Systems of Becoming
PS122 Project Studio Artists Exhibition | July 2025
Katherine Bowling | Daniel G. Hill | John Kelly | Kakyoung Lee | Luo Min | Amy Myers | Loup Sarion | Dannielle Tegeder | Shira Toren
Curated by Hyewon Yi
PS122 Gallery (150 First Avenue, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10009)
https://ps122gallery.org
Exhibition Dates: July 5–27, 2025
Opening Reception: Wednesday, July 9, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Artist Talk: Thursday, July 24 th , 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Gallery Hours: Thursdays through Sundays: 1:00 – 6:00 pm and by appointment
Systems of Becoming brings together nine residency artists from the Project Studio Program 2024–2025. This culminating exhibition of the year-long residency, held at PS122 Gallery, centers on an overarching theme: the investigation of evolving relationships between intuition and structure, memory and material, and the personal and the planetary. The artists’ diverse practices—ranging from painting, sculpture, and installation to printmaking and animation—draw on internal and external systems to shape, resist, and transform selfhood, design, and implication.
Some of these artists explore deeply personal histories that echo broader social and cultural shifts, with the body as a conduit of personal and generational memory. Luo Min’s nearly six- meter-long scroll painting traces the rupture and resilience of maternal bonds, merging traditional Chinese aesthetics with collage and text. John Kelly’s hand-drawn graphic memoir transforms autobiographical performance work—centered on an obsession with Caravaggio, a trapeze injury, and queer survival—into a layered visual opera of grief and renewal. Kakyoung Lee’s stop-motion animations emerge from cycles of erasure and redrawing, revealing the quiet, invisible rhythms of everyday life at the margins. Loup Sarion casts urban residue and bodily fragments into layered sculptures that feel at once sensual and archaeological, evoking desire and intimacy through materials with lived pasts. Katherine Bowling’s landscape and abstract paintings, rendered on spackled surfaces, express her love of nature and reflect inner and outer states of selfhood.
In contrast, other artists engage with structural logic through abstract visual language, exploring complex ideas—scientific, spiritual, or personal. Daniel G. Hill’s modular MDF sculptures—constructed using strapping, buckling, and hinges—draw inspiration from 19 th – century mechanical systems and childhood toys, testing the precarious and temporary nature of assembly through gravity and tension. Amy Myers builds symmetrical biomorphic imagery inspired by conceptual contemporary physics, creating a dynamic visual cosmology—an imagined system that seeks truth between humanity and the universe. Dannielle Tegeder’s architectonic abstractions blend speculative underground city plans with spiritual geometries, creating diagrams of unseen infrastructure, feminist utopias, and collaborative trance states. Shira Toren creates evocative abstract paintings that eschew brushes, employing a meticulous process of layering acrylic paint, graphite, Venetian plaster, and removable painter’s tape to reveal surfaces that echo the natural world.
The exhibition coalesces around two broad sensibilities: one group embraces emotionally charged, figurative imagery that expands personal narratives into wider sociocultural concerns; the other engages abstraction to explore structural and conceptual systems. Here, “systems” are not rigid frameworks, but unfolding inquiries—ways of navigating memory and trauma, constructing form, and imagining alternate futures. These artists work with systems both inherited and invented, personal and collective, to articulate a state of flux. In this space,becoming is both collaborative and continual.
Artist Biographies
Katherine Bowling is known for her meditative and luminous paintings depicting scenes and landscapes taken from the Hudson Valley area where she lives. Bowling’s paintings and prints emulate the tradition of the Hudson River School of the 19th century, using mystery and quiet symbolism to infuse a Romanticist aesthetic into the details of the landscape. Her use of space within her compositions combined with an expressive technique help to pull her practice into the 21st century. Bowling was born in Washington, DC and earned her BFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1978. She has been exhibiting her work since the early 1980s in New York City and throughout the United States. Bowling has received numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1991. Her work is featured in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston, IL; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; and the Fisher Landau Center, NY, among others.
John Kelly is a performance and visual artist whose work blends writing, directing, choreography, and vocal performance. His multidisciplinary, character-driven works explore autobiography, queer identity, creative genius, and historical and cultural subjects—ranging from gay persecution to meditations on Egon Schiele, Joni Mitchell, and Jean Cocteau. Trained in ballet and modern dance, Kelly later studied visual art at Parsons and Boston’s Museum School. He emerged in the 1980s East Village performance scene and has since created over 40 performance works presented at venues including BAM’s Next Wave Festival, La MaMa, Skirball Center, and London’s Tate Modern. His honors include two Bessie and Obie Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and a USA Artists Fellowship. As a visual artist, his self-portrait-based works span drawing, painting, photography, and video; two films are in MoMA’s collection. His recent graphic memoir, A Friend Gave Me a Book, is based on his experience of a near catastrophic trapeze accident that finds refuge in the world of the Italian painter called Caravaggio.
https://www.johnkellyperformance.org
Daniel G. Hill was born in Providence, Rhode Island, USA in 1956. He has been exhibiting his work nationally and internationally for over 40 years. He has recently been in several group exhibitions in the US, the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, Turkey, France, Australia, and Mexico. Over the past thirteen years, he has curated and organized five exhibitions in Paris, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. Hill’s work is held in the collections of the Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst; Stichting EST art foundation; Metropolitan Museum of Art; MoMA Library Special Collection; NY Public Library; Phillips Collection; Cleveland Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, The Frances Mulhall Achilles Library; Yale University Art Gallery; US Department of State; and the Arkansas Art Center. He is the recipient of a fellowship in painting from the National Endowment for the Arts and has been awarded three year-long residencies at PS122 in New York City. He earned an AB from Brown University and an MFA from Hunter College, CUNY.
