Exhibition Review: Edge of Illusions, Mriya Gallery, Tribeca

By SERENA HANZHI WANG November 20th, 2025

A ghostly chandelier made of silicone slowly rises and falls in the dim gallery, exhaling a pale glow onto the concrete floor. Its movement is deliberate, almost like breathing, then sinking back down as if under the weight of unseen memories. Below it, faint outlines of a giant tic-tac-toe grid glint with metal shavings. In the corner of your eye, a small paper boat—painted on canvas—seems to bob on an inky sea against a horizon of flames. Walking into Edge of Illusions at 101 Reade Street feels like stepping onto the threshold between past and present. Is this a stage set for a forgotten war memory, or an act of imagination willing a new reality? The question hangs in the air, drawing the viewer into the exhibition’s central preoccupation: how the shards of memory and flash collide in times of turmoil.

Installation view of “Edge of Illusions” at Mriya Gallery in Tribeca, NYC – a cultural Art exhibition where Janis Jakobsons’ silicone chandelier “breathes” above a field of metal shavings arranged in a tic-tac-toe pattern (foreground).

This haunting scene is the result of an unprecedented collaboration that bridges continents. Edge of Illusions brings together Rukh Art Hub (USA), the Tukku Magi Project (Latvia), and Mriya Gallery (Ukraine/New York) in a joint effort to ignite “a captivating dialogue among diverse cultural landscapes”. It’s a rare alignment of visions: American, Latvian, and Ukrainian voices uniting to explore how art can respond to, and even anticipate, the upheavals of our era.

 Tellingly, many works in the show were created between 2012 and 2014, yet they feel eerily prophetic today – as if the artists had intuited the coming storms. In a time when real war would once again stalk Ukrainian waters, here we find paintings from a decade ago where paper boats drift through fiery seas. Even the dignitaries present at the opening—such as Ambassador Sanita Pavļuta-Deslandes of Latvia—felt like witnesses of Art participated in this urgent conversation. The framework of the show is thus unapologetically magical and temporal: a dialogue across nations and decades that asks, how do creatives navigate conflict and loss, and what emerges when imagination confronts harsh reality?

 Zoya Frolova’s “Pattern of Night” (2013) and Above the Battle (2012), oil on linen. In Frolova’s visual poetry, paper boats bob defiantly on black waters against a burning horizon – “floating tokens of childhood innocence” set against the flames of war.

In Zoya Frolova’s paintings, a paper boat is never just a paper boat. It is a tiny act of faith, a stand-in for innocence resisting catastrophe. Frolova, who was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine and has lived in New York since the mid-1990s, paints with a diasporic double vision – one eye on the cherished memory of a homeland now scarred by conflict, the other on the immediate reality of her safe haven abroad. Her canvases often turn battlegrounds into playgrounds of metaphor: through the power of metaphor, paper boats replace warships, with childhood innocence confronting naval might. In “Pattern of Night” (painted in 2013, long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine), delicate origami boats float on a night-dark sea while an apocalyptic glow burns on the horizon. The materials shouldn’t survive this scene – fragile paper against fire and water – yet Frolova’s boats refuse to sink or burn. It is as if the fragility of these paper vessels is pretending to be invincible, holding their tiny shape in the face of catastrophe. That absurdity is the crux of Frolova’s work: the recognition that in a world where steel warships can be reduced to rusted husks, a flimsy paper skiff might carry more hope than any dreadnought.

