March 31 - April 11, 2025
Pratt MFA Thesis Show | Brooklyn, NY
Art is often experienced as a visual language that helps the artist or viewer connect and reveal something about themselves. Through abstraction, symbolism, and material intervention, each of these artists makes deliberate choices about what they choose to reveal and what remains unseen.
Access Denied explores the multiple dimensions of opacity and access—both physical and conceptual—as artists navigate the delicate balance between revelation and concealment. Within this selection, works become vessels of hidden meaning, coded language, and emotional depth, inviting the viewer to decipher, question, or accept what is withheld.
Some works function as barriers—offering glimpses yet refusing full disclosure—while others challenge the notion that understanding requires clarity. The exhibition becomes a dynamic interplay between artist and audience, where access is granted not through direct exposition, but through intuition, empathy, and layered interpretation.
What happens when knowledge is fragmented, when emotions are encrypted, or when entry is restricted? Access Denied reminds us that meaning is not always given freely; sometimes, it must be sought, negotiated, or simply left in the realm of the unknown.
–Dejá Belardo
Installation View of Access Denied, 2025
Names to Say, 2025, oil on canvas, 60x72”
Cloud Gospel or JC Retell, 2025, single-channel video, dimensions variable, 4:58
Installation View of Access Denied, 2025. From Left to Right: Trying Hard to Please, 2025, oil on canvas, 60x68”; Plans to Be, 2025, oil on canvas, 60x48”;
An Immaculate Conception, 2025, single-channel video, dimensions variable, 7:33
An Immaculate Conception, 2025, single-channel video, dimensions variable, 7:33
This is a Love Letter, 2025, photograph, polymer clay, acrylic paint, cigarettes and cigarette carton, dimensions variable
June 5 - July 12, 2025
Guest Gallery | Brooklyn, NY
GUEST is proud to present Clay From the Clay Pit, a three-person exhibition featuring works by Mariana Garibay Raeke, Molly Miller, and Allison Plastridge. Working at distinct phases of their careers, each of these artists engage with what the early 20th century French historian Henri Focillon called “the work of metamorphosis.”
Allison Plastridge’s paintings enact the slippage of bodily sensation and travel into record and back again; Molly Miller bleeds one material and medium into another, building transparencies and opacities that reflect time’s porousness; the past - manifested in the movement of bodily forms - flicker just as Mariana Garibay Raeke begins to draw, making dance partners between her earlier forms and the vanishing present.
A passage from Focillon’s lyrical 1934 book of art history and analysis, The Life of Forms in Art, lends the show its title. “The wood of the statue is no longer the wood of the tree,” he writes, deploying a straightforwardness - obviousness, even - that still retains the mystery inherent to creation. “Bricks that have been baked and then built into a wall bear no relation to the clay of the clay pit… artistic activity, like a chemical reaction, elaborates matter even as it continues the work of metamorphosis.” The works of this exhibition find the artists in the midst of that chemical reaction: making studies for larger paintings; working provisionally or in transit, with found and at-hand materials; or reaching back toward earlier works, and at a past that has already changed.
Videos by Molly Miller permit the viewer a particular intimacy: a view into the uncertain, fallible, human processes of creation. In Cloud Gospel or JC Retell, the artist repeatedly tries to remember a story she wrote years earlier. Each time she recounts the narrative, she finds new details or modifies others; found footage taken from films loosely dramatizes this shifting story. An Immaculate Conception is an even more personal reflection on acts of formation - sometimes magical, sometimes absurd and mundane. As her girlfriend prepares to have her eggs frozen, the artist records the pair’s conversations. The movement of time runs as a throughline in her works in diverse media; an oil painting situated near the monitors on which her videos play is a layered attempt to capture the changing light and shadow of a chair against a window.
– Henry Chapman & Laura MacMillan
Installation View of An Immaculate Conception, 2025, single-channel video, dimensions variable, 7:33
September 2024
Steuben Gallery | Brooklyn, NY
I opened my journal the other day * It hadn’t been written in for over a decade * Hopes and Plans * Dreams and Fears * Tales, Letters, Treasures * A physical manifestation of a mind long forgotten * Yet quick to recall * I learned a lesson the other day * One taught by a former self * To put it into words is proving futile * Perhaps it needs to be felt
– William Kim
Curated by Isabelle McTwigan and Molly Miller
June 2024 | Brooklyn, NY
Site-Specific Works at Newtown Creek
Artists created site-responsive works for the waterfront.
The Newtown Creek Nature Walk is a small place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that brings art and nature together. It’s an odd nature walk surrounding the sanitation facility. George Trakas conceptualized this site-specific environmental work, challenging the boundaries between industrial utility and natural life.
Here for us as artists, beauty is not the goal; rather, presentness.
–Isabelle McTwigan