The warning at the beach is that the water’s full of sharks. 

There’s danger underwater and on land. 

The sun shines with a blinding glow over the sand. 

What’s underwater is a dark menagerie, 

Seen blurrily by the imagination.

I don’t mean to be alarmist but:

A Shark’s Mouth is a Whole Aquarium

If you look long enough, you’ve looked too long

And seen and unseen all at once. 

—Anonymous 

The Question

While the above poem might feel modern, it was written in the early 1800s, shortly after the London Zoo opened the world’s first sustainable aquarium. Common-seeming to us, an aquarium was a revelation to its first visitors, allowing them an undreamed of glimpse beneath the choppy mirrored surface of the sea. Thus, what reads as modernity in fact can be attributed to the timeless quality of surprise and uncertainty, feelings we share with our ancestors. 

As institutions, zoos also have ancestors. They are the offspring of museums, which began as private collections. The earliest of these, a Neo-Babylonian princess’s collection of Mesopotamian artifacts, dates back to 530 BC.

Over the following centuries, some collectors focused on art, some on nature. Some, like Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, aspired toward the encyclopedic—a collection of everything known. At this point museums encountered a philosophical question: How might we form a holistic sense of reality through a collection of static things?

Two Solutions: A Mirror

For philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, this question exposed a fault line in Western thought. Reality, he argues, is not a substance, but a process. Take, for example, sand, the essence of which is not a pile of grains, but a relentless self-generating shifting that grinds rock until it is part of itself—a process of breaking down what appears to be solid.

However de Selby takes umbrage with Whitehead, writing, “He [Whitehead] describes sand as a ‘conceptual illusion,’ but in the same breath says that it ‘flows like water,’ so whose illusion is this? The greatest known mass of water, the Ocean, is a single stable substance as evidenced, refreshingly plainly, by our ability to reach it, and touch it, and feel our fingers become wet and salty. If Whitehead finds himself in mental cartwheels over his inability to understand the sand, it is his failing, not the sand’s. He must adjust himself, not Western philosophy” (de Selby, Codex §14).

Conclusion

In assembling this collection I have felt the tug and pull between Whitehead and de Selby. This is my sincere attempt to represent reality—but how best to do it?

I’ve amassed objects and reconstructions of objects (which can be understood as both object and process). I’ve gathered illustrations and diagrams of processes (that can also be understood as objects). From far and wide, I’ve collected moving and stationary things. Throughout this quest of Representing Reality I’ve felt great clarity of purpose, but the next day these same pieces would seem unrelated and arbitrary as though assembled by a stranger. How can I be both the person who chose and the one utterly mystified? Anyway, I hope you might understand.

—Grusha Povesilas, D.Sc.H.

Contributors

Claudia Bitrán is a painter, video artist and teacher who spent her formative years in Santiago, Chile and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (2013), and a BFA from the Universidad Católica de Chile (2009). Among selected grants and awards are a Visual Arts Guggenheim Fellowship (2023), a FondArt Nacional Audiovisual (2022 and 2023), Emergency Grant Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2015), Jerome Foundation Grant for Emerging Filmmakers (2015), 1st Prize Britney Spears Dance Challenge (2017), winner of the UFO McDonald’s Painting Competition (2016), 1st mention at Bienal de Artes Mediales (2015), Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile. Notable past solo exhibitions include Cristin Tierney Gallery (New York 2026), KIOSK (Ghent, Belgium 2025), Centro Cultural Matucana 100 (Santiago 2023), Marytwo Gallery (Switzerland 2023), Signs and Symbols Gallery (NY 2022), Walter Storms Galerie (Munich 2020), Practice Gallery (PA 2018), Roswell Museum and Art Center (NM 2017), Museo de Artes Visuales (Santiago 2016). She has participated in group exhibitions, screenings and performances worldwide. Bitrán was a resident at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Pioneer Works, Smack Mellon Studio Program, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Outpost Projects and Wassaic Projects. She currently teaches in the painting departments at Pratt Institute and Lehman College and is an active lecturer for various art schools and institutions.

