Ground Work (Field Revision) Curated by Joey Lico

About

The exhibition brings together twelve artists whose practices consider how the earth is held, shaped, remembered, and reimagined. Rather than depicting landscape, the artists work within its materiality. Dust, pigment, metal, and glass function not as metaphors, but as witnesses. Through sculpture, photography, painting, and installation, the exhibition examines how material and psychological terrains shape one another, and how acts of construction, resistance, and renewal emerge from the strata of lived experience. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, January 8, from 6 to 8pm. Curator Joey Lico and several of the featured artists will be present.

Works by Adrián S. Bará, Sam Moyer, Leslie Hewitt, and Caleb Hahne Quintana address architectures, both literal and internal, through which memory and meaning take form. Bará’s precarious constructions echo the instability of the built environment. Moyer’s concrete-encased photographs collapse infrastructure and image into a single object, while Hewitt distills memory into spatial grammar, structuring stillness with photographic and sculptural restraint. Hahne Quintana’s atmospheric paintings trace displacement across emotional terrain, where figures dissolve into fields of color and distance.

Working across photography, assemblage, and material abstraction, Sofía Fernández Díaz, Marcel Duchamp, Jose de Jesus Rodriguez, and Harold Mendez question what lingers and remains. Fernández Díaz builds sculptural forms that balance between permanence and collapse, articulating presence through pressure. Rodriguez merges sand, lime, and pigment into vibrating geometries that feel simultaneously built and breathing. Mendez’s oxidized surfaces, water-worn wood, and stained textiles function as quiet excavations—objects that mourn disappearance while dignifying what remains. Duchamp’s inclusion reveals early fault lines in the language of material residue and abstraction.

Addressing the geologies of time, Julian Charrière exposes the sediment of human ambition, rendering planetary transformation through obsidian, heliography, and industrial remnants that glisten with both ruin and renewal. Athena LaTocha presses ash, soil, and industrial residue into sweeping works that collapse geological, historical, and personal timelines. Nobuhito Nishigawara recomposes fractured rock into sculptural acts of repair, in which gold-glazed seams carry ancestral memory and geological persistence forward.

Across these distinct practices, Ground Work (Field Revision) asks what it means to inhabit a ground—natural or constructed—that is continually shifting. The exhibition proposes that every surface holds the politics of its making, and that the materials closest to the earth’s memory, dust, stone, metal, pigment, are also the ones through which artists articulate resilience, rupture, and renewal.

For additional information on the exhibition, please visit skny.com

For inquiries, please email Thomas Kelly at Thomas@seankellyla.com

For media inquiries, please email Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com

Image caption: Athena LaTocha, The Night the Earth Caught Fire, 2024, Shellac ink, synthetic walnut ink, shellac, charcoal from burned and decayed New Hampshire trees on paper, 88 x 216 inches © the artist Courtesy: the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Joey Lico