Luo Min, born in Sichuan, China, earned her MFA from the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Arts after graduating from Southwest Normal University. She currently lives and works in Beijing and New York. Luo’s practice explores poetic reflections on daily life, memory, and nature, and she has exhibited extensively in China and internationally. Her notable solo and two- person exhibitions include Echoes of Home · Elsewhere (Chengdu Art Academy, 2025), Diary of Plants (Changsha Art Museum, 2024), Dreams Beyond the Fences (Shanghai Gallery of Art, 2022), and The Surviving Poetry (Miguel Marcos Gallery, Barcelona, 2018). She has participated in major group exhibitions such as the Jinan International Biennale (2024, 2022), Chengdu Biennale (2023, 2021), After the Fog, First Flowers (Casa Vicens, Barcelona, 2023), New Brocade Ash Pile (Guangdong Museum of Art, 2021), and the 5th Suzhou Jinji Lake Biennale (2020). Her work bridges Eastern and Western perspectives through layered imagery and conceptual nuance.
Amy Myers (b. 1965, Austin, TX) is a New York City–based artist known for her large-scale, intricately detailed abstract drawings. She recently held her second solo exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles. Myers has exhibited at institutions such as Wayne State University, The Berkshire Museum, The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and internationally at Gallery Momo in Tokyo. Her work is held in major public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Pérez Art Museum (Miami), The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas), and the Laguna Art Museum (California). She has received numerous awards and residencies, including The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Award, Yaddo, The Elizabeth Foundation, Maison Dora Maar, and The American Academy in Rome. Myers’; work has been widely reviewed and featured in The New York Times, ARTFORUM, ARTnews, Art in America, Hyperallergic, and BOMB.
Kakyoung Lee is a Brooklyn-based artist with a background in printmaking. Her interdisciplinary practice centers on print, drawing, and time-based media to explore the invisible identities of Asian American and other marginalized communities. Lee has exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Queens Museum, MASS MoCA, Drawing Center, Kunsthalle Bremen, Seoul Arts Center, and ArtSpace C in Korea. She has participated in residencies such as Marie Walsh Sharpe, Yaddo, McDowell Colony, ISCP, Omi, and Brandywine Workshop. Her work has received awards and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, NYFA, and AHL Foundation. Lee’s work has been featured in Art in Paper, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, and Printeresting.com. Her prints and animations are held in public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Asia Society Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Jeju 4.3 Memorial in Jeju.
Loup Sarion (b. 1987) is a French sculptor whose work explores the boundaries between body and object, intimacy and abstraction. Drawing on personal narratives and historical materials, he transforms elements like beeswax, belts, and aluminum into tactile forms that engage architecture and memory. Often inspired by facial features, his fluid shapes and ambiguous symbols evoke themes of androgyny, desire, and the passage of time. Sarion studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Cooper Union in New York, where he now lives and works. His recent solo and duo exhibitions include Berthold Pott, Cologne; M+B, Los Angeles (with Daniel Boccato); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; Kunstverein Heppenheim, Germany; and Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels (with Al Freeman). Group shows include Mac Val Museum (France), Rubens Castle (Belgium), Biennale de Nice, Carl Kostyál (Sweden), Galleria Continua (France), and NOIRE gallery (Italy).
Dannielle Tegeder is an artist and professor at CUNY Lehman College whose work explores abstraction through systems and architecture. Over the past fifteen years, she has exhibited in more than 100 shows across the U.S. and internationally, including Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, and New York. Her work has been featured in major institutions such as PS1/MoMA, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, and MCA Chicago, and is held in the permanent collections of
MoMA, MCA Chicago, and The Weatherspoon Museum. Tegeder is also the co-founder of Hilma’s Ghost, a feminist artist collective focused on the legacy of women and nonbinary artists working in abstraction, mysticism, and the occult. Through exhibitions, collaborations, and workshops, such as tarot, spell-making, and experimental drawing, the group fosters inclusive spaces for metaphysical exploration. She has received numerous awards and residencies, including from the recipient of grants and residencies including The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Yaddo, Triangle Arts, ART OMI, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Shira Toren is an American visual artist originally from Tel Aviv Israel, now based in Brooklyn New York. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an Associate Degree in Art Therapy from The New School. She also studied painting and printmaking at The Art Students League. Toren is currently a resident artist at Painting Space122 Studio Project 2024/25 and will return to her studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn, afterward. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Museums and Galleries including Thierry Goldberg Gallery (NYC), NYU Gallery, Front Room Gallery (Hudson, NY), Craven Contemporary Gallery (Kent, CT), Bernay Fine Art (Great Barrington, MA), and Gallery Sitka (Newport, RI). She has also participated in The Flag Project at Rockefeller Center, and her artwork appeared in the TV Prime series Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
Curator Biography
Hyewon Yi is Assistant Professor of Art History at SUNY Old Westbury and Director and Curator of the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery and Art Lab, where she has mounted over sixty exhibitions of contemporary U.S. and international artists. She frequently writes about contemporary art and artists and has conducted interviews with artists from around the world. Career highlights include receiving the Fund for Korean Art Abroad (2021–2022) in support of the exhibition Sung Rok Choi: Great Chain of Being (February/March 2022) and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Professional Service in May 2022. Born in Seoul, Yi earned her M.A. in Art History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and her Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
About the Project Studio Program
The Project Studio Program offers one-year private studio rentals to professional fine artists residing in the New York City metropolitan area. Disciplines include painting, sculpture, mixed media, digital art, drawing, and installation. At the conclusion of the residency, a group exhibition featuring the Project Studio Artists is presented at PS122 Gallery.
https://ps122gallery.org/studio/
PS122 Gallery 150 1 st Avenue
New York, NY 10009