2026-05-15 06:07:33
Milan-based Filipina designer Mirei Monticelli creates biomorphic lighting fixtures that toe the line between sculpture and utility. Undulating outward and glowing from within, the artist’s works feel as if they are alive, quietly dancing wherever they stand or hang.
These gestural, biodegradable structures are crafted with hand-woven Banaca fabric made from Abacá, a fiber that grows abundantly in Monticelli’s native Philippines. The artist’s studio works directly with a community of weavers in the Bicol province at the southeastern end of Luzon, sharing with Colossal, “We’ve developed the material together over time, so it’s not just sourcing, but a relationship.”
The laborious act of harvesting Abacá fiber has long been communal. From gathering the wild plant’s towering stalks and stripping them layer by layer to sun-drying bundles of knotted thread and hand-weaving the strands into functional textiles, the necessity of human connection has always been part of the process.
The term Banaca—coined by Monticelli—combines modern elements of design with a heritage technique that has been passed down for centuries. Monticelli’s contemporary subversion of a material so deeply engrained within Philippine culture further emphasizes the works’ metamorphic and dynamic presence. “Human rhythm is what gives the material its character, and it’s also why every piece feels alive when it’s lit,” says the artist.
Monticelli’s practice also incoporates techniques that echo garment construction and fashion. The artist shared that many of her methods are also learned from her mother, a fashion designer. Draping, volume-building, and creating shape are present in Monticelli’s lamps, underscoring a bodily essence within their surging forms.
Last month, the artist unveiled an installation titled “Pleasure Garden” at Milan Design Week, and often collaborates with interior designers, hospitality partners, and architectural studios to create immersive spaces. Find more from Monticelli on Instagram.
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2026-05-15 00:07:20
Joy Machine is pleased to present Feel Free, a group exhibition featuring new works by Rachel Hayden, Paulina Ho, Hanna Lee Joshi, and Jeremy Miranda. The opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. on May 15, 2026.
Attempting to create order and find clarity amid chaos is human instinct. Since time immemorial, we’ve endeavored to make sense of a world in which reason and certainty are never assured. Change, as the saying goes, is the only constant, which means notions of autonomy or control are a subjective fantasy rather than a concrete reality. In Feel Free, we witness four artists grappling with this enduring paradox. Each surrenders to the inevitability of change and focuses on the small instances of understanding that, for a brief moment, allow us to believe we’re closer to figuring it out.
Hayden is known for her uncanny compositions that infuse flowers, plants, and insects with human emotion, often those that are unsightly or difficult to voice. She’s described her work as a way “to take control” amid situations that are so often out of our hands. For this exhibition, Hayden subsumes fruit and figures with the checkerboard pattern of a picnic blanket, utilizing color to make one indistinguishable from the other. As ants crawl along a character’s face in the shape of perfectly arched brows, the artist gestures toward the brief intervals when disparate components align, creating an uncanny harmony.
Blending gouache and colored pencil into textured gradients, Joshi similarly reflects inarticulable experiences through her signature nude figures. In the bold “Held like a flower,” the artist presents an anonymous woman with a mass of black hair as she peers down at a single flower. The thin vines mimic the gestural qualities of her fingers, suggesting an affinity between the two.
Typically working in controlled acrylic on canvas, Ho shifts to textiles sourced from a thrift shop, rendering soft landscapes with Japanese indigo. This new direction emerged from an artist residency in Joseph, Oregon, following a trip to Andalusia, where she found inspiration in the cream-and-blue Moorish architecture. Frayed edges and bold gradients capture both movement and evolution, invoking a sense of the undone and the cyclical processes that often pattern our lives.
Miranda, too, captures singular moments of impermanence. There’s a stock pot atop a roaring flame, a bundle of plump white asparagus bound by bands, and an antique ceramic sink unadorned by backsplash or countertop. To create his painterly compositions, Miranda incorporates a wet-sanding process that reveals how “the painting has lived.” Acknowledging that his own desires are not the sole factors in an artwork’s creation, he surrenders to the slippery qualities of memory and paint itself.
Feel Free is on view from May 15 to June 27, 2026. RSVP.
