A Quiet Insurgency in Chelsea: Sacrament’s Exit Wound and the Architecture of Rupture

 Emma Beatrez – Pivot - 14” x 11” - oil on canvas over panel

By LUCIA MERROW April 19, 2025

On West 19th Street in Chelsea—between David Zwirner, Vito Schnabel, and directly beside Nicola Vassell Gallery—a small exhibition staged inside Urbana Gallery and Coffee Shop is mounting a quiet insurgency. Sacrament, a curatorial project founded by interdisciplinary artist John Brendan Guinan, offers a model that rejects the optics of prestige while remaining fiercely committed to conceptual clarity and emotional consequence. There is something unmistakably punk in its refusal of pretense, its structural democratization, and its disregard for the protocols that often insulate contemporary art from the public it claims to serve. In a neighborhood engineered for exclusivity, Sacrament counters with intimacy, density, and a different kind of gravity. It does not mask its access—it radicalizes it.

Its second exhibition, Exit Wound, brings together Emma Beatrez, Todd Bienvenu, and Jack Drummond. These artists span markedly different stages of their careers: Beatrez and Bienvenu have received significant critical recognition and attention, while Drummond, a BFA student, is making some of his first public marks. That they appear together—without hierarchy, without distinction in framing—is not incidental. It’s essential. Sacrament curates laterally. What matters is not market standing, but psychic charge—how a work insists, reverberates, or punctures.

Guinan’s curatorial framework draws from a lineage of anarchistic thought—not merely in its structural decentralization, but in its symbolic resistance to fixed meaning, favoring ambiguity, and viewer participation over institutional legibility. Born above a homeless shelter run by his parents in Washington, DC, and raised within the Catholic Worker tradition emphasizing radical hospitality, Guinan brings a worldview formed by ritual, theology, and the rejection of power structures. His own practice spans installation, mythopoesis, and world-building; his exhibitions unfold less as statements than as symbolic architectures. Sacrament is not a rejection of the gallery model—it’s a different cosmology altogether.

Opening Night for Exit Wound featuring Emma Beatrez, Todd Bienvenu and Jack Drummond at Urbana Gallery and Coffee Shop (Photo by: Vladyslav Kondratenko)

Its philosophical rigor is not declared through scale or production value but through structural intention. There’s no Artsy page, no choreography of collector-facing spectacle. Aside from the exhibition title and artist names on the wall, contextual framing is minimal. The show is tightly installed and thoughtfully paced. A modest digital presence exists (a press release, an Instagram account, a public price list), but it serves transparency more than promotion. Guinan isn’t rejecting structure—he’s navigating within the rupture, reconfiguring how exhibitions can hold meaning without defaulting to institutional scripts or market gloss. Above and beyond its curatorial premise, Exit Wound delivers serious, arresting work. You might have to sidestep a stroller or weave through a family of five visiting from Ohio, but what’s on the walls is worth it. The show opens with Emma Beatrez, whose paintings set the tone for everything that follows—charged, uncanny, and suspended somewhere between ritual and unease.

Emma Beatrez’s two paintings approach iconography as if through fog—soft-edged, but charged. Heartbreaker depicts a unicorn floating in cosmic suspension, somewhere between fantasy and sacred relic. Pivot, a tightly cropped portrait of a cheerleader’s face and torso, radiates with a strange vacancy. The figure glows, but not with vitality—more like a symbol charged past its expiration date. Beatrez’s practice doesn’t traffic in nostalgia; it animates disused imagery with a kind of quiet, ceremonial force. These are not ironic paintings. They are reverent in the way ghosts are: unfinished, potent, slightly dangerous.

 Emma Beatrez - Heartbreaker - 14” x 11” - oil on canvas over panel

Todd Bienvenu’s paintings bring forward something looser, fleshier, and more immediate—but equally unstable. In one, a dating profile is glimpsed mid-scroll. In another, a close-up of an erection pushes against the limits of casual visibility. But to reduce Bienvenu’s work to provocation is to miss the point. These are not gestures of bravado. They’re gestures of collapse. The erotic, here, is melancholic. The body isn’t triumphant—it’s exposed, absurd, sometimes pathetic. Bienvenu’s painterly language has earned him international attention, but what’s striking in Exit Wound is how unguarded the work feels—how little it performs knowingness.

Todd Bienvenu - Boner - 12” x 12” - Oil on panel

Jack Drummond, the youngest of the three, works with the iconography of surveillance. Payday shows a masked bank robber mid-heist, rendered in the pixelated grain of CCTV. Another piece captures a roadside shoulder—vacant, depopulated, strange. Drummond’s materials are acrylic and airbrush, but his real medium is omission. These works are not images in the traditional sense—they are records of having seen, of failed recognition, of atmospheric unease. That such an emergent artist holds his own in this context only reinforces Sacrament’s curatorial belief: that critical engagement is not the exclusive domain of careerist visibility.

Jack Drummond - Payday -10” x 7.5” - acrylic on canvas over panel  

That these three artists agreed to present here—outside the institutional safety net, embedded in the ambient flow of a coffee shop, next door to Chelsea’s most fortified galleries—is its own gesture of solidarity. Not against the art world, but toward another arrangement of it. One that privileges experience over access, presence over posture.

The curatorial project extends this ethic beyond its walls and also embraces mutual aid. A portion of proceeds from Exit Wound will benefit Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, the city’s largest emergency feeding program. With each future exhibition, a different local nonprofit will be selected. The hope is not to brand this act, but to normalize it. Visibility, here, is expected to do more than circulate. It must contribute.

The press release for Exit Wound reads: “These three aren’t making art about the apocalypse. They’re painting from inside it.” That distinction isn’t rhetorical—it’s architectural. These works don’t seek to explain collapse. They endure it. The wound, in this case, is not symbolic. It’s formal. And what seeps from it is what Sacrament exists to hold: dissonance, doubt, and—occasionally—grace.

Exit Wound, presented by Sacrament in partnership with Urbana Gallery and Coffee Shop, is on view daily through June 10, 2025, at 144 10th Avenue, New York, NY 10011. Hours are Monday through Friday from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM, and weekends from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM.

https://www.sacrament-ny.com