Exhibition
Stay With Me (Neither Here nor There)
Andrius Alvarez-Backus
Christopher Hartmann
Isaac Soh Fujita Howell
Luo Ran
Sarah Slappey
Woo Hannah
Duration_ March 18–April 30, 2026
Opening_ Wednesday, March 18, 4–7 PM
Opening_ Wednesday, March 18, 4–7 PM
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Gallery Vacancy is pleased to announce the group exhibition Stay With Me (Neither Here nor There), on view from March 18 to April 30, 2026. The exhibition features recent works by Andrius Alvarez-Backus, Christopher Hartmann, Isaac Soh Fujita Howell, Luo Ran, Sarah Slappey, and Woo Hannah.
The exhibition takes its cue from a familiar idiom--neither here nor there—which in a casual sense names a condition of drift, misalignment, or insignificance. Paired with the direct appeal of stay with me, the title opens a paradox: a request for closeness addressed to a state that refuses fixed location. In such an atmosphere, connection does not rely on fixed guarantees; instead, it finds its pivot within constant movement, making “staying together” a dynamic process that requires perpetual reconfirmation. Across painting, assemblage, sculpture, and installation, the participating artists approach this condition through different registers of material and spatial attention. Andrius Alvarez-Backus and Woo Hannah explore the surfaces of objects to examine the sedimentation of memory and time. Alvarez-Backus’s works, such as Leave the Lights On For Me (2025), utilize found textiles to construct dense surfaces where texture behaves as a carrier of touch and pressure, registering the traces accumulated through use and inheritance . This dialogue is extended by Woo Hannah’s fabric installations; her Spiral Core (2026) series originated from a personal medical experience involving a missing organ, translating invisible fear into wearable sculptures that explore bodily states existing yet resisting clear classification. Within the interactions of daily life and private domains, the body shifts between intimacy and withdrawal. Christopher Hartmann’s paintings, such as Shared Weight (2026), portray near-photorealistic bedscapes and rumpled sheets, domestic remnants that serve as charged settings for vulnerability, capturing moments lingering at the edge of connection. Sarah Slappey, in Lamp Crush (2026), embeds symbols of “quiet violence”—pins and ribbons—beneath luscious, tactile surfaces, revealing the discipline and labor underlying idealized femininity. Spatial and digital experiences are reconstructed in the exhibition as new perceptual coordinates. Isaac Soh Fujita Howell’s work, such as Fast-forward, Set me to zero, Reverse, Stop. (2024), focuses on overlooked infrastructure and marginal landscapes. By placing fawns amidst tangled cables and industrial architecture, and marking their bodies with Braille that translates to the painting's title, Howell creates a friction between tactile language and visual field. This juxtaposition blurs the boundaries of communication, allowing indeterminacy to function as a structural principle that keeps the image open. In his new work Cowboy (2026), Luo Ran likens complex workplace emotions to a "cyber wander" through Song Dynasty landscapes. By deconstructing and reducing the "hollow" templates of 3D modeling software, he seeks to establish a resistance between the virtuality of digital technology and the graininess of painting materials, thereby salvaging the vital will to live that is often overlooked within algorithmic logic. Here, the boundaries of the body are consciously eroded, replaced by emotional maps that record the fluidity and warmth of contemporary human relationships. Stay With Me (Neither Here nor There) is assembled as a field of soft coordinates—neither anchoring the works to a single place nor dispersing them into pure drift. Across these works, staying emerges as something provisional yet sustained: an address made in passing, and a closeness that remains legible even as it refuses to settle. |
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