Within New Ground and Fragments Shimmer

Within New Ground and Fragments Shimmer

August 17 to September 21, 2025

Curated by Jesse Bandler Firestone, Curator & Community Affiliate

Artists:  Udi Cassirer, Jieun Cheon, Anna Cho, Faye Harnest, Jim Jennewein, Grace Larkin,  Cameron Meade, Rita Nannini, Edward Newcomb,  Layne Takahashi, Noah Tavlin, Camila Vale, and Martin Vuong 

New York, NY – Kunstraum is pleased to announce its 2025 Members’ Show, Within New Ground Fragments Shimmer featuring thirteen artists drawn from the studio’s Membership and Residency programs. Presented in two interrelated chapters— Within New Ground and Fragments Shimmer —the exhibition reveals the breadth of practices thriving within Kunstraum’s community. Working across photography, painting, mixed media, and installation, the artists probe questions of identity, play, grief, and memory. Despite their varied approaches, a connective thread emerges: visual fragmentation and depictions of landscapes serve as anchor points through which each artist gains initial footing. These two intertwined exhibitions reveal how visual fragmentation and the language of landscape become shared points of departure within Kunstraum’s community of artists—even as each practice charts a distinct course.

In Within New Ground, landscapes—literal, emotional, and political—serve as generative sites for meaning-making, memory, and personal reflection. The featured artists examine how environments, both natural and constructed, carry emotional, historical, and psychological weight. 

Some of the artists in the exhibition take a realistic approach to rendering landscapes to concretely document their surroundings and experiences, depict memories, or bring forward lesser-known histories that the land has witnessed.  Rita Nannini presents composite photographs made during a month-long residency in Sardinia, focusing on how we look at and interpret landscapes through fragmented horizontal and vertical compositions. For Nannini, seeing is already an act of editing. 

Martin Boa Vuong’s Sève du sud utilizes a highly illustrative and romanticized visual language to reflects on French colonialism in Vietnam by depicting rubber tree plantations littered with tires, symbolizing environmental and human exploitation within the natural environment. 

Conversely, abstraction and whimsy become tools to reimagine and stretch what a landscape is, exploring maps, wonder, and possibility.  Grace Larkin’s monotype prints offer a humanistic and anthropomorphic lens on nature, exploring limitless compassion between humans, plants, and animals. Anna Cho’s paintings draw inspiration from nature, everyday scenes and memories, filtered through imagination, to suggest the elusive, playful, and open-endedness of life. Cameron Meade's work uses floral motifs as stand-ins for his emotional terrain while reflecting a desire to embrace multiplicity and reject rigid definitions of identity.

In Fragments Shimmer, fragmentation is embraced as a dynamic visual and conceptual strategy—inviting viewers to reflect on the complex and layered nature of identity, history, and form. Artists here disassemble and reassemble materials, memories, and media to create new visual languages that invite viewers into mosaic-like structures—interconnected assemblages and mind maps. 

Camila Valle’s video reframes the everyday act of commuting into a deeply intimate space, where the NYC subway becomes a vessel for memory and connection. Fragments of voice messages from loved ones can be heard, overlapping scenes of solitude, dislocation, and longing felt by the artist. Layne Takahashi’s works draw on iconography rooted in both childhood and broader American culture to explore dualities such as childhood/adulthood and comfort/fear, ultimately charting a continually evolving perspective on these tensions. Ed Newcomb’s acrylic and glitter painting renders and reduces the formal structures of children’s playground into fragmented composition that speak to ideas of play and learning through color and form. Noah Tavlin explores geometry, gesture, and rhythm through found imagery and abstraction, negotiating tension and harmony across visual planes. 

Udi Cassirer’s layered works mimic digital glitches, overlaying transparency onto expressive brushwork to explore the boundary between analog and virtual processes. Jieun Cheon’s intricate maps, which defy rational structure, make visible the inherent instability of life and the fallacy of autocracy and singular understandings. Jim Jennewein’s paintings rely on fragmented and overlapping scenes of quintessentially “American” suburbs to speak to overlapping similarities and difference. Faye Harnest combines individual, brightly colored felt forms into soft, abstract compositions that meditate on grief, disability, mental health, and motherhood—holding space for yearning, possibility, repair, and change.  

Together, these exhibitions confront the viewer with unresolved questions and lingering tensions—about belonging, authorship, and the limits of perception. What constitutes a whole when identity is in pieces? What does a landscape hold that we cannot name? These works don’t aim to resolve such questions, but instead create space for reflection, confrontation, and transformation. In doing so, they challenge us not only to look but to linger—and perhaps, to see anew. 

Within New Ground and Fragments Shimmer, the two chapters of Kunstraum’s 2025 Members’ Show, will run consecutively from August 17 to September 21, 2025.

PART 1 – Within New Ground Members Show 

Exhibition Dates: August 17^th – August 31^st, 2025 

Opening Reception: Sunday, August 17^th, 4-6pm  

Closing with Curator's Tour: Sunday, August 31^st, 4-6PM  

PART 2 – Fragments Shimmer Members Show 

Exhibition Dates: September 7th – September 21st, 2025 

Opening Reception: Sunday, September 7th, 4-6pm 

Closing with Curator's Tour: Sunday, Sept 21st, 4-6pm 

Address: KUNSTRAUM, 20 Grand Street, Loft 509, Brooklyn, NY 

Visiting Hours: Thursday - Saturday, 12–6 PM, by appointment.  

Please email jesse@kunstraumll.com to schedule your visit. 

For press inquiries, images, or interview requests, contact:  

Jesse Bandler Firestone, Curator and Community Affiliate – jesse@kunstraumllc.com 

KUNSTRAUM LLC is a gallery, artist hub, and studio space located near the Brooklyn Navy 

Yard. Engaging artists, architects, curators, designers, filmmakers and writers, we are an 

interdisciplinary community that seeks to redefine the way creatives and curators collaborate. 

Image Credits:

Garland Quek

Cameron Meade, Externalizing My Internal Experience, 2025