The School of Visual Arts and ArtCake are pleased to present the MFA Art Practice 2026 Thesis exhibition “Finding Here” with artwork by Niki Brisnovali-Grillakis, Anna Gordy, Julie Jablonski, Meghan E. Jones, Em Koch, Artemis Lyu, Richard Montañez, Sarah Parker, and Talia Steinman.

This close-knit group of artists connects through questions around belonging, memory, “placefulness,” migration, de- and re-construction, endurance, and liberatory joy. Visit their group exhibition to experience a wide range of mixed-media work that grapples with seeking resolution, informed by interdisciplinary research.

What will you find? A reimagined Garden of Eden that you can enter and play inside of; a surreal, narrative landscape paintings with embedded residue from New Orleans; costumes for an absurdist bird opera about the housing crisis; wind-activated drawings paired with Wile E. Coyote and abstracted rock formations; an installation of suspended coils that echo iron fences from Greece and beyond; large-format “photo paintings,” printed on the back of photo paper, then further manipulated; delicate yet substantial illuminated barnacle sculptures and video that explores underwater cave diving; redactive poetry on the New York Post and an inflatable Hulk toy in a Dorothy Gale costume; and 2D, 3D, and video collage that reinterprets Judaica through details of NYC sidewalks.

This group of artists channel tenderness in feeling unsettled towards playful processes. They use pre-existing objects, reference imagery and symbols, and cultural and political narratives as source material to transform, subvert, or even create new speculative worlds through. The question becomes: is it even possible to clearly see where and who we are—and if it is, what could bring us there, both as individuals and as a collective?

Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, July 10, 6:00–9:00pm at ArtCake, 214 40th St, Brooklyn, NY. There will be a closing reception on Thursday, July 23, 6:00–9:00pm. The show will be open to the public 12pm-5pm on Saturday July 18th and other times by appointment. Please contact Sarah Parker at 575.770.0424.

ARTIST BIOS

Niki Brisnovali-Grillakis (b. 1999, New York, NY) is a Greek-American artist based in New York. Her work explores the dynamic interplay of identity, belonging, and memory. Drawing inspiration from architectural elements, such as the ironwork of her childhood home in Greece, she creates unique patterns that blend the old with the new. Using materials such as aluminum foil covered with plaster gauze, she constructs installations that connect her personal memories and history to a broader collective experience.

Anna Gordy (b. 1976, Macon, GA) is a San Antonio and New York City-based artist and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America pastor. She is a true interdisciplinary artist who works across many types of media, but her first loves and current focuses are ceramics and fiber. Anna’s work addresses trauma and healing through expressed themes of hope, safety, and belonging, with particular attention to bodily autonomy, civil/social protest, and the pursuit of joy.

Julie Jablonski is a Colorado-based interdisciplinary artist with a formal background in painting and drawing. Indulging in experimentation, Jablonski merges 2D, 3D and digital art making, blending traditional and unorthodox methods resulting in exploratory amalgamations of sculpture, photography, collage, and nontraditional mark-making. Drawing from her background in psychology and a life spent amid the red rock formation of the American West, Jablonski explores place and human experience through the geological idea of pressure over time.

Emily (Em) Koch (b. 1998) is a painter and mixed media artist who creates layered landscapes that unfold as surreal terrains. Koch’s practice begins outside the studio, with collecting and studying the residues of her urban landscape in New Orleans, Louisiana. Everyday motifs like ironwork, symbolism, and insect ecology then start to inform the work, asking how meaning and narrative emerge within a fragmented space. Using canvas and found surfaces, gesture and illustrative rendering, her paintings allow moments of the mark-making process and the materiality itself to shape the composition. Meghan E Jones (b. 1979) draws on her photojournalist background to destabilize the traditional photograph, developing it as a material that behaves like memory. From printing photographs on the back of photo paper where heavily saturated colors drip off the surface, to stapling 3D photo sculptures that crawl up telephone poles, each piece becomes less a document and more an abstract emotional record. Combining photography, sculpture, and painting, Jones’ work critiques how photographic memory is a terrible archivist and instead moves fluidly between shared experiences. Fan Lyu (b.1993) is a Chinese interdisciplinary artist based in New York. By incorporating the extreme experience of cave diving into her artistic practice, she focuses on how people move and survive within unfamiliar, unstable, and often invisible systems. Her practice spans installation, painting, video, and other media. Lines and light flow through her works, becoming recurring visual structures in her practice. She uses delicate and fragile materials to create installations, using them as metaphors for the vulnerability of desire as something always displaced. Richard Montañez (b. 1998) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice primarily operates through methods of subversion, redaction, and culture jamming. He excavates various forms of media, making space for the emergence of his own voice from beneath the coded languages and symbols of propaganda, pop-culture, and art history.

