a space in fourteen traces
Groupshow curated by Vida Zamora
Gelman Gallery at RISD Museum
Providence, RI, 2026
May 1st - May 31st
Press release and checklist
Whitehot Magazine: “Night at Gelman Gallery: On a space in fourteen traces
From the curator Vida Zamora:
“a space in fourteen traces is an ecosystem composed by fourteen interventions to the networks that sustain the Gelman Gallery and its structures. (The artists) asks us to consider how land, place, viewership, socialities, histories, relationships, and affiliations always already co-constitute and renegotiate the exhibition space. Whether gathering over twelve weeks or singularly responding to the collective, these artists' proposals ponder the current space’s eco-geographic and socio-institutional context, weaving site and its relations through an emerging inquiry: How can we stand in one place and hold its many worlds at once?
In their site- and context-specificity, they invite these worlds contingent and constitutive of the gallery to probe open a dialogue-in-place which is reframed anew with each encounter. Here, authorship and spectatorship stumble into each other and onto shared ground. Spectators are invited to approach the gallery as collaborators. At times, this requires stepping outside convention: communicating with performers, handling objects, moving along scripted and unscripted paths, turning away, relinquishing attention, shifting scale, and holding the many affects. The exhibition is an invitation shaped by the multiplicity of agencies that surround and sustain it—human and more-than-human alike. The viewer inhabits an assemblage of strange, liminal loops and contingent structures, continuously mediated, perpetually implicated.”
Paper trail
2026
Shredded documents, wood
Dimension Variable
Collaborated with AnneMarie Torresen
A trail of shredded paper winds around the gallery. In many places the paper is loose, so the trail moves as people walk through or beside it. In other places, the trail rises on swellings of the floor that force people to walk around or over. The shifting shreds record traces of visitors interacting with subtle obstacles and implicit gallery conventions.
By the end of opening night, the shredded paper had been trampled and scattered throughout the gallery. None of the original traces remained recognizable. Instead, the paper had become a record of the viewers’ movements and interactions with the space.