denmark. She has also attended residencies at the Pine Meadows Artist Residency, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, MASS MOCA in North Adams, MA and the Chautauqua School of Art in Chautauqua, NY. alexandrianazar.comAmira Pualwan is an artist and educator based in Philadelphia, PA. She received an MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, and a BA in Studio Art from Wheaton College (MA). Pualwan has completed residencies at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the Women's Studio Workshop Beisinghoff Residency. Recently, Pualwan's work has been included in group exhibitions at Automat in Philadelphia and Wassaic Project in Amenia, NY. She is currently the Dayton Hudson Visiting Artist at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. afpprints.com Sean M. Starowitz has worked in a variety of community-based contexts, spanning more than a decade of socially engaged art practice. He uses archival research and public memory as material to reframe our current understanding of natural history and political imaginaries. Starowitz has exhibited his work at Living Arts of Tulsa, KMAC Museum, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as numerous artist-run spaces. He has contributed writings to Proximity Magazine, Ruckus Journal and Belt Magazine. &nbsp;In 2023, Starowitz received his MFA in Sculpture from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. He currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA, and spends his summers teaching at the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts in Lexington, KY. sean-starowitz.com https://fjordspace.com/Universal-Solvent Fri, 08 Aug 2025 13:28:56 +0000 FJORD https://fjordspace.com/Universal-Solvent Universal Solvent Georgia Hourdas, Marisha Lozada, Fanni Somogyi 16 August - 27 September 2025 Opening Reception: Saturday, August 16, 6-9pm Curated by FJORD ︎ FJORD (1720 N 5th St G2) <img width="2400" height="3000" width_o="2400" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/796c0a3db1b334f533caecafa07a9bb5176891ca4b429380bce22ecc72ac3622/Web_OpenCall.jpg" data-mid="236833801" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/796c0a3db1b334f533caecafa07a9bb5176891ca4b429380bce22ecc72ac3622/Web_OpenCall.jpg" /> “But memory is mercurial, shapeshifting over time and slipping through the sieve of one’s mind like quicksilver. Quicksilver—an element that transcends solid and liquid states, a metaphor for the fluidity between the realms of heaven and earth, life and death…” Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe’s words above (used to describe painter Ali Banisadr’s work) offer an appropriately slick and slippery entry point into Universal Solvent, an exhibition featuring works by Georgia Hourdas, Marisha Lozada, and Fanni Somogyi – finalists in the 2025 Annual Open Call exhibition. The show brings together materially and conceptually diverse approaches to growth, entropy, and metamorphosis. Mysterious, symbol-laden paintings shift through high-key color to muted neutrals, and sculptural works flicker between recognizable utility and organic, living matter – a network of dissolve and resolidification speaking to transformation, fluidity, and changeability. In Hourdas’ paintings, one encounters specific flora and species entwined with imagery of swirling star clusters. We are naturally inclined to name the recognizable forms, but in looking more closely at the delineated shapes, we encounter taxonomies that collapse under scrutiny, giving way to portals of mythic vastness. A wide spectrum of lifespans and their respective temporalities is present—a dew drop, a shiver of sharks, seemingly endless galaxies. This fluctuation between micro and macro, classification and dream, unsettles our gaze and reveals the pattern-seeking psyche at work. According to Robert Gober, “memory is like looking up at the stars.” Some are clear and bright, and some a bit hazy or unseen. Lozada’s mixed media paintings utilize fragments from a personal symbolic system to construct works that speak to adolescence and identity. Combining Eastern Orthodox iconography with illustrations reminiscent of middle school notebook doodles, the layered motifs become highly emotional amidst deliberate and striking use of color—flashlight-like washes of sunny yellow, all-over matte black flatness, and bright, arsenic greens. Icons of devotion and self-fashioning share the same pictorial ground, inviting