SUPERSYMMETRY

For Manas Ranjan, the ordering principle is time.

In Not that still a life of Jacob’s desk, the traditional still life becomes a problem of diachronic identity, asking what, if anything, remains continuous when the visible evidence of a life is constantly changing. Developed in dialogue with Marya Schechtman’s The Constitution of Selves and its philosophical inquiry into personal identity, the work records Jacob’s desk not at a single moment but through several weeks of accumulation, disappearance and rearrangement.

Ranjan compresses these temporal states into one image, setting color against black outline and asking the viewer to mentally transfer one state into another, much as the objects themselves migrate across the desk. Symmetry exists not simply between left and right but between different versions of Jacob: organized and disorganized, empty and cluttered, momentary and continuous. Rather than resolving these states into a definitive portrait, Ranjan uses time itself as the structure through which identity is assembled, turning the still life into a quiet metaphysical study of how a self persists through change.

For Precious Utobunwa, order becomes cosmology.

Exceptionally prolific and almost obsessive in the density of his making, Utobunwa approaches drawing less as depiction than as world-building. Given an unfamiliar large format and a doubled structure, his instinct was immediate. He made a universe.

In The Contrast, sky, earth, water, architecture, animals and human presence are woven into a single ordered field, reflecting a religious imagination in which nothing appears incidental and every element must find its place within a larger creation. This impulse toward totality coexists with relentless self-questioning. Utobunwa writes his doubts directly into the margins, noting what failed, what should change and what remains unresolved.

When he finally accepts the work as complete, he records the exact time down to the second. The result is an unusual collision between cosmological abundance and procedural precision, a world expansive enough to contain everything but disciplined by the artist’s need to account for every mark, every uncertainty and even the moment of completion.

For Brigitte Bentele, order is built from accumulated experience.

After a professional life teaching mathematics, Bentele spent the next twenty-five years developing an intensely observational watercolor practice, largely through landscape and plein-air painting. That long commitment to a traditional medium becomes the conceptual engine of Gothic Double.

Rather than separating her mature work from the studies, failures and unresolved paintings that preceded it, Bentele turns that archive back into material. One panel is painted directly from observation, while the other is reconstructed from fragments of earlier watercolors she had once judged unsuccessful. The gesture is deceptively radical. Decades of discarded labor are neither hidden nor sentimentalized; they are cut apart, reordered and given a new formal life. In Bentele’s hands, experience becomes both subject and medium, and the artist’s own history is literally reassembled into the present.

For Bella Romeo Civorelli, order emerges through an inquiry into vocation, artistic identity and the value of labor.

In Dharma, Civorelli moves beyond the category of painting without abandoning it, bringing coffee, watercolor, graphite and natural-dye cotton thread into a deliberately hybrid practice. Repetitive hand-stitching becomes more than technique. It tests how artistic identity is formed through sustained action rather than fixed labels.

The title Dharma frames this process as a question of vocation, an ongoing commitment enacted through work, while opening onto a broader social concern with how different forms of creative labor are classified, valued and made visible. Rather than resolving the distinction between painter, fiber artist and maker, Civorelli uses that instability productively and allows the work itself to define the terms of her practice.

For Kim White, order takes the form of synthesis across disciplines, media and radically different scales of memory.

White occupies an unusual position between literary and visual practice. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University and an MFA in Poetry from Hunter College, trained in studio art at the University of Michigan and the New York Academy of Art, and worked as an artisan in Jeff Koons’s studio.

Her writing and electronic literature projects have long examined what happens to narrative, identity and language as they move through technological systems and human-machine relationships. In The Dark Twin, this conceptual and digital intelligence is translated into an intensely handmade, materially dense image.

Conjoined figures occupy the threshold between two universes, surrounded by a tesseract-like architecture in which interior and exterior, separation and connection, self and counterpart become unstable. White layers the residual radiation of the Big Bang with the fossil pattern of Petoskey stone and, through it, a childhood memory of collecting those stones with her grandmother in Michigan. Cosmic time, geological time and autobiographical memory are compressed into a single surface.

That collision is central to the work. A technologically literate artist chooses the resistance of paint, ink, repetition and the hand to construct an image in which scientific knowledge, literary structure and intimate memory remain inseparable.

Brigitte Bentele
Bella Romeo Civorelli
Shawne Cooper
Dionisio Cortes Ortega
Zemfira Mazukabzova
Sohhee Oh
Manas Ranjan
Julie Schaffer
Precious Utobunwa
Kim White