The Magic Show
Chelsea, New York City
Role: Exhibition Designer
You walk into a grid of cruciform walls. Studs, concrete blocks, black plastic.
The materials are borrowed from New York’s construction sites, but reassembled into something slower and more deliberate. This is a show about memory, rawness, and the city that made it.
Each X frames eight faces. Each face holds a work. You weave through the field like walking between towers. You don’t move through a gallery. You move through a city plan. It’s not a white box. It’s a framework. Rough, repeatable, familiar.
At the base, concrete blocks anchor the walls. Above, plywood sheathing is wrapped in black contractor bags, adding a strange softness. The studs stay exposed. The structure is always visible.
The artwork lives inside this frame. Not on pristine white walls, but in the space between raw materials. Paintings, prints, video, sculpture. Each piece shaped by the same environment as the frame that surrounds it.
Throughout the run of the show, the grid becomes a gathering space. Music fills it. People move through it. The structure holds the art, but also the crowd. It becomes a temporary commons for a scene rooted in texture, sound, memory, and the physical language of New York.
It’s raw, but not careless. Fast to build. Easy to break down. A temporary body made from working parts. The architecture of construction, reused without disguise. Built to reflect the city that shaped it.