reverence, irreverence, and reinterpretation. Somogyi’s work, fantastical in its own right, bridges organic and industrial logic. The recognition of copper piping helps us locate ourselves in familiarity while simultaneously presenting unexpected, nearly fungal mutations. The process of electroforming copper takes the piece through distinct stages, utilizing both decay and accumulation to build each form—an echo of how bodies heal, scar, and change shape. The material’s bruised surfaces, tinged with heat-patina pinks and purples, underscore the sensual vulnerability of the work. Like infrastructure infected with memory, the sculptures suggest both support systems and sites of rupture. The artists in Universal Solvent present snapshots of slippage—from earthside to the cosmos, from the intimate body to sprawling infrastructure. Their works offer fractured cosmologies, where classification, memory, and matter blur—each piece a trace of something shifting, unfixed, and alive. The Artists: Georgia Hourdaswww.georgiahourdas.com Marisha Lozada www.marishalozada.com Fanni Somogyi www.fannisomogyi.com https://fjordspace.com/hollow-thread-solid-ground Sun, 08 Jun 2025 17:09:01 +0000 FJORD https://fjordspace.com/hollow-thread-solid-ground hollow thread, solid ground Kiani Kodama, Paolo Mentasti, Abbey Muza, Ellie Richards, Hester Stinnett, Katie Wynne 21 June - 02 August 2025 Opening Reception: Saturday, June 21, 6-9pm Curated by Amy Shindo and Todd Stong ︎ FJORD (1720 N 5th St G2) <img width="2160" height="2880" width_o="2160" height_o="2880" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a29f6ced3dfd8dc1d9f717327e006cdc6a6b5503e655e555f8b40e7c35bfd717/hollow-thread--solid-ground.png" data-mid="234317420" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a29f6ced3dfd8dc1d9f717327e006cdc6a6b5503e655e555f8b40e7c35bfd717/hollow-thread--solid-ground.png" /> FJORD is pleased to present hollow thread, solid ground, an exhibition of sculpture, drawing, weaving, and print that interrogates questions of language, image, and truth. Artists Kiani Kodama, Paolo Mentasti, Abbey Muza, Ellie Richards, Hester Stinnett, and Katie Wynne constellate a set of proposals for accessing something more real than the network of signs we often rely upon to build our understanding of shared reality. In-so-doing, they reorient us toward embodiment, empathy, and wonder. From the moment we first externalized our thoughts, carved in stone or spoken in air, we have lived in a mediated reality. With language, we came to construct our understanding of the world not based solely on direct lived experiences, but also the experiences of others, which we chose to believe as truth. Language was a tool of faith; it required that we saw truth in it, and that we believed in one another. Maybe, for some time, we did. But, inevitably, one direct experience of the world refutes another: one man is bitten by a snake, while another finds one playing dead. Which behavior became definitional? Of course, the bite; and then all snakes were to be feared. Then, too, competing interests and beliefs between groups incentivized language for propaganda, deception, ruse, and rumor. Our signs shifted from vehicles of truth to a network of contradiction. Today, truthlessness accelerates. Jean Baudrillard expounded on the phenomenon of mediated reality in three seminal essays compiled under the final title The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in which he argued that the media’s images and stories of the 1991 invasion of Iraq by a US-led coalition were so sanitized that the conflict may as well have not happened in the Western imagination. A premium was placed on displays of advanced military technology, with no follow-up on the ground. Horrific deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians were reduced to statistics. For Baudrillard, the event was the first total hyperreality, a state where the gap between what actually happens and what we imagine to happen is so wide that there is no bridging it. We live in another, separate reality. But what of today, when unvarnished images of war do break through? Civilian videos out of Ukraine and Gaza are anything but sanitized. And still, we seem not to accept the weight of their reality – if we did, surely we would have stopped these conflicts by now? Again, Baudrilliard describes the phenomenon in another text, The Transparency of Evil – that an excess of information in fact