The inaugural group show and gallery presentation offers a new imagining of what an exhibition might be, while signaling fashion and art’s spatial collapse upon one another
Galleries are closing yet gallery spatial aesthetics are everywhere. The interplay between the built environments of fashion retail and art spaces is a long-running ballet. Since the 1800s, museums, world fairs, and department stores have all occupied the same psychic space of exhibition – borrowing from one another in hopes of seducing onlookers into buying what they’re seeing.
The most recent influx of New York brick-and-mortar openings, even as galleries shutter (in this city at least), is remarkable for how completely the line between commerce and culture has blurred. Is it even there anymore? Paloma Wool, Awaykin, Komune, Ven.Space, Colbo all take the model to this final degree. Contemporary consumption has reached such heights of sophistication. Even the Manhattan bagel shops refuse to be simply one thing, hosting artist talks and workshops. Everywhere, audiences demand more from what seeks to capture their attention and their coin.
This collapsed blend of built environments reaches a culmination point in WSA’s Duet,which ran from September 4-8 and inaugurated “The Mall,” the Water Street multi-use cultural hub’s newly renovated third and fourth floors. The space is intended to host art, design and commerce through experiences. Eleven galleries – including Pace, James Fuentes, and Spinello Projects – showed work alongside an eclectic group show featuring Karon Davis, Marina Ambramovic, Brendan Fernandes. Curators Kyle DeWoody and Zoe Lukov choreographed the presentation to a cohesive, if simple, tune.
DeWoody and Lukov describe the presentation as inspired by conversations around duality. On a meta level, Duet itself holds a dual nature. In this celebration of the “transformative power of the dynamic duo,” Duet occupies at least two identities at any given moment: cultural center and retail space, established and upstart, living and dead.
Entering 161 Water St. from its side entrance at John Street the day after the preview — particularly with the activity of the Armory Show uptown in mind — imbued the space with an eerie, uneasy air. It felt like we were trespassing. Something had been here previously, and now we wandered among its remnants.
The exhibit opened with Elliot & Erick Jiménez’s installation titled Red Chapel, a four-part piece that deepened the otherworldly veil hanging in the atmosphere. The benediction was neatly mirrored by two lightboxes from Zanele Muholi’s Being (T)here, Amsterdam series. Their presence provided a contrast to the surreal, spiritual realm met by Muholi’s carnal urban realities and performance labor. As above, so below.
Upstairs in WSA’s well reposted lobby, there returned a sense of life. We’d exited purgatory, and now ascended to the land of the living. The round floorplan allowed the exhibiting galleries to nestle into their respective “storefronts” or in offshoot corners like kiosk stands, unbound by formal walled locations.
With “duet” as the guiding principle of this entire endeavor, I expected musicality in the gathered displays. On cue, Naama Tsabar’s metronome installation was there to keep time and reinstate the spectre of its passage. If this was a mall, then perhaps this was a mall in limbo: shuttered to the world’s eyes but haunted by a stubborn pack of lurkers that saw the space’s enduring luster.
Galerie Sardine presented a steady, heavy bodied beat between the suite of paintings by Anthony Banks and ceramic sculptures by Jenna Kaës.– geode-like forms that suggested an archeological dig, earthy and tactile. Of The Cloth, tucked in one of these “kiosk corners,” offered a slow, sensual dyad between new stoneware works by Armina Howada Mussa and architectural wood pieces by Sebastião Hungerbühler. On a second visit, Mussa’s sculptures were reconfigured, climbing from a perch on one of Hungerbühler’s tall benches to a low setting emphasizing the bodily record and captured spirit of her dynamic practice.
MASA, on the other hand, brought material experimentation to the fore with wax, paper, copper (a pas de trois of sorts to disrupt and introduce a new, driving cadence). Brian Thoreen and the late Ana Pellicer entered a dynamic conversation with one another: Pellicer’s oversized jewelry played warmly against Thoreen’s Paperweight/Inflate 001, 2025, which employs inversions of visual heft and wordplay.
Now on the fourth floor, entirely dedicated to group presentations under DeWoody and Lukov’s curation, artists Maya Lin, Didier William, Naudline Pierre, Brianna Lance and Paul Gardère are brought together in one of the “storefronts.” The late Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Gardère’s framed large relief titled The Snowman, 1986 quietly commands attention in the artist’s signature historically and materially layered manner. With an oeuvre at home in the paradoxes inherent to the racial, cultural realities produced under Western imperialism and his own archeologic distillation of the nuances of immigrant, diasporic phenomenology both surgically lifted from his personal history and the histories of the Carribean, France and the U.S.—Gardère’s inclusion rings with a clarity through the show. The Snowman, as his pieces so often do, trades in Caribbean thought and spiritual practices, particularly Vodou producing therein the unanimity only distinction and duality can offer. A union in symbol, ritual and colour of what may be to come.
That may be Duet’s true delight: an attempt to dance on the grave of old and waning norms of the art world as it stands before us. Breaking into the hometown abandoned mall to fill it with new vitality; remake the space in your image by reveling in the space. Luckily a chapel was erected downstairs so all who observe might properly mourn the passing of an older era. On that meta-level, Duet’s curatorial focus on the twin becomes compelling when considering the crossroads that those within the arts find themselves at. “All” the galleries are closing yet season’s openings remain packed with eager bodies. We should be well-accustomed to the cycle of things. If something is dying here, something else is dying to be born. One of the gallerists presenting I’d spoken to noted even the conversations they were having throughout the exhibition had taken on a different focus at Duet. I might’ve assumed setting programming in a “mall” would also condense the interactions to solely a hyperfocus on sale. You’re at the mall, so shop. At other presentations, talks often steer quickly through yes/no sale outcomes. Here, there was space for wonder. Yet another duet: the desire to participate in the rituals we’ve come to recognize and the wish for something entirely new. It helps that there isn’t a price on entry. Someone with the set intention to acquire and someone leaving a tea ceremony on another floor and happening upon the curator’s roving talkthrough would have equal access to said conversations.
Look to UHaul Gallery, or to the excitement at the Armory Show being driven by newcomers or upstate to the openings that skipped the metropolitan hum entirely for the forests. Everywhere dancing on the graves of old models—and rightly so, mourning often looks like a life-full celebration. Why not let the spirit of what sparked potential in generations prior, that likely inspired deep interest in the art ecosystem live on in the full-thriving bodies of the new potential. And what of success? Monetarily, I’ll leave that to the pocket watchers. Instead I’d recommend allowing enough time and room for what will become… become. We can reconvene after, take stock, and hopefully, do better. There is a cohort of those who, perhaps from privilege, have never conceived of themselves as anything other than victor. For the rest who’ve lived low and risen and fallen and middled and still find themselves vested deeply in the work, here is the moment to bring forth something new, unbelievable. Duet is not that messiah model vision, the curatorial perspective was just broad enough that the strengths of the gathered works and names could fill in the nooks and gaps with room to spare for the audience to come in with their own offerings. But it is a new vision, an attempt at shaping imagination. We are instructed by Toni Morrison to “dream a little before you think.” Dr. Ruha Benjamin offers in her 2024 text, Imagination: A Manifesto, the necessity of us structuring our worlds with the truth of our all belonging to and in this round world. “Unless the old scripts animated by false notions of superiority and inferiority are ripped to shreds, we will be caught in an endless purgatory: forced to inhabit the same tired roles as we advance predictable and deadly plots,” Dr. Benjamin implores. “Instead, let us clear the way for new stories!”
Written by Arimeta Diop