Sarah Parker (b. 1975, Shawnee, Oklahoma) is a multi-disciplinary artist living off-grid in Northern New Mexico. She examines our survival in this modern world by playing with the absurd and dressing up as birds using costumes that she creates. Her work tackles issues like the housing crisis with community-based projects, animating oral histories, and performance.

Talia Steinman (b. 1992) is an anti-Zionist, Ashkenazi artist making collage in New York City from a Jewish Diasporist perspective. She invokes Jewish frameworks through playful ambiguity, iterative layering, obsessive collecting, and transforming old and new together. Between digital and physical formats, she actively abstracts and combines details that range from urban fragments to Judaic objects and symbols. Her works span assemblage, photography, Riso printing, painting, video, bookmaking, and more, and she often makes digital collages on-the-go with her phone.

We enter the room Stage Left, like a play within a dream, where the spectators are every version of yourself, even the ones you have not yet lived. We cannot see their faces, just silhouettes in different shaped hats.

Hovering above it all is also You. You are the puppeteer, the marionette, and every character in this production. To borrow a phrase from artist Austin Li Chang, the eye of the storm is sap green.

Life unfolds, like a sweeping narrative, an exquisite corpse, a story that began long before you got here, and one that continues to build on itself, and its own self-important purpose. The story of You, and then Us.

On the walls of this Room, there are images, made by the people in this play.

Three separate versions of the self in the form of three different artists; Austin Li Chang, David Fix Jr., and Erica Newton. A type of Plato’s cave, they are paintings, yes, but in other ways they are projections of the past and future, shadows, dancing light, and the unbearable present. An otherworldly plane to get lost in, an epic to tell.

Although these paintings appear at first glance as undisturbed, languid scenes of everyday life, they draw the contours of something deeper, more ubiquitous. In these seemingly muted worlds, where the intimate and the universal converge, the nostalgic textures imbue the work with the strangeness of an alternate reality, one simultaneously existing with the now.

Through the ostensible stillness and guilelessness of their lifescapes, carved and built textures and portraiture, these artists achieve what only a few can: they create a tension that engages the viewer in the dangerous and necessary feeling of desire created by a fragile equilibrium of absence and presence.

Each painting alludes to what is not there, to what lies outside of the canvas, or the obscured face, the viewer builds their own narrative, and inevitably draws from their own intimate experiences to fill the gaps. It forces us to delve into a more personal recollection of memories that make us reflect on who we are, as individuals and in tandem with the rest of humanity.

For example, in a series where he paints his late grandfather from photographs taken on a trip through Canada, Austin Li Chang invites us to discover an intimate portrait of the man, and although his figure seems more nebulous in the smaller paintings, his presence is strikingly magnetic. This touching portrayal reaches its final articulation through a bolder, more cutting portrayal of an old man, as one of the artist’s final visions of his grandfather.

Erica Newton’s work touches on similar themes of longing and nostalgia and a connection to self through presence. In her signature medium of oil on plaster, she creates works with both weight and weightlessness, grit and textural depth, as well as the smoothness of water running over a rock.

David Fix Jr., a painter and self-identified outsider artist living and working on his family’s ancestral fruit farm in Upstate New York, is also using his grandfather’s old photographs as source material, but rather than trying to fully articulate these figures, he removes their faces, reducing them to texture and color, via a technique all his own, working in epoxy clay applied like a pinch-pot to wood panel.

The candidness of these works is far from naïve. Instead, it reveals a rare honesty and a remarkable sensitivity to the nostalgia and beauty woven into experience and memory. Their poignancy stems from their evocation of what lies at the heart of the human experience: the transient beauty of the present moment. The ability to begin anew at every second, and continue to write your own story. This is Act 1, Scene 1. Now,as always, is the beginning of the rest of your life

Nicholas Gerson: 𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝘾𝙪𝙩 𝘿𝙤𝙬𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙈𝙖𝙜𝙣𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙖

Art Cake, 2nd Floor #10

February 13-25, 2026 Opening Reception: February 13, 6-8PM

Hours: Sunday through Tuesday 12-6PM and by appointment: 202 368-1617

The exhibition takes its title from a southern magnolia that grew in the yard of the artist’s childhood home. The expression “what cut down the magnolia” spawns from the death of that tree and the deaths of Gerson’s grandmother and father. The paintings are a longing to return, a hope that time is cyclical.