collapses meaning. A flood of war footage in algorithmic feeds doesn’t bring clarity; it turns atrocities into fleeting content alongside memes and fitness accounts. Social media blurs the lines between propaganda, activism, and brain rot, creating a contextless stream where urgency is constant but little resonates. Source credibility becomes irrelevant and truth is indistinguishable from noise. The artists in hollow thread, solid ground interrogate the ways in which humans meet experience through language, tools, time, and the body, often as an interrelated web of phenomena. They present antidotes to the deficiencies of meaning-making and truth in modern times, engaging with solutions that anchor to the interior body and outward into the world of shared spirit. They engage with senses of time and memory far outside the constant present-tense of the infinite scroll, shifting back generations or leaping deep into the future, all to re-find themselves and us, as we are. This exhibition does not propose these artworks in and of themselves as a solution to the problems of hyperreality. But it hopes to collect a group of artists who have, in their small ways, used art to undo its structure. For an extended press release, click here. About the Artists: Kiani Kodama Paolo Mentasti Abbey Muza Ellie Richards Hester Stinnett Katie Wynne https://fjordspace.com/Natural-Language Tue, 15 Apr 2025 14:20:20 +0000 FJORD https://fjordspace.com/Natural-Language Natural Language York Chang, Nate Flagg 26 April - 7 June 2025 Opening Reception: Saturday, April 26, 6-9pm Zine Launch: Thursday, May 8, 6-8pm Curated by Charlotte G. Chin Greene ︎ FJORD (1720 N 5th St G2) <img width="1320" height="1680" width_o="1320" height_o="1680" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6fbce9bc61d3df3e4566bafabe6ad402205925028cf315bee380a308f99597ba/natural-language.jpg" data-mid="229840107" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6fbce9bc61d3df3e4566bafabe6ad402205925028cf315bee380a308f99597ba/natural-language.jpg" /> About the Artists: York Chang (b. 1973, St. Louis, MO) is an artist and practicing lawyer based in Los Angeles. His conceptual-driven work considers how our sense of truth and reality is affected by evolving forms of propaganda, the theatrics of conflict, and the staged presentation of credibility. Chang has exhibited in the United States and internationally, including Commonwealth &amp; Council, Charlie James Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, MASS MoCA, Scottsdale MoCA, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Edel Assanti London, NADA New York, EXPO Chicago, the Orange County Museum of Art and the Vincent Price Art Museum. His work is held in private and public collections, including the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. His work has been reviewed and profiled in publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Artnews, ArtAsiaPacific, Hyperallergic, Artillery, The LA Weekly, the OC Weekly, and Artscene. Nate Flagg (b. 1989 in New York, NY) received his MFA in 2016 in Painting/Printmaking from Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT) and his BA in Anthropology in 2011 from Reed College (Portland, OR). Nate is an interdisciplinary artist working across practices of drawing, animation, installation, sound, performance and invented languages. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Many-Ringèd Touch, Post Times (New York NY), Cwacacaminshin / Songs, Elma (Brooklyn, NY), and Yiawwiyi / Current Matter, Galerie Dengyun, (Shanghai, China). He has been included in group exhibitions at Island Gallery (New York, NY), YveYang (New York, NY), Swiss Institute (New York, NY), Ashes/Ashes (New York, NY), and Foxy Production (New York, NY). He lives in New York City and teaches Drawing and Time-Based Media at Pratt Institute and SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology. https://fjordspace.com/Echoes-Ripples-and-Buzzed-Whispers Mon, 24 Feb 2025 19:50:16 +0000 FJORD https://fjordspace.com/Echoes-Ripples-and-Buzzed-Whispers Echoes, Ripples and Buzzed Whispers Sachiko Akiyama, Trevor King 01 March - 12 April 2025 Opening Reception: Saturday, March 01, 6-9pm Curated by Chrissy Scolaro ︎ FJORD (1720 N 5th St G2) <img