SYMPATHETIC LIGHTNING
June 5 - July 26, 2025
Jacq Groves, Diana Sofia Lozano, Saar Shemesh,Erin Johnson, Sarah Davidson, Laur P, Jay Pahre,mosquito girlfriend(Gabi Dao and Lou Lou Sainsbury)
curated by Sarah Davidson and Nirvana Santos-Kuilan
Curator’s tour: Sunday June 8, 2pm (RSVP by June 7 at 5pm to info@springsprojects.com)
Performance: Friday July 18th, 7pm (RSVP by July 17 at 5pm to info@springsprojects.com)
Sculptor Saar Shemesh presents a collaboration with sound artist and musician Mars Dietz, wherein Shemesh’s sculpture THE LOST SALT, and the enclosed ideas, are activated through speech and audio feedback looping in a live improvisation. Join us for the premiere of this performance practice.
​
** Access note: the building requires a QR code to enter **
For visits outside First Thursdays and Opening Nights, please call 646-389-9522 and the gallery will send you a QR code valid for the day, or email info@springsprojects.com
Sympathetic Lightning features work by 9 artists who variously expand understandings of ‘nature’ through themes of haunting, dislocation, and non-linear time. The term ‘sympathetic lightning’ refers to the tendency of lightning to be closely coordinated across long distances, appearing in clusters when viewed from space. Underlining solidarities both within the works and between the artists themselves, this exhibition highlights queer and trans perspectives in a political moment where mobility is especially fraught. Brought together by artist Sarah Davidson and curator Nirvana Santos-Kuilan, the exhibition includes the work of New York based artists Jacq Groves, Diana Sofia Lozano, Saar Shemesh, Erin Johnson, and Sarah Davidson, alongside international peers Laur P (Montréal, Canada), Jay Pahre (Vancouver, Canada), and mosquito girlfriend (Gabi Dao and Lou Lou Sainsbury, both Rotterdam, NL).
Set against a misty mountainscape, mosquito girlfriend (Gabi Dao and Lou Lou Sainsbury)’s eco-horror Resurrect Me as a Parasite plays on the nature of the vampire as a parasitic force. Interspliced images of Sint Pietersberg quarry in the Netherlands, and the Magdalene cave of Sainte-Baume Mountain in southern France–said to have been the site of Mary Magdalene’s exile and isolation–loom over the experimental narrative, conjuring cyclical ideas of life, death, gender and parasitism.
Jacq Groves’ series Embodied Infrastructures echoes ideas of cyclical entanglement, tracking time through movement as nature and object consume one another. Groves’ vignettes of trees molding themselves around architectural elements highlight the continuous nature of materials and the permeability of bodily boundaries.
Sarah Davidson’s layered compositions of plant and animal fragments also uncannily mesh worlds, troubling bodily boundaries through a mix of biomorphic abstraction and scientific illustration. The title of their painting, Crypsis–another word for camouflage–implies both the double edged sword of visibility and the queer potential of code-switching.
Saar Shemesh’s visceral sculptures THE LOST SALT and SATURN IN THE FOURTH HOUSE reference natural elements such as membranes and mucus, and integrate bodily substances like ‘communal piss’, to create wholly new forms. Oozing, dripping elements evoke monstrosity, otherness, and the abject body.
Boundaries are shown to be ever-shifting in Diana Sofia Lozano’s sprawling botanical hybrids. Embedding militarized maps in her work, the artist deconstructs boundaries of colonial identification, highlighting the fraught relationship of botany to geopolitical borders.
In Erin Johnson’s To be Sound is to Be Solid, tracking camera movement suggests a ghostly presence surveying the empty rooms of a seaside house. Voiceover of conversation with an oceanographer attempting to map the ever-shifting ocean floor parallels the filmmaker’s attempt to excavate the house’s uncharted queer history.
Jay Pahre’s ongoing Space Blanket is an intimate tracking of time and ritual, as daily testosterone gel packets are stitched together to form a space blanket, an object used for warmth and protection in the wilderness. The abstracted blanket infers the presence of the artist’s body while itself becoming a source of camouflage, reflecting its environment.
The reflective surface of Laur P’s Will our record misrecognize us too? echoes this strategy. Drawing parallels between fossilization and the act of painting, the artist highlights the trans-poetic potential of kinship across geologic time. In their writing about this work they ask “is it funny to imagine us fossilized, but safe?”
​​​​​