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2026-05-14 21:42:52
Faig Ahmed is known for his vibrant textile sculptures that take traditional Azerbaijani ornamental carpets as starting point, often appearing to melt, pool, or glitch. In his current solo presentation at the 61st Venice Biennale, where he is representing Azerbaijan, the Baku-based artist branches out into more conceptual territory, exploring science, alchemy, spirituality, and perceptions of self in a sprawling, maze-like installation called The Attention.
Curated by Gwendolyn Collaço, the exhibition expands upon Ahmed’s interest in the dialectic between digital processes and time-honored, hand-crafted techniques. The artist considers how advanced scientific inquiry, such as quantum physics and neuroscience, relates to how we “articulate cosmologies of belonging,” says a statement.
Ornamental carpets continue as a through-line in The Attention, undulating, scrunching, distending, and balling up through a series of rooms. They even extend outdoors, creating a kind of continuous runner that spills out of doorways and stretches into long lines of color.
“Ahmed bridges the 15th-century Hurufi mystic tradition—which viewed the universe as a coded text—with modern information theory,” says a statement. “By channeling the ‘human energy’ of the weave, he uses this ancient textile paradigm to address our era’s information overload and collective grief.”
Ahmed taps into a theoretical framework coined by physicist John Wheeler that can be summed up, rather enigmatically, as “it from bit.” It’s a short way of describing an approach to information theory that string theorists and quantum mechanics researchers have tested. In other words, “…every it—every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits.”
In The Attention, the binaries of “it from bit” are not only present in the way digital methods and the physical labor of the loom converge but also in Ahmed’s interests.
“I have always been drawn to exploring consciousness for as far back as I can remember,” he says in a statement, continuing:
This search has guided my attention in two directions: on one hand, toward science—biology, physics, and mathematics—and on the other, toward spirituality, art, poetry, and creative expression. At first glance, these fields appear opposite, even contradictory. One form of knowledge is directed out-ward, toward what can be measured, calculated, observed, and verified. The other turns inward, toward the subjective, the unprovable, and the inexpressible. It is an experience that cannot be confirmed or fully shared with another, just as it is impossible to truly know what it feels like to be someone else.
Merging 15th-century Hurufi mysticism with science, digital interfaces with the analog, and introspective personal experiences with objective data, Ahmed’s carpets guide visitors through the immersive space. The largest one, a monumental machine-woven piece, is titled “I Can Contain Both Worlds But I Do Not Fit Into This One.” It forms what the artist describes as a “breathing body” that climbs the architecture, knots itself, collapses, and spills. “Ancestors,” a faintly anthropomorphic wall piece that glows psychedelically in black light is woven by hand. And a work called “Entropy Altar” uses a quantum random number generator to translate visitor presence into an evolving language.
The Attention remains on view through November 22 at Campo della Tana, Castello 2124/A–2125, Venice. See more on Ahmed’s Instagram and Vimeo.
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2026-05-14 04:22:16
Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris is perhaps one of the world’s most famous burial grounds, home to luminaries like authors Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust, musicians and composers like Frédéric Chopin, Édith Piaf, and even The Doors’ Jim Morrison, among many others. Its family tombs and sculptural headstones are iconic, and when artist Marina Kappos spent time wandering through Père Lachaise during a stay in the city last year, she was intrigued by the sculptures of grieving women she encountered. “They seemed to hold a power in their sadness, but also great beauty and remembrance as they stood guard over many of the tombs,” the artist says.
In Piercing the Veil at SHRINE, Kappos’ solo exhibition that opens this week, the artist delves into the nature of loss and memory. “Grief is a somber subject and multi-layered; it feels fitting for the time we’re living in, but I also saw hope and life bursting through,” she says. Few instances highlight the duality of life and death so well as the context of a cemetery, and that’s where the artist homed in on her interest in relationships between presence and absence, the terrestrial and the spiritual, and impermanence and decay.
Piercing the Veil features Kappos’ signature aura-like acrylic paintings on wood panels in which thin layers of pigment create a kind of gauzily psychedelic, prismatic effect. Consciousness is at the root of her works, reflected in the title of the show, which references the idea of awakening—of achieving some kind of enhanced comprehension or level of perception within one’s world. “These paintings depict that threshold,” Kappos says, “moving from one realm to another.”
