ART CITIES: N.York-Material Witness

The  Group exhibition “Material Witness” explores each artist’s deep investigation of a particular medium. The paintings, sculptures, textiles, graphic and multi-media works in the show explore the interplay between materials and methods, reflecting each artist’s shared sensibility of inspiration, devotion, curiosity and engagement with the physical properties of their chosen materials.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: McKenzie Fine Art Archive

In “Material Witness”, material is neither neutral nor subordinate. It is the primary language through which meaning is generated—sensuous, stubborn, and charged with implication. Spanning an expansive range of media, from aluminum cans and horsehair to urethane resin, egg tempera, and stoneware clay, the exhibition proposes materiality itself as an active agent: a bearer of memory, labor, ethics, and affect. What emerges is not a survey of technique for its own sake, but a sustained meditation on how matter records experience and how artists, as witnesses, coax narrative and emotion from the physical world.

Several works quite literally project into the viewer’s space, collapsing the distance between object and observer. Ben Godward’s wall-mounted sculpture, cast in translucent, vibrantly colored urethane, shimmers with refracted and reflected light. Its optical instability resists fixity, inviting movement and prolonged looking. The work insists on perception as an embodied act, where color and form are contingent on position, time, and light.

Embodiment also animates Alexandra Kohl’s sculptures, which draw upon the strength, grace, and healing spirit of horses. By hand-placing strands of horsehair into meticulously constructed forms, Kohl orchestrates a dialogue between stillness and motion, precision and imperfection. The works hover between the geometric and the organic, their apparent delicacy belying a material historically associated with endurance and labor.

Paint, too, becomes sculptural in its own right. James Lecce’s richly vivid, high-gloss paintings are composed of poured, layered, and pooled acrylic polymer emulsion. Flowing organic shapes seem to grow across the surface, producing a sense of internal movement and liquidity. The paintings are less images than events—records of gravity, viscosity, and controlled chance.

Questions of responsibility and reuse surface pointedly in Christina Massey’s hanging sculptures, which transform repurposed beer cans into highly articulated forms. Addressing the emotional terrain of climate change, Massey’s works balance seduction and unease. The familiar refuse of consumption is reconfigured into intricate, almost celebratory structures that simultaneously acknowledge beauty and complicity.

Dana Melamed’s practice similarly engages fragility and resilience through unconventional means. Using dried cholla cactus as both subject and substance, Melamed burns and carves the material into three-dimensional architectural worlds. The resulting forms appear simultaneously rugged and vulnerable, evoking ruin, shelter, and the tenuous architectures—both ecological and social—that shape human existence.

Textile and fiber-based works throughout the exhibition emphasize touch, intimacy, and time. Cyrilla Mozenter hand-cuts industrial wool felt, stitching it with silk thread to create wall hangings that hover between two and three dimensions, and between visual art and poetry. Ellie Murphy braids brightly colored acrylic yarn into cascading textiles that reference doll hair, craft traditions, folk motifs, and Americana. In both practices, repetition and hand labor function as quiet acts of devotion.

Drawing anchors the exhibition with moments of restraint and precision. James Nelson’s finely wrought graphite drawings allow abstract organic forms to emerge gradually from fibrous Chinese paper, while Pete Schulte employs graphite and pigment to construct nuanced fields of precisely defined shapes and spaces that oscillate between geometry and biomorphism. Drew Shiflett extends drawing into the realm of construction, weaving small pieces of paper layered with gouache and graphite into reductive yet complex, ethereal compositions.

Wood, long associated with structure and support, is reimagined across several practices. Helen O’Leary bandages together discarded wood fragments to form dimensional substrates for her egg tempera paintings, embedding histories of damage and repair directly into the ground of the image. Jim Osman uses cut sections of wood and house paint to build intricately balanced, architectonic sculptures that evoke both playfulness and precarity. Cordy Ryman fuses painting and sculpture through abstract geometric works fashioned from acrylic paint and wood, foregrounding process and material honesty.

Clay and cosmos close the circuit between the intimate and the infinite. Ursula Morley Price, working with a traditional pinch-and-coil method, achieves a paper-like delicacy in her fluted stoneware vessels, challenging assumptions about weight and permanence. Inspired by Webb and Hubble telescope imagery, John Torreano embeds faux faceted gems into wood surfaces, transforming humble substrates into celestial maps that reference stars, planets, and the vastness of the universe.

Collectively, “Material Witness” advances a compelling proposition: that materials do not merely serve artistic intention, but actively shape it. Each work bears the trace of touch, time, and transformation. In an era increasingly defined by virtuality and abstraction, the exhibition insists on the eloquence of matter—and on the artist’s role as one who listens, responds, and gives form to what materials already know.

Participating Artists: Ben Godward, Alexandra Kohl, James Lecce, Christina Massey, Dana Melamed, Cyrilla Mozenter, Ellie Murphy, James Nelson, Helen O’Leary, Jim Osman, Ursula Morley Price, Cordy Ryman, Pete Schulte, Drew Shiflett, and John Torreano.

Photo: Christina Massey, Recovery, 2025, Acrylic on repurposed aluminum cans with wire, 60 x 70 1/2 x 12 inches, © Christina Massey, Courtesy the artist and McKenzie Fine Art

Info: Curator: Lesley Heller, McKenzie Fine Art, 55 Orchard Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 5/12/2025-25/1/2026, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-17:00, www.mckenziefineart.com/