INSTALLATION VIEWS
Even the Phrase Each Other, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY, May 10 – 31, 2025.
ARTWORK CREDIT
Andy N Li (medium size painting in far left corner); Adrian Aguilera (three-channel monitors and light projection on prints); Elina Ansary (paintings on right wall); Hyunjin Park (sculpture and photograph towards left wall).
Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY)
May 10 – May 31, 2025
(Poster) (Credits)
(Checklist)
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Even the Phrase Each Other, a group exhibition in the main gallery by artists from the Cornell MFA in Creative Visual Arts program. The VIP preview is on Saturday, May 10, 5-6pm. The opening reception is open to the public from 6-8pm. There is a live performance by Andy Nicholas Li at 7pm. The exhibition is on view through Saturday, May 31, 2025.
Examining intersecting themes of death, consciousness, destruction, and desire, these five artists draw on the cultural contexts that shape them. Working across interdisciplinary boundaries, their practices span painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Adrian Aguilera, born in Monterrey, Mexico, researches the intrinsic essence that resides in objects, often through dissection or corruption of common phrases. Andy Nicholas Li, a Cantonese-Midwestern artist from Chicago, conjures contradictions of identity and intimacy to uncover the queer and sticky construction of a person. Hyunjin Park is a Korean interdisciplinary whose work examines how the affective power of non-human beings unsettles the boundary between the modern and the pre-modern. Elina Ansary combines auspicious materials with painted images to build cohesive wholes out of contradictory parts, reflecting the discomfort and wonder of her experience as a Jewish-Muslim-Afghan-American. Sopheak Sam pieces together fragmentary memories of war, tracing the afterlives and afterimages of Cambodian refugees to remap the intersection of Buddhist, queer, and diasporic subjectivities.
Even The Phrase Each Other is itself a fragmented phrase. The ‘translator,’ Coleman Barks, does not speak Farsi. This remnant of ancient poetry was translated and retranslated through a global game of telephone. In a similar way, these five artists, whose lineages spring from opposite corners of the earth, have found themselves flung together, by chance and synchronicity, at Cornell University’s MFA program. Together these five artists reach across borders, of geography and artistic discipline, to create a new collective intimacy.
Text by Elina Ansary