Hazy landscapes unfold in the distance of some works, and keyhole shapes emerge almost Magic Eye-like in the center of several others. These focal portals unlock something, the artist says, “perhaps our own beliefs and the haze of the unknown, or they can act like doorways to another time or place.” And the figure of the widow, influenced by the gravestones, is present in elegant facial profiles and hands. Kappos likens her to someone who has not only been left behind but may be a spectre herself—one that “has power, magic, strength, and can potentially straddle two worlds.”
Piercing the Veil opens on May 15 and continues through June 27 in New York City. See more on Kappos’ Instagram.
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2026-05-14 03:17:05
May is an incredibly busy time for migrating birds, as millions flock from their southerly wintertime feeding grounds back to northern climes, where they’ll nest and breed. Chances are, if you look and listen in your back garden or nearby nature preserves, a wide variety of unusual birds may be noticeable around this time as they stop off to refuel during their journeys. So, it’s fitting that Vasilisa Romanenko’s solo exhibition, Flora & Flight at Arch Enemy Arts, continues this month.
Romanenko’s detailed acrylic paintings, which range from six to 28 inches tall, set birds within vibrant sprays of blossoms. They’re intimate and inviting, bringing us close to these feathered creatures that, in real life, we expect to dart off the moment we get near. White doves sit amid peonies, poppies, and snapdragons, and dark-eyed juncos perch on colorful hollyhocks. “Each bird in Vasilisa’s work carries such a wonderful sense of form and character,” the gallery says. “Each leaf and flower feels varied and alive.”
Flora & Flight continues through May 31 in Philadelphia. See more on Romanenko’s Instagram.
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2026-05-13 21:57:44
Debbie Lawson is known for her large-scale sculptures of life-size animals cloaked in ornamental carpets. Starting with an armature of wire mesh, masking tape, and Jesmonite resin, she meticulously cuts and tucks Persian carpet around every limb, building a surface that looks unbroken. As if the animals have materialized from within the textiles and are temporarily frozen in a stage of metamorphosis, we encounter them on the verge of making a move.
In the artist’s solo exhibition, In a Cowslip’s Bell I Lie at Sargent’s Daughters, she provokes “questions about the relationships between decoration and nature, craft and camouflage,” the gallery says. The title is a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, when the spirit Ariel sings about freedom and the carefree, even charmed connection to nature following his release from forced servitude to the sorcerer Prospero. Several of the works seen here, including “Wild Dog Sundown,” “Red Eagle,” and “Black Cougar,” are included in the show.
Lawson draws on the lineage of nature motifs in art, especially wildlife. She alludes to “the natural and animal forms hidden within decorative forms and patterns, from the frescoes of Pompeii to French Rococo moldings to Venetian stone carvings—the designs of William Morris and even the New York Public Library’s lions,” says a statement. Think clawfoot tubs, heraldic animals carved into hearths and other decorative interior elements, and the more modern form-meets-function works of Les Lalannes, which often incorporate birds and mammals into designs for benches and lamps.
The dialogue between art and decor parallels inherent tensions between interiors and the outside world—refinement and domesticity versus nature or indeed, the wilderness. Lawson also thinks about the gendered history of home life and craft, which has long been been associated with “women’s work.” This is deeply personal for the artist, as textile- and art-making go back generations in both her family and her hometown of Dundee, Scotland. She says, “I’m also thinking about women, including some of my near ancestors, so often confined by the constraints of the patriarchal society in which they/we lived, trapped in the daily grind and unable to pursue their own considerable creative talents or fully inhabit the world.”
Lawson’s camouflaged animals manifest from the backgrounds of carpets, emphasizing emergence itself. As these wild animals—leopards, cougars, bears, and more—are more clearly defined, they don’t break free from their patterns. Rather, they are indelibly characterized by the textile and can be clearly recognized for their unique individual traits. It’s not unlike how craft, especially textiles that were historically relegated to domestic settings and considered at least a notch or two below “high art,” has intently disrupted the art canon in recent decades.
In a Cowslip’s Bell I Lie continues through May 30 in New York. See more on Lawson’s Instagram.
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