Hollow Body
Kate Stone
Curated by Clare Britt
BARELY FAIR
23 APR - 11 MAY
CHICAGO, IL
VISITING HOURS
23 – 27 APR, 11 AM – 4 PM
3 – 4 MAY, 12 – 5 PM
10 – 11 MAY, 12 – 5 PM

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to participate in BARELY FAIR 2025, presenting Hollow Body, an installation by Kate Stone. Stone works across installation, sculpture and animation to imagine the ways that our minds and bodies are reflected in the spaces we occupy. She sees architecture as a recording device - a structure for the accumulation of history, a repository for the things we leave behind and an extension of ourselves. Her work draws from American suburbia - its aesthetics as well as its cultural role as a site for ambient dread and anxiety. Her work explores the cognitive dissonance that occurs when we consume the horrors of the external world from the (dis)comfort of our living room sofas. Her sculptures employ carpet, found furniture and other household materials to imagine a process in which domestic space absorbs so much residue of life that it is animated into a living organism. Drawing inspiration from science, mythology, human anatomy and horror tropes, Stone builds worlds that exist between interior and exterior, reality and superstition, architecture and the body. They are psychological spaces in the midst of transformation, being overtaken by supernatural forces that represent the anxiety that world events bring into our personal lives and private spaces.

Artist Bio

Kate Stone is a Brooklyn-based artist working across installation, sculpture and animation. Stone received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Parsons the New School for Design. She has been awarded the Tierney Fellowship, The Lotos Foundation Prize, an FST StudioProjects Grant and a Kone Foundation Grant. She has attended residencies at NARS Foundation, Artists Alliance LES Studio Program, Kone Foundation, MASS MoCA and Mudhouse Residency. Her work has been exhibited at 601Artspace, Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, Dinner Gallery, FiveMyles, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Practice Gallery, Spring Break Art Show, South Bend Museum of Art, Transmitter Gallery and Union Hall Denver among others.

Curator Bio

Clare Britt (she/her) joined OyG Projects in 2013 as a founding co-director. She curated the first solo exhibition of photographic work with Chicago artist Kelly Kaczynski Yes; Or As If. She co curated the group exhibition Code Switch with co-director Lauren Whearty, curated the group show Shadow of the Gradient, and co curated the exhibition entitled Apparitions with artist Alicia Smith and co-director Eleanna Anagnos. Clare has been instrumental in creating virtual content for the gallery including starting the YouTube Channel and creating content for the virtual space.  She spearheaded Rendezvous, an interactive virtual experience that serves as a platform for creative exchange between artists with co-director Tiffany Smith. Clare interviews artists in the Flat File Program in a casual studio visit on Friday’s on OyG’s Instagram Live channel. Clare is a freelance photographer and lives in Chicago, IL and works all over the country creating art and NFTs and telling stories of the people she encounters along the way.

Even the Phrase Each Other
May 10 – May 31, 2025
Group exhibition featuring Cornell MFA artists: Adrian Aguilera, Elina Ansary, Andy Nicholas Li, Hyunjin Park, and Sopheak Sam

Opening Reception: May 10, 2025, 6-8pm (VIP Preview, 5-6 pm)
Performance by Andy Nicholas Li at 7pm

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, /even the phrase each other/
Doesn't make any sense.
–Jalaladdin Rumi
Interpreted by Coleman Barks, 1995

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Even the Phrase Each Other, a group exhibition in the main gallery by artists from the Cornell MFA in Creative Visual Arts program. The VIP preview is on Saturday, May 10, 5-6pm. The opening reception is open to the public from 6-8pm. There is a live performance by Andy Nicholas Li at 7pm. The exhibition is on view through Saturday, May 31, 2025. 

Examining intersecting themes of death, consciousness, destruction, and desire, these five artists  draw on the cultural contexts that shape them. Working across interdisciplinary boundaries, their practices span painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Adrian Aguilera, born in Monterrey, Mexico, researches the intrinsic essence that resides in objects, often through dissection or corruption of common phrases. Andy Nicholas Li, a Cantonese-Midwestern artist from Chicago, conjures contradictions of identity and intimacy to uncover the queer and sticky construction of a person. Hyunjin Park is a Korean interdisciplinary whose work examines how the affective power of non-human beings unsettles the boundary between the modern and the pre-modern. Elina Ansary combines auspicious materials with painted images to build cohesive wholes out of contradictory parts, reflecting the discomfort and wonder of her experience as a Jewish-Muslim-Afghan-American. Sopheak Sam pieces together fragmentary memories of war, tracing the afterlives and afterimages of Cambodian refugees to remap the intersection of Buddhist, queer, and diasporic subjectivities.

