MAIN GALLERY:
A Bag of Tricks
A Solo Exhibition by Samuel Alexander Forest
July 25th - Aug 16th

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 25, 6–8 pm Performance at 7 pm

Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG) is proud to present A Bag of Tricks, a solo exhibition by Samuel Alexander Forest in the main space, curated by OyG co-director Xingze Li.

The exhibition is activated by a series of in-the-round music performances by the artist on Saturday, July 25 at 7 pm, Saturday, August 1 at 2 pm, and Sunday, August 16 at 5 pm.

Across a dark empty stage, a rotating cast of performers step on and off the frame. A ringleader, a violinist, a magician, an aerialist, a jester, and a one-man band, each traced and described by the gleam of the spotlight, bare their life’s work. Walk down to the backstage and you’ll find their bags of tricks. Cases that held and safely transported tools for their acts now sit and await the end. The lights go out, the bags are packed. We leave behind the stage and the stripes of the tent that lured us in to peer. After the show is over, what is left?

A Bag of Tricks features graphite drawings in artist’s frames that represent performances on- and off-stage. Six drawings show solo performers standing in a spotlight, set in stepped wood frames that act as steps to the stage of the drawing surface. Other drawings depict performers’ bags of tricks, closed instrument cases and containers backstage that hold equipment for the show. Placed throughout are references to Alexander Forest’s idols: virtuosic musician, singer and composer Owen Pallett; the historic drag aerialist performer Barbette; Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ case of small tools they bring out to all their shows; and Mary Poppins’ magical carpet bag.

Two sculptures expand on the thematic and conceptual threads found in the drawings. Central to the show is an oversized briefcase, left closed and rendered in colored pencils and pastels with the same careful hand displayed in the drawings. This sculpture is activated in the performances, in which Alexander Forest opens it to reveal musical instruments housed within while transforming it into a stage to perform on. It’s Curtains (2025) is a kinetic miniature circus tent where the curtain opening reveals smaller rotating circus tents inside. Only when all the openings line up can one see through to the innermost, empty, circle.

Artist bio: 

Samuel Alexander Forest (b. 1998, Surabaya, Indonesia) maintains a primarily drawing-based practice. Through book, video and sculpture forms, his works place special attention on unsung objects and slip across moments of humor and poetry. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union in 2021 and his MFA from NYU Steinhardt in 2024. His works have been reviewed in Hyperallergic, IMPULSE, and the New York Review of Architecture among others. He lives and works in New York, NY and runs a publishing practice through his small press Figure Bound.
samuelalexanderforest.com/  @samuelalexanderforest

Curator bio: 
Xingze Li (b. Yan'an, China) is a visual artist and independent curator based in Brooklyn. Poised at the intersection of photography, painting, and sculpture, his work uses the portrayals of natural and artificial light effects to provoke the daily experience of the phenomenal world. He has had solo and two-person exhibitions in New York City at venues including Yi Gallery, Ortega y Gasset Projects, and Hunter East Harlem Gallery. Recent group exhibitions have taken place at the Bullet Space and the Gala Art Center. Notable awards include the visual artist fellowship at the Edward F. Albee Foundation (NY), artist-in-residence at the Marble House Project (VT), and 77ART Residency (VT). Li’s work has been reviewed in Whitehot Magazine, Two Coats of Paint, and featured in Evergreen Review. He has curated group shows in New York City at Accent Sisters and Tutu Gallery. Li joined OyG as a co-director in 2025.
www.xingzeli.com  @xing.ze

The Skirt:
HOLE FOLDS
A SOLO INSTALLATION by ANNA IALEGGIO
Curated by Annamariah Knox and Leeza Meksin
June 12th - August 16, 2026

Opening Reception Friday, June 12h, 2026, 6-8pm

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present HOLE FOLDS, a site-responsive  solo installation in The Skirt  by artist Anna Ialeggio, co-curated by Annamariah Knox and Leeza Meksin. The opening reception with the artist will take place  on  Friday June 12th, 6-8pm, and the exhibition will run  through August 16, 2026.

HOLE FOLDS is composed of mediated image sculptures, ceramic objects, and sound. It brings together pieces from three distinct series of work which take contrasting approaches to intimately related subjects and themes: exploration of the personal archive of Ursula K Le Guin (with permission from Le Guin’s estate); long-term involvement in sites of prairie and meadow rehabilitation; the aesthetics and politics of repair as a framework for art-making.

Vesper Meadow in Ashland, Oregon was over-grazed by cattle, clearcut, and drastically eroded along the banks of its streams for many years. Opportunist grass species, most of which were introduced in North America for, or as a direct result of, agricultural purposes, fill the meadows. These grasses (for example, cheatgrass - Bromus tectorum) form thick rhizomatic root mats through which native species have difficulty reaching to the soil below. Even when the grasses have been burned or smothered to begin anew, the root mats remain; other plants cannot thrive there without intervention. One restoration method involves cutting openings down through these dense grassbeds to plant plugs of native grasses. It is a small intervention in the face of a very large problem.