width="4500" height="5625" width_o="4500" height_o="5625" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/75fc74805d26b7a73dfda62e3977f74a4fb31a3cfc43ec7acbbfb0e9b9aaee03/Echoes-Whispers-and-Buzzed-Whispers.png" data-mid="227144602" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/75fc74805d26b7a73dfda62e3977f74a4fb31a3cfc43ec7acbbfb0e9b9aaee03/Echoes-Whispers-and-Buzzed-Whispers.png" /> design by Kelsey Dusenka FJORD Gallery is pleased to announce Echoes, Ripples and Buzzed Whispers featuring work by Sachiko Akiyama and Trevor King. The exhibition is curated by Chrissy Scolaro and will be on view March 1-April 12. The opening reception will be Saturday, March 1 from 6-9pm. Echoes, Ripples and Buzzed Whispers brings together two artists whose works embody visualizations of “the life of the mind,” a phrase uttered by John Goodman’s character, Charlie Meadows, in the 1991 Coen brothers film, Barton Fink. Meadows shouts, “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” in a moment of carnage. Our interior psychological spaces are rife with both the romance of Whitman (as referenced in the show title, sourced from Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass) as well as uninhibited turmoil, exemplified by Meadows.&nbsp; The phrase attempts to categorize the complexities of being human, from the depths of desires and feelings, to the greatest beliefs and winged possibilities. In Akiyama’s and King’s works, this seemingly impossible feat is approached through sculptures that simultaneously, against the odds of their desirous and psychologically complex content, emit calm and reverence. Focusing on a use of clay and wood, the works lead us to question limitations, or lack thereof, in our collective physical and mental spaces. King’s ceramic stoneware Human Man, a figure who towers at nearly seven feet, casts a gentle look of awe and admiration. Attached to his right leg is a fragment of a walking stick. Appendages like branches, legs like tree trunks. The suspended off cut leads us to consider physical mortality and vulnerability–breakage, truncation, divisions and simultaneously, an ability to persist and thrive–floating, fastening, buoyancy. Nearby, Akiyama’s Reach, is in dialogue; an arm is disconnected, yet unbothered and relaxed. In our contemplation of this work, its stillness and inaction is questioned. Akiyama offers a spectrum of impactful reflections on existence, both physically and spiritually. In the three larger works presented, we experience a variety of mindsets. In both Carried and Waking Dream, Akiyama’s figures are engaged with symbolic elements of nature and environment, proposing psychological spaces. Is the figure in Carried independent and fearless or isolated and hopeless? Serendipitously, in the viewing of Between, a work that celebrates a multiplicity of readings, the viewer is again challenged to accept a lack of binary interpretation. About the Artists: Sachiko Akiyama (b.1973) received her MFA from Boston University and continued her studies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Akiyama has had solo exhibitions at Brattleboro Museum (Brattleboro, VT) and Tracey Morgan Gallery (Asheville, NC). Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Mrs Gallery (Queens, NY), the CMCA (Rockland, ME) and in a collaboration between Dunes Gallery (Portland, ME) and Night Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). Among numerous honors, Akiyama was awarded a Joan Mitchell Fellowship, an Artist Resource Trust Grant, and residencies at Millay Arts and Ucross. Trevor King lives and works in New York City.&nbsp; King received a BFA from Slippery Rock University. During this time, he also studied in the Sculpture and Intermedia departments at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland. Trevor received an MFA from the Stamps School of Art &amp; Design at the University of Michigan in 2015.&nbsp; He has been an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA, Touchstone Center for Crafts, Ox Bow School of Art, Haystack Mountain School, Sculpture Space NYC, Greenwich House Pottery, and The Hambidge Center. King has been a Fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Articles on his work have been published in CFile, Floræ, Maake Magazine, and Sculpture Magazine. Solo exhibitions of King’s work include Projections at Art Lot (2022), Notions at Concept Gallery(2022), Notions at Sculpture Space NYC (2018), and STILLNESSNESS at the Emmanuel Barbault Gallery (2018). Group Exhibitions include: Crucible at Spencer Brownstone Gallery (2022), Bronx Calling at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.