Even The Phrase Each Other is itself a fragmented phrase. The ‘translator,’ Coleman Barks, does not speak Farsi. This remnant of ancient poetry was translated and retranslated through a global game of telephone. In a similar way, these five artists, whose lineages spring from opposite corners of the earth, have found themselves flung together, by chance and synchronicity, at Cornell University’s MFA program. Together these five artists reach across borders, of geography and artistic discipline, to create a new collective intimacy.

Artist Bios

Adrian Aguilera was born in Mexico's industrial capital of Monterrey. Aguilera immigrated as a young adult to the U.S. where he settled in Austin, Texas in early 2010's. He received his BFA (2004) from The Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, and an MFA in Creative Visual Arts at Cornell (2025). Working with a variety of mediums that include sculpture, text-based work, print media, video, public art, and installations; he researches the intrinsic essence that resides in objects. With an interest in scientific observation, cultural history, and social issues, Aguilera's work aboard our relationship with the physical and cultural spaces in which we inhabit. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally at Artpace San Antonio, Johnson Museum, The State Silk Museum, Philbrook Museum, The Contemporary Austin, Fusebox Festival, Blanton Museum of Art, The George Washington Carver Museum, Alfred University and the Museum of Human Achievement. His work has been featured in a variety of publications, including ARTFORUM, Frieze, NYT, Vogue, and Glasstire.

Elina Ansary was born and raised in San Francisco. Working primarily in painting and sculpture, her work explores time, consciousness, and perception through the narrative lens of her hybrid heritage. Ansary earned her BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in 2013, and completed the Scenic Painting Professional Apprenticeship at the Juilliard School in 2017. Ansary was an artist-in-residence at BigCi (Australia, 2017), Chautauqua Institution (USA, 2021), La Macina di San Cresci (Italy, 2022), and RaumArs (Finland, 2023). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Holter Museum (USA, 2024) UC Berkeley’s Worth Ryder Gallery (USA, 2023), and the Rauma Art Museum (Finland, 2023). She’s based in Brooklyn, where she is the cofounder of a DIY art space called Peach Pit Gallery.

Andy Nicholas Li is an artist based in Chicago, IL and Ithaca, NY. Andy's work has appeared at Co-Prosperity, Hyde Park Art Center, ACRE Projects (Chicago), The Soil Factory (Ithaca), Midsumma Festival (Melbourne, Australia), and Granoff Center for the Creative Arts (Providence, RI), with collaborative projects at AS220 (Providence), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Singapore Art Book Fair. Andy has spent time at residencies and workshops at Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL), ACRE (Steuben, WI), Hyde Park Art Center, Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, MI), GnarWare (Chicago), and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Andy’s work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and A-B Projects (Portland, OR).

Hyunjin Park is a Korean interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in New York and Seoul, working across sculpture, installation, performance, and video. Raised in one of the world’s most fast-paced societies, she investigates how technology-driven capitalism reshapes traditions and reinforces boundaries between the old and new, human and non-human, and life and death. Park participated in residency programs at Domaine de Boisbuchet, Lessac, France (2024, sponsored by the Youngmin International Art Program), Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT (2024, fellowship), and Wassaic Project (2025), Wassaic, NY.

Sopheak Sam was born in the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in Thailand after their family fled the Khmer Rouge genocide. Sam’s work has been exhibited at Kalm Village (Chiang Mai, Thailand), FT Gallery (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), the Minnesota Museum of American Art (St. Paul, MN), Denison Museum (Granville, OH), the Grace and Clark Fyfe Gallery (Glasgow, UK), and they have collaborated on projects with Boston CyberArts and Distillery Gallery (Boston, MA). They were a 2022 Fulbright Scholar in Thailand, and have held residencies at SLOWSPACE Studio (Phnom Penh, Cambodia) and the Chautauqua School of Art (Chautauqua, NY). Sam grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, and is a naturalized American citizen of ethnic Khmer descent.

Walls Wearing Worlds, a full color catalog is co-published by OyG Projects and Space Sisters Press with a curatorial essay by Eric Hibit and an interview with Jodi Hays and Leeza Meksin. Link to preorder.