Ialeggio begins with photographs of these intervention sites—fields marked by holes puncturing the invasive growth, taken in a meadow in Oregon. Ialeggio uses an unorthodox combination of printing processes to transform the original image, ultimately fusing them onto fine silk as image-objects mounted on bleached-pine brackets. The series plays with the idea of resolution while maintaining a sense of extreme care, changing images that were once very clear into evanescent, drifting forms.

Other forms in the gallery drift and ground in turn. A ghostly sonic duet with a beloved, deceased author emerges from a monument made from clay-heavy soils. Transformed through heat into a speculative soil horizon, this ceramic monument is intended as its own cut tunnel, through which the viewer might descend down through the accumulated clutter. Perhaps something can grow down there.

HOLE FOLDS proposes a politics of repair that is both optimistic and ambiguous, evoking various idiosyncratic attempts to imagine, excavate, and rehabilitate intimate connection with fragile lands.
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Artist Bio: Born by the ocean and raised in the mountains, Anna Ialeggio is an educator and interdisciplinary artist living in Downeast Maine. Their work takes a winding path through sculpture, performance and image to consider our collectively fuzzy perception of change.  Ialeggio has recently supported by Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (2026), The Puffin Foundation (2022), Cornell Council on the Arts (2025), Stone Quarry Hill Art Park (2022), REDCAT Theater (2020), and the Ursula K Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship (2022).

While unsuccessful in their audition bid for a salaried role as a charismatic prehistoric quadruped at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, they nonetheless earned an MFA in Sculpture from the University of California, Irvine.  Ialeggio serves as Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME) and works from afar with The Soil Factory, a communitarian art & sustainability project in Ithaca NY.  They feel most alive in their practice when they are working on multiple registers, in multiple modalities, at various levels of formality, and on at least several boats.

Curator Bios:
Annamariah Knox (b. New York City, NY), is an interdisciplinary artist working across textiles, soft sculpture, movement, and video. Her current work integrates videos of body gestures with fabric sculptures to explore the connection to one’s spirit, as it is accessed through the physical body. She received a B.A. in Art History and Theater from Bowdoin College, and a Masters in Fine Art from Cornell University. Recent exhibitions have been at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY, and at the Soil Factory, in Ithaca, NY. Her show at Ortega y Gasset Projects was listed as a Must See in Artforum. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Soil Factory, Anderson Ranch, and Arrowmont School of Craft. She is currently based in New York City. 

Leeza Meksin is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the gendered conventions of architecture, fashion, and the body through the overlap of painting, sculpture, and installation. Her site-specific works, including projects with the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, National Academy of Design, BRIC Media and UMOCA, deploy fabric as “architectural drag,” temporary, gender-shifting outfits for buildings. This interest in surface and public space derives from a multi-generational family experience of migration, immigration, diaspora, and assimilation.  Meksin’s work has been featured in Bomb Magazine, Hyperallergic, Cultured Magazine and the New York Times. In addition to her studio practice, collaboration and curation are central to her creative commitments. In 2013 she co-founded Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery in Brooklyn, NYC, which seeks to advance nonconforming expressions of art as a counterpoint to the industrializing effects of commercialism on cultural production. In 2026 Meksin received the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.

Support the Future of OyG Projects with a Monthly Gift

Dear OyG Community,

Like many artist-run spaces, OyG Projects is navigating a challenging financial year. Since COVID, we've worked tirelessly to keep our doors open — drawing down our emergency reserves and steadily repaying an SBA loan that helped sustain us during the most uncertain times. While we’ve been fortunate to receive support in the past from grant makers, including the NEA, those sources are increasingly unpredictable in today’s rapidly shifting funding landscape.

Because of these challenges, we are currently faced with a $25,000 deficit for 2026. We must raise these funds in order to complete this year's programming, and to begin planning for our near future.

We are asking you to help sustain it

The most impactful way you can contribute is by becoming a monthly donor with a recurring gift of $5, $10, $25 or more a month.

We hope you will help us meet a tangible short-term goal:
75 monthly donors by the end of Summer. 

We are reaching out at an important moment for OyG Projects to ask for your support. We did not receive a major recurring grant this year and are working to fill a significant gap in our budget as we work to sustain programming and grow to support artists.

Your donations help OyG Projects remain sustainable amid increasingly limited grant funding. Your consistent commitment and support help us develop effective budgets, and help to stabilize our finances in between grant periods.

If you choose to donate $10, $25, $50, $100 per month or more we will provide you with free applications to our annual solo show open call and our annual curatorial open call. We will also offer occasional discounts for future events.

• A $10 per month donation helps support printing of exhibition materials for each show.

• A $25 per month donation helps support an exhibition's photographic documentation.

• A $50 per month donation helps support the installation and shipping for one exhibition.

• A $100 per month donation helps support gallery assistants who keep the gallery open.

We are so grateful for your support, and hope you will help us continue to provide the programming and opportunities that support artists and bring our community together.

OyG Projects is a 501c(3) nonprofit and your donation is tax deductible. Thank you for 13 years of OyGoodness!

OyG Projects 

Clare Britt
Eric Hibit
Annamariah Knox
Xingze Li
Leeza Meksin
Nickola Pottinger
Adam Liam Rose
Zahar Vaks
Lauren Whearty