Living Systems
October 2 – December 3, 2025
Opening Reception: October 2, 6-8 pm
EFA Studios
323 West 39th St., New York, NY, 3rd Floor
Hours: Tue–Fri, 12–5 pm
Armando Cortés
Sean Fader
Cadence Giersbach
Lise Kjaer
Pablo Garcia Lopez
Vidal Mouet
Jan Mun
Heather Renée Russ
Yu-Wen Wu
Curated by Deric Carner
The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts presents a group show featuring nine new members of the acclaimed EFA Studio Program. Living Systems highlights the innovative and thoughtful approaches of this cohort of artists whose work spans photography, sculpture, installation, and film. Members are invited to join EFA for two years and represent the highest calibre artists selected by an independent jury panel.
The 2025 panel included Samira Abbassy (EFA co-founder), Mitra Abbaspour (Harvard Art Museums), Sarah Freeman (Brattleboro Museum & Art Center), Robert Dimin (Dinim Gallery), and Elle Burchill (Microscope Gallery). This year, we are pleased to add five new studios to our Midtown location and launch our renovated 3rd-floor gallery space.
Vidal Mouet uses the pared-down language of painting to create voluptuous sculptures, smoothly bending the surfaces of canvases into rolls and twists. The scale and pictorial rupture engage the viewer’s body. Mouet chooses a single flat color at the end of his process as an expressive move.
Cadence Giersbach pairs kite-shaped paintings with oversized, crumpled sculptural flowers. The wall works are both structured and evocative of wind-born freedom, while the flowers disorient with their scale but remain grounded through texture and detail. Earth meets sky through Giersbach's commitment to handmade forms that refuse digital smoothness.
American Snapshots: Perpetual Foreigner by Jan Mun presents overlooked historical photographs of East Asian female migration and adaptation in the United States. In The Golden Lotus, she creates foot sculptures from mushroom mycelium, referencing Chinese footbinding and how fungi decompose and regenerate, paralleling how societies can transform harmful conventional practices.
Taiwanese tea leaves mix with New England plant matter to create a harmonious yet differentiated community in Yu-Wen Wu’s piece Acculturation Flow IV. The clusters are gold-covered to represent the American dream of prosperity that many immigrants pursue.
The drawings and masks of Armando Cortés show us the imaginings of an artist who links traditional forms and methods from his native México with broader Latin American literary traditions, and contrasts and hybridizes them with elements of his life in the United States.
Using silk and steel, Pablo Garcia Lopez creates imaginary neural networks that reference bio hacking, transhumanism, and medical experimentation. Both baroque and noir, Lopez’s work points to an uneven history of humans seeking to expand their abilities and transgress their limitations.
Heather Renée Russ uses living algae to produce natural artifice. Her bioart shoes embody the liberatory potential of bio hacking and drag performance. Russ’s large-scale photograph bridges the natural and the digital using glitchy scans of bio materials collected at Jacob Riis Beach. The auroral coloration pays homage to this queer Xanadu.
Following her interest in the Danish-American photographer Jacob Riis, Lise Kjaer has woven newspaper microfilm from the New York Times from 1870-1914, the time Riis lived and worked as a reporter in the US, into a material pathway to the past. The microfilm mesh renders information simultaneously accessible yet indecipherable. A video zooms in on text and then zooms away again before we can grasp the content.
Sean Fader’s arch-conceptual interaction with romance writer Danielle Steel resulted in a series of high camp photographs that explore themes of fame, fortune, and the origins of the sugar daddy. His letter to Steel begins:
My name is Sean Fader. I am a queer artist and a professor at Tulane University. I am writing to you from Stove Works, an artist residency in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I have been asked to produce a piece for a show at Antenna Gallery that will open as part of a multivenue triennial in New Orleans. The exhibition’s theme is sugar, and I decided to investigate the history of the sugar daddy, in particular, the story of Adolph Spreckels and Alma de Bretteville Spreckels. I was immediately consumed by their story, which eventually led me to you.
Contact: deric@efanyc.org