Lucas Blalock is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Hammer Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Portland Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. Recent solo exhibitions include Florida, 1989, at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York; Insoluble Pancakes, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; and An Enormous Oar, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; recent group exhibitions include venues in Oslo, Miami, Moscow, Berlin, Beirut, Minneapolis, and New York, where his work was selected for the Whitney Biennial 2019. He and his art have been profiled in publications including Arforum, the New York Times, New Yorker, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, W Magazine, British Journal of Photography, and Time. He has published essays and interviews as author in the journal Objectiv, IMA Magazine, BOMB, Foam, and Mousse, among others. He teaches photography at Bard College.

Melissa Brown lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her paintings explore mundane events in her life as otherworldly tapestries of symbols, alignments, hidden messages, invisible effects, and transformations, revealing reality to be much more complex than we perceive it to be. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include Window Shopping at Derek Eller Gallery, Flower Games, at Cellar Contemporary in Trento, Italy, Two Pair and Windows and Bars at Derek Eller Gallery in New York City, West Coast Paintings at Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles, Thrift Store Find at Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago, Fountain, Melissa Brown and Jamie Bull at Dodd Gallery at the University of Georgia, Going AWOL at the Biggins Gallery, Auburn University. For over ten years she has organized poker tournaments where the wager is art at galleries, art fairs, and most recently, a tournament and exhibition titled Rules of the Game at the Center for Book Arts in New York City. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Pit LA, Canada, New York, Everyday Mooonday Seoul, Korea, Parker Gallery, Venus Over Manhattan, Mass MOCA, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Klaus Von Nichtssagend and Musée International Des Arts Modestes, France, and Deitch Projects, Los Angeles. In 2024-25, she was awarded a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program residency and residencies at Yaddo and Headlands in 2026.  In 2012, she was awarded the Joan Mitchell Painter’s Grant and a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in 2019. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Department of Education and the Fidelity Corporate Collection. She is a Professor in studio art at Lehman College, CUNY.

Jonathan Ehrenberg’s work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, SculptureCenter, The Drawing Center, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, Ulterior (New York), Futura Center (Prague), The B3 Biennial (Frankfurt), Temnikova & Kasela (Tallinn), and Nara Roesler (São Paulo). He has participated in residencies at LMCC Workspace, Harvestworks, Skowhegan, Triangle, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Glenfiddich in Scotland, and Shandaken: Storm King, and his work has been reviewed in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Art in America. He received a BA from Brown University, and an MFA from Yale, and teaches at Lehman College, CUNY. He was born in New York, NY, where he currently lives and works.

Kevin Ford received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University and his BFA in from Boston University. His work has been included in solo exhibitions at March Gallery, NY, NY, Gallery Sanghyunze, Seoul, South Korea, 12.26, Dallas, TX, Galerie Semiose, Paris, FR, Kate Werble Gallery, NY, NY, and Tops Gallery, Memphis, TN among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, TN, Reyes Finn, MI, The Center for Maine Contemporary Art, ME, Inman Gallery, TX, Casey Kaplan Gallery, NY, and elsewhere. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Burnaway, and other publications and it has been featured in V Magazine and included in the book Artists II. 

Daniel Gordon holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Yale School of Art, and he lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has staged solo exhibitions at Kasmin, New York (2023); Nazarian/Curcio, Los Angeles (2024); Huxley-Parlour, London (2024); Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston, MA (2021-22); Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX (2019) and Foam Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2014), among other venues. He has participated in several additional museum exhibitions at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens, Stockbridge, MA (2022); J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Pier 24, San Francisco (2016); MoMA P.S. 1, Queens, New York (2010); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009). His work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Pier 24, San Francisco; Foam Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and the VandenBroek Foundation, Lisse, Netherlands. Gordon’s most comprehensive monograph to date, New Canvas, was published by Chose Commune in 2022. He was included in Vitamin C+: Collage in Contemporary Art (Phaidon, 2023), a survey of contemporary artists whose practices demonstrate the wide-ranging possibilities of collage today. Additional publications of the artist’s work include Houseplants (Aperture, 2019), Spaces, Faces, Tables and Legs (OSP, 2018), Intermissions (OSP, 2017), Still Life with Onions and Mackerel (OSP, 2014), Still Lifes, Portraits, and Parts (Mörel, 2013), Flowers and Shadows (Onestar Press, 2011), and Flying Pictures (powerHouse Books, 2009).

Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s recent solo museum exhibitions include Brief Emotion, Frac Bretagne, Rennes, FR; You Are Here, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art Charleston, SC; and Now That I Can Dance, Tufts University Art Gallery, Tufts University, Medford, MA. Huffman’s work has also been exhibited at museums and institutions including Wexner Center for the Arts, Ballroom Marfa, The Kitchen, MoCA Tucson, Swiss Institute, New York, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, The Jewish Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Hammer Museum. Huffman was educated at Bard College (BA), Brown University (MFA, Literary Arts), and USC (MFA, Studio Art), his awards include the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Jerome Foundation Travel Grant and fellowships from Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Lighthouse Works, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Huffman was a 2015-16 Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work is in the permanent collections of Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Kadist, San Francisco, CA/Paris, FR; Pierce & Hill Harper Arts Foundation, Detroit, MI; Studio Museum in Harlem, Harlem, NY; and Tufts University Art Collection, Medford, MA. Huffman lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Meredith James completed her AB at Harvard University and her MFA at Yale University. She had a museum exhibition at the Queens Museum, NY and has had solo shows at Jack Hanley Gallery, NY; LaMontange Gallery, Boston; and Marc Jancou, NY. She has installed major public art projects at Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; The Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston; and Lieu Histrorique National Center-Brébeuf, Quebec City.

Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a double BA in Semiotics and Visual Arts from Brown University and an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. Incorporating installation, drawing, video, as well as living materials and processes, Lin’s work deals with the politics of representation with a focus on histories of colonialism and diaspora vis-à-vis race, gender, and sexuality. Lin has had recent solo exhibitions at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2024); Canal Projects, New York (2023); Spike Island, Bristol, UK (2022); Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge (2022), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2021); Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2021); and Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2020). Lin’s work showed at the 59th Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams” (2022), Prospect.5 Triennial “Yesterday We Said Tomorrow” (2022), and both the 13th and 14th Gwangju Biennales (2021, 2023). She is the recipient of the 2024 Ruth Award, 2023 Arnoldo Pomodoro Sculpture Prize, a 2022 Gold Art Prize, and a 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, among others. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Walker Art Center.

Dana Lok received an MFA from Columbia University in 2015 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016. In 2018, Lok was awarded the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Solo exhibitions of her work include As Syllable from Sound, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2024); Closer to the Metal, Clima, Milan (2023); Part and Parse, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2022); One Second Per Second, PAGE, New York (2020); Words Without Skin, Clima, Milan (2019); Mind’s Mouth, Bianca D’Allessandro, Copenhagen (2018); Soft Fact, Clima, Milan (2017); and The Set of All Sets, Chewday’s, London (2016). Selected group shows include Eye of the Blackbird, Bo Bartlett Centerat Columbus State University, Columbus, GA (2025); Anything But Here, Candice Madey, New York (2025); Double Lift, David Petersen Gallery, Minneapolis (2024); Strange Sensation, Foyer LA, Los Angeles (2024); darling, your head’s not right, curated by Danica Lundy, François Ghebaly, New York (2023); Anything can pass before the eyes of a person, Derosia, New York (2023); X PINK 101, X Museum, Beijing (2023); The future perfect will have arrived, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (2023); Le Biscuit à Soupe, High Art, Arles, France (2022); Gravity, a proposal,Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2022); Regroup Show, Miguel Abreu Gallery (2021); Fifteen Painters, Andrew Kreps Gallery (2021); PAGE (NYC), Petzel Gallery (2021); and In Place Of, curated by Leah Pires, Miguel Abreu Gallery (2016), all in New York. Her work is held in the collections of Espacio 2021, La Palma; Pinault Collection; and X Museum, Beijing.

