Speak ill

Ask the flirtatious Gavin Butt, Silvia Federici the witch, or Balkan secret agent Julia Kristeva: gossip is valuable. Integral to cultural production, hearsay can be a corrosive or supportive force, depending on the words exchanged. The value of information and its dissemination holds alchemical potential.

There are some useful spells for thwarting gossip. Materials include candles, broken glass, twine, ice, ink, and the written word.

"Speak ill" includes artists Creighton Baxter, Travis Boyer, Cristine Brache, Nick Fusaro, Adrienne Greenblatt, Ellen Pong and Gitte Maria Möller. A listening area at the exhibition’s center houses a series of recorded programs that expand on examples of hearsay using artist-editioned Morningstar speakers by Emmett Palaima as a conduit. Programming includes artists Sophia Giovannitti, Erik Foss, Journey Streams, and more.

NICK FUSARO (b. 1989) is based in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA in Sculpture from Hunter College in 2022 and his BFA in Sculpture from Pratt Institute in 2012. His sculptural practice combines humble materials, collections, and iteration to emphasize the effects of memory on lived experience. Fusaro also studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2011 and is the founder of Three Four Three Four, an artist-run gallery in New York. He has shown at Parent Company Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Marwan (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Jupiter Woods (London, UK), Fisher Parrish (Brooklyn, NY), Strobe Gallery (New York, NY) and Long Story Short (New York, NY).

Gitte Maria Möller (b. 1991, Cape Town, South Africa) is a painter, multi-disciplinary artist and pre-school teacher. She graduated with a BAFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2015, where she received the Judy Steinberg Painting Prize for her graduate show. She has exhibited locally in South Africa, as a well as internationally across Europe, the UK and the United States. She lives and works between Cape Town and New York City. Gitte uses a range of different mediums and painterly devices to explore the symbolic and numinous possibilities of picture-making. Drawing from dream symbology, early video games and the natural and urban landscape, Gitte’s work holds a complex array of signs, symbols, and archetypes in suspension. Through her work Gitte strives to form a union between her inner and outer reality, creating a personalized arena for devotion in her pictures. In this intricate visual space, she offers a distracted meditation on a world interpolated by empathy and apathy, freedom and vulnerability, and the struggle between g00d and 3vil.