Places & Spaces
Friedrichs Pontone- NYC
9/5/25 - 9/28/25
Show Flier: Photo by Chelsea Odufu
Installation View of “Places & Spaces
Dennis Osadebe, Archive is a Mirror, 2025,
Laurie Simmons, Color Pictures/Deep Photos Series (2007 - 2022)
Suchitra Mattai,
Ivan Forde, From series “9 Views to the Gateway to the Sea Above Heaven, 2025
Curator Statement:
In 1974, Sun Ra famously declared “Space is the Place,” channeling cosmic philosophy and sonic mythmaking to imagine liberated worlds beyond the confines of history. Years earlier, Guy Debord coined the term psychogeography as a framework for decoding how environments, urban and natural, visible and invisible, shape human behavior, emotion, and perception. These radical ideas inform Places & Spaces, an exhibition that treats space not as passive backdrop but as an active medium: charged, constructed, and contested.
This exhibition brings together artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, textile, video, interactive installation, and game design. Through layered material processes such as stitching, coding, and building, they challenge the assumed boundaries of space, both physical and psychological. Fabric becomes architectural building blocks. Code becomes terrain. Video becomes sculpture. Shapes, colors, and emotions become three dimensional.
A central preoccupation of the exhibition is the idea of nested realities: spaces within spaces, histories within images, identities within avatars. One work in particular, an interactive game installation, literalizes this by creating a navigable world within a world. It is a digital fortress to be mapped, moved, and dismantled. Across mediums this impulse recurs: spaces fold into themselves, echo each other, or split open under pressure.
Surrealism pulses throughout, not as an aesthetic style but as a logic. Figures dissolve. Landscapes bend. Time loops. This surreal quality unsettles fixed narratives and allows for alternate readings of memory, ancestry, and self. Whether through miniature sets, fragmented maps, speculative portraits, or layered sound and moving image, the works conjure a dreamlike spatiality where meaning is slippery yet resonant.
Throughout, the exhibition resists strict categorization. Moving images are positioned as physical presences. Tactile materials are arranged as portals or screens. Embodied practices such as ritual, gesture, and adornment coexist with technological ones. Together they reveal how space is produced not only through architecture but also through language, culture, and performance.
Ultimately, Places & Spaces asks: What does it mean to build or unbuild a world? How do spaces remember us, and how do we reimagine them in return? The show becomes a shifting atlas of thresholds, ruins, soft data, and sacred zones. Here, space is not simply where the story unfolds. It is the story, and it is always in flux.
