Margot Samel is pleased to announce Kuu Maa, a group exhibition with Sasha Brodsky, Brian Dawn Chalkley, Miho Dohi, Edith Karlson, Cécile Lempert, Man Yau, and Klara Zetterholm.
Taking its name from an Estonian song by Vana, Kuu Maa gathers seven artists whose works engage with distance, not simply as a measurement of space but as an affective condition between people, places, and things. Kuu and Maa, moon and earth, became a way to think about what lies between us: the quiet gravity that holds things apart while keeping them in motion.
This sense of interval threads through the exhibition in subtle ways, appearing as hesitation, drift, or the faint pull between surfaces. In Sasha Brodsky’s paintings, solitary figures move through imagined terrains shaped as much by atmosphere as by architecture. Moments recur in Brian Dawn Chalkley’s embroidered scenes, where symbols and characters flicker like fragments from an elliptical interior narrative.
Forms across the exhibition seem to hold themselves slightly open, as if pausing before their next shift. Miho Dohi’s buttai sculptures–objects whose name joins the characters for “thing” and “body”–gather carved and stitched materials into forms that feel briefly poised before shifting again. Nearby, Edith Karlson’s sculptural candle holders from the 60th Venice Biennial gently light a corner of the gallery, carrying the instinctive, human-animal tension of her Return to Innocence series.
These gestures settle into an atmosphere shaped by memory, proximity, and the soft pressure of attention. In Cécile Lempert’s distemper paintings, figures hover mid-thought, suspended between recollection and observation. A different kind of charge enters with Man Yau’s HARDENER 01, which positions the viewer as an unintentional voyeur, its porcelain surfaces and intimate details reflecting tacit violence and racialized forms of beauty. Klara Zetterholm’s floor-bound toddler figure rests between myth and invention, its posture hinting at a fall, a pause, or a small refusal to be present.
Throughout Kuu Maa, forms fold, lean, and return. Materials carry traces of previous gestures, and images appear slightly askew, as though glimpsed from the corner of the eye. The title points to this metaphorical terrain, where proximity feels like a shifting sensation rather than a fixed state, and where distance becomes its own field of relation, alive with minor currents.
Kuu Maa is organized with support from the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, the Consulate General of Finland in New York, the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, Finlandia Foundation National, and the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland.
