Below Grand is pleased to present Get Around, a two-person exhibition of new and recent works by Craig Jun Li and Coco Klockner. While working in distinct mediums—Li through photographic, sculptural, and site-responsive forms, Klockner through digitally fabricated and hand-altered sculpture—both artists engage in acts of re-materialization that treat form as mutable, contingent, and in flux.

Li presents a sequence of works realized in various materials in response to the gallery site. On the front-facing windows, a twopanel printed mesh work restages an image from Roy Colmer’s Doors series (1975–76), a typological photographic inventory of Manhattan’s thresholds at a moment of rapid economic and technological change. The chosen frame captures the facade of what now houses Below Grand—then a clothing boutique, Projections—and appears as an inverted negative when the doors are closed, split into two when open.

Inside the back space, a group of Polaroid works extend this play between positive and negative, recto and verso. Working with SX-70 instant film—which produces no separate negative—Li disturbs the film’s emulsion from inside the pictures and affixes it over fragments of cotton fabric, collapsing overlapping planes into painterly abstraction.

Continuing this distillation, an intermittently activated sculpture by Li, Save the Next Dance for Me, sits on a low plinth concealing an exposed section of the gallery’s radiator. In place of the heating device, two belt-linked turntable platforms spin in opposite directions at different standardized speeds for records, 33 and 45 RPM.

Installed alongside Li’s works, Klockner’s figurative sculpture series consists of five nylon PA12 panels—one pair flanking the main wall, and three others positioned on the walls visible from the street. Beginning as digitally modeled “impossible forms,” each panel is produced through a resin-based fusion process that enables form to emerge from a powdered bed of plastic allowing for complex undercuts and recesses. In contrast to digital fabrication’s fetishization of the infinitely reproducible, pure object, Klockner treats each work as a site for incisions and abrasions. Using a grinding disc, drill, and occasional collage elements, she interrupts the surfaces with scars and sutures that refuse formal purity, drawing analogies to surgical intervention and the violence inherent in some life-saving processes of care.

The exhibition may appear to draw on the logic of a musical cover: a reinterpretation that carries forward the structure and melody of the original, while inflecting it with new tone, texture, and authorship. Li and Klockner approach their own works in a similar manner, treating source materials as scores to be interpreted and re-performed. The exhibition title’s open imperative—get around—suggests movements, mischief and contingency, evoking similarities between material embodiments and language structures. As Saussure tells us, the value of a sign is nothing but its difference from all other related signs.1

Across works in the exhibition, both artists engage in acts of material perversion, whether in the peeling and scratching of photographic emulsions, or the cutting and drilling of digitally printed forms. They share a methodological resonance in troubling material stability and disrupting the conditions under which images or bodies are made legible. Li’s use of obsolescent formats and historical research meets Klockner’s forward leaning fabrication processes in a dialogue that resists linearity and reduction, suggesting instead that the “present” of the image is always a palimpsest of past and future mediations. In essence: you look once, and then you look again.

1 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, translated by Wade Baskin (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966), 114–115.

“CJ” Craig Jun Li (b. 1998, China) is an art worker and artist based in New York. Li’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions including François Ghebaly, LA & New York; Taon, Ivey-sur-Seine; Ulterior, New York; ROMANCE, Pittsburgh; Chris Andrews, Montréal; RAINRAIN, New York; September Sessions, Stockholm; Parent Company, New York; hatred 2, New York; Prairie, Chicago; and Canal Projects, New York, among others. Li operates a curatorial project “Benny’s Video,” currently hosted in a studio sublet in Bushwick.

Coco Klockner (b. 1991, USA) is an artist and writer living and working in New York. She is the author of the speculative novella K-Y (Genderfail Press, 2019) and her essays have appeared in Texte Zur Kunst, Spike Art Magazine, Disclaimer/Liquid Architecture, and The Whitney Review. Klockner has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York; Bad Water, Knoxville, TN; stop-gap projects, Columbia, MO; lower_ cavity, Holyoke, MA; and her work has been included in group exhibitions at Centre des arts actuels SKOL, Montreal, QC, CA; White Columns, New York; Lubov, New York; Guadalajara 90210, CDMX, MX; Bass & Reiner, San Francisco, CA; MoMA PS1, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; Stove Works, Chattanooga, TN; and Musik Installationen Nürnberg, DE. She is director of the project space hatred 2 in Brooklyn. Her forthcoming exhibition at SculptureCenter in Long Island City opens October 2025.