This presentation features new work by New York-based artists Colleen Billing and Zora Moniz exploring the physical, mystical, and emotional energies that shape our inner and outer worlds. In abstractions and symbols of heat transfer, light, and doubling, their work examines feelings of attraction, soothing, renewal, and transformation, giving form to forces that are cultural, psychological, and cosmic. Both artists question “rationality” by challenging separations of medicine and herbalism, physical and emotional healing, technology and magic.
Colleen Billing (b. 1991, Baltimore, MD) lives and works in New York. Through sculpture and installation, Billing explores the properties of objects, phenomena, and systems of belief that are unseen but deeply felt. Her work brings together histories of mysticism, such as Maguerite Porete’s erotic devotional text, The Mirror of Simple Souls, with invisible phenomenon like electrical currents and centuries-old processes of transforming materials through electroplating to alchemize her intricate assemblages of dried flora, seeds, blown glass, or industrial and precious metals. Combining aesthetic registers of sci-fi with the mythological–elixirs, relics, amulets–and evocations of the human figure, her work subtly undoes the separation of forms of knowledge that “rationality” opposes: medicine and herbalism, technology and magic, human and cosmic realms such that we can locate the otherworldly among us.
Recent exhibitions include Butterflies, David Peter Francis, New York; nothing is so vivid as a void that swallows your senses, Romance, Pittsburgh; and The Mirror of Simple Souls, Inadequate Lighting, Baltimore, MD; Foundation for Contemporary Arts Benefit Exhibition, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York, NY; There was earth in them, and they dug, Miriam Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; THE ENEMY KNOWS THE SYSTEM, Motel, Brooklyn, NY; and Sister Genus, Bad Water, Knoxville, TN. Billing received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and MFA from Rutgers University. lives and works in New York. Recent exhibitions include Butterflies, David Peter Francis, New York; nothing is so vivid as a void that swallows your senses, Romance, Pittsburgh; and The Mirror of Simple Souls, Inadequate Lighting, Baltimore, MD; Foundation for Contemporary Arts Benefit Exhibition, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York, NY; There was earth in them, and they dug, Miriam Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; THE ENEMY KNOWS THE SYSTEM, Motel, Brooklyn, NY; and Sister Genus, Bad Water, Knoxville, TN. Billing received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and MFA from Rutgers University.
Zora Moniz (b. 1995, Oakland, CA) lives and works in New York. Her work reflects on the physical and bodily registers of psychological experience––and vice versa. This series of paintings draws on source imagery from YouTube home video screenshots and nostalgic tv series to machinery parts, electronic cardiac scans, and migraine auras. Marked by sinewy and organic motifs that suggest coming apart or fitting together, interlocking and embracing, her work abstracts emotional electricity and bodily sensations. Through a delicate, tentative paint application interrupted by moments of sharp articulation and a subtle glow within her palette, Moniz gives shape to the relief and tension of pushing against our own edges, allowing a connection to others to enter and searching for a sense of internal grounding for healing.
Her work was recently included in Contemporary Fossil Record, Jack Hanley Gallery; The Devil’s Chestnut, Phil Gallery, Los Angeles and Entrance, New York; The Oil of Angels, Iowa Projects, New York; and Fade Into You, A.D. Gallery, New York. Her debut solo show, i stage up late, took place in 2023 at Romance, Pittsburgh. She has also shown at Sculpture Gallery, Broad Art Center, Los Angeles and The Loft at Gallery 1548, Los Angeles. Moniz received her BA from UCLA’s School of Arts and Architecture in 2017.
