"My work builds items and places containing stories, born from natural history and domestic modernity: what came before and the hope/fear of what might come. It conveys an unsettled familiarity—spaces and objects the viewer suspects are for everyday use, but for purposes that exist in an undiscovered time/space/context. These are artifacts of a culture not yet understood."

In Spatiality of Light, working on themes of solitude and light, Ioana Joa created a series of black-and-white drawings of fleeting encounters populated by protagonists of a familiar yet non-specific urbanity.

In this new body of work, Weixian Jiang alludes to nature’s power and magnificence in its plenitude of manifestations. For “Natural Effect”, Jiang transforms bronze into elemental shapes reminiscent of towering Chinese mountain landscapes, billowing deep-sea volcanic pyres, ghostly bonsai trees, and simple plants grasping up towards the sky. Using bronze casts of found antique planting pots as bases, this body of work calls into question the long tradition of Chinese decorum while transplanting the original appreciation for nature’s forms into a contemporary setting.

Marius Ritiu highlights in his work the importance, here, on Earth, of an “overview effect” approach (usually experienced by those traveling to space). Ritiu believes in an imperative need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this ”pale blue dot”, Earth. Cultural differences, religion, tribes, nations, race, these are all creative expressions and variations that should and could be celebrated, but instead they become symbols that are all too often used to create suffocating boundaries. By zooming out and reconsidering our position in the Universe we can learn to pay more attention to fields like science and art. As technology and information enable greater mobility of ideas, goods and people, the role of the physical border is shifting.

Sarah Fuhrman’s paintings circle around issues of ecology, observational play, and the study of human behavior.

Slag Gallery is pleased to present Reducing Distance, a two-person show of works by Colombian artist Margarita Sánchez Urdaneta and German artist Roger Kausch. This will be Urdaneta’s first exhibition at Slag Gallery, and Kausch’s first exhibition in the United States.

Marie Peter-Toltz is best known for her rich oil paintings reflecting fictional narratives of filial relationships, sexuality and extreme emotional states, offering viewers a direct connection to their own psychological complexity and history.

Avital Burg is best known for her dreamy still-lives and self-portraits. In these new paintings one can find a postcard of a Piero painting taped to a peeling brick wall, a broken gilded frame, a used paper coffee cup and a clay diorama of a Pompeii fresco. This seemingly random group of images in fact carries a sense of immediate and personal symbolism. They also hint at specific art history references and allusions to Burg’s past. In Low Relief, Burg meditates on the current moment through the passage of time, particularly on what it means to spend time making and looking at painting in today’s world.

Dov Talpaz is best known for his sense of meditative and romantic storytelling in his work. Delving deep into the complexities of human emotion, Breathing focuses on the connection between music and painting in their composition, energy, and broad spectrum of emotional narratives.

Klaudia Dietewich’s photographs capture the city’s subtle aesthetics of daily life’s relics -- abstracting human beings’ enigmatic and repetitive traces into an authentic beauty. Much like an archeologist, she searches for her subjects in urban and industrial spaces -- found objects that are nonrepresentational, but reflect the memories and narratives of life lived.