Pooneh Maghazehe is a Brooklyn-based sculptor. Notable solo presentations include “Double Barrel” at Martos After Dark, “Half-Time” at KinoSaito Art Center in Verplank, NY and “2for1” at Brennan & Griffin Gallery in New York, NY. Select group exhibitions include “Global Contemporary : Art Worlds After 1989” at ZKM Center for Art and Media, “Transnational Aesthetics” 798 Biennal at BTAP Gallery, Etiquette for Lucid Dreaming” Gateway II at Newark Penn Station and “Iran Inside Out” at DePaul University Museum. A forthcoming four-person sculpture exhibition will travel between Geary Contemporary Gallery and the Bridgehampton Art Museum in Spring 2026. Her work has been featured in Artforum, BmoreArt, Contemporary Practices, Flaunt Magazine, Art Asia Pacific Magazine and Magazine 1. She received an MFA from Columbia University in 2011.

Sean McCarthy received a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. He has had solo exhibitions of his paintings and drawings at Fredericks & Freiser and Essex Flowers (where his 2020 exhibition was named a must-see show by the editors of Artforum) in New York and the Palmer Gallery at Vassar College, as well as group exhibitions at Marlborough Chelsea and Kate Werble Gallery in New York, One in the Other in London, VOLTA in Basel, Tops Gallery in Memphis, and Ada Gallery in Richmond, among many other venues. His comics and zines have been featured in a global survey of zine culture at Cubitt Gallery in London and the Desert Island Comic Zine Party at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and he received a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Fiction for his work in comics. He is Associate Professor of Art at Lehman College of the City University of New York in the Bronx and has also taught studio art at Pratt Institute. He is a contributing writer at The Comics Journal and runs a Risograph press called Pollinator Print Works. He lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York.

Shana Moulton is a California-born-and based artist who works in video, performance, and installation. In 2002, Moulton began the video series Whispering Pines, in which she performs as Cynthia, an alter-ego searching for purpose and fulfillment through home decor, self-help paraphernalia, and cosmetic rituals. Moulton has had solo exhibitions at international institutions including MoMA, Palais De Tokyo, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Kunsthaus Glarus, Art in General, and the Zabludowicz Collection. Her work has been featured in Artforum, the New York Times, Art in America, Flash Art, BOMB, and Frieze, among others. Her single-channel videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix.

Maria Rapoport is a psychoanalyst and writer. Her psychoanalytic writing was a finalist for the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis Gradiva Award and received the National Institute for the Psychotherapies Educator’s Award. Her literary work has appeared in publications including BOMB Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, The Iowa Review, The Rattling Wall, and The Pinch. She received an Iowa Review Award in creative nonfiction and has been awarded fellowships by the Edward Albee Foundation and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program. She is currently working on a book of experimental short fiction and a nonfiction book about clinical application of neuropsychoanalysis.

Andrew Ross is an artist working within the intersections of assemblage sculpture and digital imaging. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2011, where he was awarded the Gelman Trust Award for Excellence in Sculpture. He attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at SUNY New Paltz and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and has previously served as a visiting professor in Graduate Painting and Drawing at Virginia Commonwealth University. He’s been a resident or fellow of programs including The Windgate Artist in Residence at SUNY Purchase College of Art and Design, ISCP, The Triangle Arts Association, The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, LMCC’s Swing Space, The Macedonia Institute, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Atelier Mondial, and Two Trees’ Cultural Space Subsidy Program. He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2025. Ross has exhibited in group exhibitions at The Hessel Museum, The Drawing Center, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Artists Space, Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center, White Columns, and Greene Naftali. He has staged solo and two-person exhibitions at Thomas Erben Gallery, Kai Matsumiya Fine Arts Gallery, The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center, Signal, American Medium, Clima Gallery, and False Flag Gallery. Ross’ work has been reviewed in publications including Artforum, Art in America, Cultured, Flash Art, Mousse, and the Brooklyn Rail.