OPENING SOON:
Building
Jamie Nares and Kern Samuel
September 18—October 31, 2026
Video, sound
64:03 minutes
Suite 210, The Bennett Building
139 Fulton St, New York, NY 10038
▸ EXHIBITION CHECKLIST
Bringing together Jamie Nares and Samuel Kern, this exhibition emerges from this doubling, channeling the material constitution of the city itself as something continually made and remade. The paintings, objects, and films on view—most made over the past decade—echo rusted surfaces and glinting fixtures, mottled sidewalks and elaborate scaffolding. Though primarily non-representational, these works retain the visible seams and indelible traces of human contact, physical labor, and material transformation. The exhibition is titled after Nares’s 64-minute film, Building (2020), which quietly observes the construction of a highrise condo from the artist’s 25th-floor window until it exceeds the frame, recasting abstraction as a negotiation of perspective relative to scale.
Where Nares’s films record labor as an embodied, durational language of movement, her painted and sculptural abstractions likewise retain the physical intelligence of their making—treating bodily effort as both an essential action and an ornamental event. In parallel, Samuel engages with and pushes against the conventions of painting, allowing the relationship between materials to shape his work. Through iterative processes of making and unmaking, his compositions retain seams, stains, and other signs of labor. In both artists’ practices, abstraction thus emerges as a reorganization of relations—between figure and ground, support and embellishment, body and surface, material and other material—made visible as a result of contact.