Things That Remember Us brings together the work of Calvin Miceli-Nelson, Lub Poeem and Naoki Sutter-Shudo in an exhibition shaped by the afterlives of objects. Across sculpture, painting, and installation, each artist approaches material not as inert matter, but as something psychically charged: a vessel capable of storing touch, labor, memory, and belief. Branches polished by hand until they begin to resemble relics, stones transformed through small gestures of balance, painted scenes where fragmented landscapes and symbolic forms drift through dreamlike architectures: the works in the exhibition occupy a threshold where things cease representing the world and begin participating in it. What emerges is an ecology of unstable symbols, where matter appears capable of feeling, witnessing, and remembering alongside us.
Throughout the exhibition, acts of transformation unfold slowly and imperfectly. Sutter-Shudo’s worked branches become condensed traces of sunlight and duration, shaped through meticulous sanding to reveal hidden forms latent within the material itself. Poeem’s sculptural interventions similarly hinge upon restraint and reanimation: discarded stones become vessels for flowers that gradually wilt and dry over the course of the exhibition, turning the sculptures into quiet meditations on mortality, devotion, and time. Miceli-Nelson’s paintings approach transformation through narrative and psychological projection, rendering imagined landscapes populated by drifting forms and symbolic debris. Eerily tranquil, his paintings translate a certain il/logic of dreams, where fragmentary figures languish in washy, layered tableaus, teetering on the brink of total dispersion.
Rather than treating memory as something stable or purely human, Things That Remember Us proposes remembrance as a material condition dispersed across bodies, images, and environments. In each artist’s work, acts of participation and moments of disintegration remain closely intertwined, joined by a shared faith in the immanent vitality of refuse. Together, these works suggest that the things surrounding us are never passive. They absorb our desires, anxieties, and systems of belief, eventually returning them to us altered, bearing witness to forms of fragility and persistence we struggle to name ourselves.