Exhibition
Derosia hosting Vacancy
24/8*
Anna Gonzalez Noguchi
Duration_ May 14–June 13, 2026
Opening_ Thursday, May 14, 6–8 PM
Venue_ Derosia, 197 Grand St. 2W, New York, NY 10013
Opening_ Thursday, May 14, 6–8 PM
Venue_ Derosia, 197 Grand St. 2W, New York, NY 10013
Installation Views / Works / Press Release
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Gallery Vacancy presents 24/8*, a special solo project by Japanese-Spanish artist Anna Gonzalez Noguchi in the front room of Derosia’s reception office. Set within a working environment where labor, administration, and creativity quietly overlap, the presentation offers a seamless framework for Gonzalez Noguchi’s wall-based sculptures, which are composed from stationery, folded aluminum, brass elements, and fragments of magazine pages.
The works belong to the artist’s ongoing Kamidana series, titled after the Japanese word for “god shelf” — miniature altars commonly found in homes and businesses. Informed by Gonzalez Noguchi’s cross-cultural background, the series draws from an intimate archive of personal materials inherited from her Japanese grandparents, which often permeates the surfaces of her work. Through sculptural assembly, handcrafted forms, prosaic artefacts, and found images are layered together, suggesting an ongoing renegotiation of memory, inheritance, and devotion. In this new group of sculptures, shimmering orchids etched in brass are pressed and punctured by green thumbs, while name-tagged pencils stand in place as offerings. Cuttings from her grandfather’s garden magazines pollinate each sculpture, appearing as fragments, stains, wings, or dragonfly-like patinations keyed into place. Folded aluminum surfaces are annotated with hybrid orchid names, abbreviations, days of the week, her grandmother’s age, and the recurring asterisk symbol — a mark that footnotes obscured relations, unfinished stories, and the fragile systems through which memory is held. Each sculpture takes on an intimate scale, as if made to fit in the palm of a hand. Across the presentation, Gonzalez Noguchi’s works suggest an unspoken cross-generational collaboration, moving between time zones, cultures, and private histories. The title 24/8 refers to a withheld work, still on the wall of the artist’s studio. Not yet finalized like the others, and ready to move again, it points toward an additional day of the week — a transient, unmeasured time from which the works seem to appear. Anna Gonzalez-Noguchi, born in the UK in 1992, currently lives and works in Athens, Greece. She received a BA in Sculpture from the University of Brighton in 2014 and an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, in 2018. Gonzalez-Noguchi’s sculptural practice examines the layered intersections of memory, material, and cultural identity, informed by her Spanish and Japanese cross-cultural heritage and familial ties to her Japanese grandparents. Her works incorporate both machine-produced and hand-made objects, ranging from personal possessions to copper engravings, as a means of renegotiating the meanings and associations embedded in existing forms. Recent solo exhibitions include: 24/8*, Derosia hosting Vacancy, New York, 2026; Lc. Galaxy x 94, Commonage, London, 2025. Group exhibitions include: BEDROCK, Liverpool Biennial, 2025; Ubiquitous No.14, Tube Gallery, Mallorca, 2023; Halls of Mirrors, PLOP, London, 2023; Cloud & Toe, KNULP, Sydney, 2023; Beyond Fear, Tinos Cultural Foundation, 2023; Kazuko Splendor, La Boulangerie, Paris, 2023; A Surviving Image, Zerui, London, 2023; Portable Elastic Temple, Pet Projects, Athens, 2022; and On the Other Hand, Canary Wharf Estate, London, 2021. |
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