 Janis Jakobsons, Chandelier (Light Sculpture), 2024, H 86 in (2018 cm) x D 32.5 in (85 cm) Silicon, Steel wire, Steel hardware

If Frolova’s works are prayers set afloat on dark waters, Janis Jakobsons’ installations are the theaters where those prayers echo. Jakobsons, a Latvian-born artist who has made New York his home since the 1990s, brings a very different sensibility into the dialogue – one of grand, operatic machinery and dark whimsy. At the center of the gallery, his luminous silicone chandelier hangs like a phantom stage prop. Its translucent tentacles of light are designed to be raised and lowered with operatic eminence, and indeed they move. Every so often, with a soft whir and creak. This motion is hypnotic. The chandelier emits a warm, heavy glow – heavy light, as one might call it – that feels both lavish and ominous. Jakobsons finds poetry in mechanical repetition: the way the chandelier ascends and descends is like a lung or a stage curtain, giving the installation a rhythmic life. As a viewer, you cannot help but anthropomorphize the device – each rise and fall feels like an exhalation of grief and an inhalation of resolve, a cycle of mourning rendered in light and motion.

  At the Opening of Installation view of “Edge of Illusions” at Mriya Gallery in Tribeca, NYC, October 23, 2025

On the floor beneath this hanging sculpture lies Jakobsons’ sly nod to both art history and childhood play. He has arranged iron filings and metal shavings into the form of a giant tic-tac-toe grid, a dark metallic square that immediately brings to mind Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square. Scattered across this grid are what look like game pieces – perhaps shards of metal or other small sculptural elements marking X’s and O’s. The tic-tac-toe motif, echoing Frolova’s recurring boat symbol, reinforces the show’s conversation about innocence and conflict. 

I think in dialogue with Frolova’s paper boats (themselves a kind of game piece against war), Jakobsons’ metal game board suggests that even the gravest conflicts are a deadly game played over and over on the same grid. There’s a tragic humor in it: tic-tac-toe is unwinnable if both players know what they’re doing, and in this installation one senses the futility of war’s endless rounds. Yet within this structured sorrow, there’s also a strange solace: the mechanical ritual creates a space where grief is acknowledged, almost sung into the air, rather than ignored. Jakobsons transforms the gallery into a kind of memorial stage where the show must go on, gracefully and gravely.

 Installation view of “Edge of Illusions” at Mriya Gallery in Tribeca, NYC 

Vasyl Mironenko (1910–1964) enters Edge of Illusions not through a physical artwork on the wall, but through what the exhibition calls “an intimate dialogue with the legacy” of his practice. A Ukrainian master printmaker who chronicled the rise of Soviet industry, Mironenko left behind etchings of steel plants—Azovstal’s chimneys, cranes, and vast factory grids—that now read as chillingly contemporary. His legacy functions in the show as a conceptual anchor, a historical counterpoint that sharpens the emotional terrain navigated by the two contemporary artists. In his images, ambition and decay sit side by side: factories rendered with devotional precision yet already haunted by their eventual collapse. By invoking Mironenko’s vision, the exhibition builds a bridge across generations, revealing that the fragility and violence shaping today’s world have deep, persistent roots. His work reminds us that we are not confronting something new, but something returning.

  Zoya Frolova, Battleship, I-IV, 2005, 35,5 x 47 in*4, Digital Print

In the end, Edge of Illusions offers something rare: a space where different times speak to each other. Walking through the exhibition is like listening in on a dialogue between grandparents,  parents, and children – three generations of artists sharing notes on how they have endured turbulent times. Frolova’s paintings from 2013 sensed the rupture long before it arrived; Jakobsons’ theatrical machines embody cycles of grief that feel uncannily familiar; Mironenko as a reference - his mid-century visions prefigure the landscapes of destruction we see now. 

The show’s curators frame it “a reassurance that others before us have faced darkness with creativity and courage”. Despite the heavy themes of conflict and collapse, the atmosphere is not despairing. On the contrary, it’s reflective, even gentle in its darkness. In a corner of the gallery during the opening, Ambassador Pavļuta-Deslandes stood quietly alongside artists and viewers, all carving out a small space of attention and hope amid the noise of world events. This encapsulates the exhibition’s achievement: it creates a haven of contemplation in the heart of Tribeca’s bustle, a place where one can reckon with tragedy yet not feel utterly overcome.