This is the general mental state the artist has worked in the past decade. Trusting paint to carve meaning from fragments of memory, speculations, paranoias, dreams, and sadnesses. The artist uses paint as a medium to process singular moments rooted in emotional experience.

“The Bold Arrow of Time,” one of the earliest works in the show, prods at the slippage between restrained and unrestrained, formed and formless, past and present, the linearity of the conscious realm and the unconscious as timeless as death.

“City Scene” and “Park Scene” rely on sketches by Gerson’s grandmother, Betty, the first painter the artist knew. These paintings stand in opposition to the passage and interference of time.

Silhouettes of figures occupy many of Gerson’s paintings symbolizing absence and loss. Celestial bodies stand as constants amongst change. The act of painting affirms life.

Origami Hermit Crab: Order to Labyrinth: Jieun Cheon

Curated by Sooa Lim Feb 3-8, 2026 Closing reception Friday, Feb 6, 2026, 6PM-8PM ArtCake 2nd FL, studio 10 (214 40th St, Brooklyn, NY 11232)

Jieun Cheon’s solo exhibition, Origami Hermit Crab: Order to Labyrinth, is an immersive installation that invites visitors to move through an unfamiliar terrain where perception, scale, and orientation continually shift. As viewers navigate the space, they encounter a landscape that appears navigable yet resists clear direction, unfolding as a site of disorientation, pause, and imaginative projection.

In the exhibition, the artwork Origami Hermit Crab visualizes the myth of a giant hermit crab as a topography situated within the invisible realm between the world and individual perception, forming part of Cheon’s fictional universe, Uncanished Workld (uncanny world + unfinished work). The series reinterprets elements of the ancient Aspidochelone myth through their combination with fractal theory, expressing the complexity and sense of awe Cheon experienced while tracing the accumulated time and entangled traces encountered in historically, religiously, and culturally layered sites.

Drawing on fractal theory, which uncovers order within nature’s chaos, Cheon used the folded lines on repeatedly folded and unfolded paper as a structural framework. Architectural and natural elements from the places she visited were layered onto this framework, creating anti-fractal labyrinth patterns that appear to have an exit yet ultimately lead to disorientation. These patterns were transferred onto silk, symbolizing the shell of the giant hermit crab island, while the pen-drawn lines map the terrain of the fictional hermit crab island (The Anti-Fractal Map). Two rainbow quartz pieces at the center, the artworks titled Demagnified z-axis, represent the crab’s body and eyes, while simultaneously offering a unique visual perspective between the two dimensions of the world and individual perception.

As visitors navigate the intricate terrain of the installation, they explore the shifting boundaries between perception and imagination. Origami Hermit Crab: Order to Labyrinth offers an experiential environment in which an apparent order gradually unfolds into a labyrinthine condition, inviting visitors to move through the space and expand their own ways of seeing and sensing.

In Studio 10

Presented by Thomas Park Gallery

The Low Land: A SOLO EXHIBITION BY BYOUNG CHO ian architect's objects, sketches, and conceptual models

•Concrete Box House •Earth House •Tilt Roof House •Meditation House •Jipyoung Guesthouse •Jichuk-dong House •Village of Dancing Fish •Southcape Linear Suite Hotel •Park Taejoon Memorial& Imrang Culture Park •Ayu Space •SK Saemangeum Project : Seed •Gangneung Project: Ecological Recovery •Lee Oisoo Exhibtion Hall

*A great country is like low land. -Tao Te Ching 61

Thomas Park = New York | Seoul 4F, 199 ITAEWON-RO, SEOUL, 04349 thomaspark.site info.thomaspark@gmail.com @thomasparknewyork

Thomas sat down and looked at the sea. remained motionless for time, as if he had some there to follow the movements of the other swimmers. Then a powervul wave reached him, he went down onto the sloping sand and slipped among the currents. the sea was calm, and Thomas was in the habit of swimming for long periods without tiring. . .

4F, 199 ITAEWON-RO, SEOUL, 04349 thomaspark.site info.thomaspark@gmail.com