06/18/2025
Opening Friday, June 20th at KATES-FERRI PROJECTS: SPHERE NOT, a solo exhibition by Art-In-Buildings alum Cecile Chong, curated by Art-in-buildings director and curator, Tessa Ferreyros.
Join us for opening reception on Friday, June 20, 6-8pm and public program with Broken China (Tao Leigh Goffe and Cecile Chong) on Friday, June 27, 6-9pm rsvp to [email protected]. The exhibition will be on view through July 16th.
Through immersive sound and evocative visual imagery, the exhibition conjures the amorphous specter of a collective fate unfolding in a world teetering on the edge of calamity. Chong’s work explores our inability to break from destructive patterns, and how systems of culture and commerce distract us with comforting illusions. These mechanisms allow us to hold catastrophe at bay, keeping it just outside the margins of everyday life, until it inevitably surges into our reality.
Rather than offering a resolution, SPHERE NOT inhabits the ambiguity between grief and apathy, between collective mourning and the will to act. The works gesture toward a kind of emotional fossil record, layers of distraction, desire, and despair sedimented into our everyday lives. The exhibition traces a liminal psychological space, one in which we bargain with uncertainty, make peace with resignation, or feign normalcy in the face of collapse. Our future may not be set in stone, but Chong’s work insists that we reckon with its shape and texture now, before it hardens beyond our reach.
A portion of the proceeds from SPHERE NOT will be donated to the Galápagos Conservancy
