Spectral Situations: neither / nor

Abstract

neither/nor presents new work emerging from a semester-long investigation into the invisible forces, obscured histories, and lingering presences that contour contemporary life. Guided by an interdisciplinary engagement with theories of haunting, opacity, intersubjectivity, and material memory, the exhibition presents sculptural and time-based works that confront what remains unseen yet is felt with insistent force. Participants approached the figure of the ghost not as a metaphor alone but as a methodological tool: a way of sensing the pressures, absences, and impressions that shape the conditions of daily social life.

Across the exhibition, housed in the site of the former Ithaca Bottling Works, objects act as witnesses, indexes, and displaced subjects. Some works examine the residues of political and social violence, drawing from studies in hauntology and the aesthetics of the disinherited. Others map the entanglements of land, ancestry, and disappearance, attending to the spectral dimensions of settler colonialism and the weight of silence. Still others foreground the instability of perception itself, exploring ways of seeing and not seeing in relation to personal and collective memory.

Produced through independent and collaborative studio research, the works demonstrate how sculpture can serve as an inquiry into that which resists capture. Casting, time-based media, found materials, and experimental processes reveal the tensions between presence and loss, legibility and opacity, form and its excess.

neither/nor invites viewers to consider how the unseen structures our sense of relation, responsibility, and imagination. By bringing these investigations into public space, the exhibition asks what it means to inhabit a world animated not only by what is present but also by what remains.

Exhibitors

neither/nor is an exhibition presenting the work of the following participants of Spectral Situations, a special topics course in sculpture taught by Visiting Critic Kyle Bellucci Johanson:

• Shemi Bolese (B.F.A. ’27)
• Paloma Hostin (B.F.A. ’28)
• Tobby Jiang (B.F.A. ’28)
• Cecilia Li (B.F.A. ’27)
• Jesús Mayen Palomo (B.Arch. ’26)
• José Ortega (B.Arch. ’26)
• Catherine Qin (B.F.A. ’28)
• Haotian Shi (B.F.A. ’28)
• Daniel Si (B.F.A. ’28)
• Lauren Song (B.S. ’26)
• Cristhian Varela (M.F.A. ’27)

Special thanks to Paul Ramírez Jonas and Deborah Fisher for their support and for hosting our haunt.