Surroundings Exhibition at SPACE776

SPACE776, Surroundings exhibition, installation view (featuring at right), Lise Ellingsen's Kloen, 2023, Claw machine with fluorescent light, sound, and 3D printed Polylactic Acid figurines, 55 x 15 x 15 in. Courtesy SPACE776 Gallery.

By MARK BLOCH, March 8, 2025

A group show of objects and paintings called “Surroundings” at SPACE776 features seven youngish New York artists: Dasha Bazanova, Lise Ellingsen, Mary Tooley Parker, Sarah Fuhrman, Zak Vreeland, Chunbum Park, and Ryan Schroeder. It includes ceramic sculpture, assemblage, 3-D printing, photographs, oil painting, and textile art by the four women and three men, however gender fluidity is explored herein, as are inter-species, inter-ethnicity and deity-human relations—so all bets are off when it comes to “who.”

According to the press release, more important is “where.” It is, after all, a show called “Surroundings.” So what currently surrounds us? This exhibit on Clinton Street aspires to conceal the importance of the individual self “since individuality is always shaped by—and connected to—our relationships and the context of our surroundings.” But thankfully, “shaped” and “connected” does not mean usurped or disappeared because if it does, then I don’t buy it for a second. The seven clever individuals whose work I saw “there” were front and center as artists and and as people and I feel better off for it. They were indeed a “group” as in “group show” and the gallery provided a common ground. But each artist and their work could also be said to be single, separate and solitary subjects for examination.

Zak Vreeland, Compass, 2020, Resin and objects, 8 x 6 x 6 in. Courtesy SPACE776 Gallery.

Sarah Fuhrman is a gifted painter with fun ideas. Her paintings are tableaus that capture offbeat intricacies inspired by her life and imagination that tap into a universally collective consciousness of what's good, what's not and what's neutral, all laced with a lightness and a sense of humor.

Her 2024 painting Charged By a Magic Spell enchanted me immediately, presenting a bird's eye view of a fictitious resort or amusement park just out of reach called Kishefdik On the Shore with some whimsical lettering and branding that provided a feeling of familarity and nostalgia within the fake tourism in a land of pure fantasy and playfulness.

Sarah Fuhrman, Bataclan, 2016, Mixed media on panel, 9 x 12 in. Courtesy SPACE776 Gallery.

Though it does not appear to be a commonly-used Yiddishism, kishefdik means “charged by a magic spell,” apparently, indicating that it is sprinkled with a mysticism. Mark Chagall was inspired to become a painter by a fiddler uncle who was a characterized as kishefdik, Fuhrman explained. “I could relate,” she said, “since I had an opera singer aunt who seemed kishefdik to me and who inspired me to become a painter,” adding she loves the term, “Because it’s so mystical and optimistic.”

In her practice, angels appear, allowing some form of magic to happen. Similarly, her Bataclan is inspired by Dave Hickey’s book Invisible Dragon, a metaphor for timeless artistic strength that endures generations. Her painting is named for a venue attacked by terrorists in France. But finding the building beautiful, she wanted it to “float up into space.” It is surrounded by people: old gender based roles, children-dolls, sadomasochistic parent figures, and a monster that chases a hair-falling-out and fleeing nude woman.“In front of them is a relaxed nude of a gallery director I work with, observing the scene, on a flannel picnic blanket.”

Sarah Fuhrman, Charged By a Magic Spell, 2024, Mixed Media on Panel, 22 x 35 in. Courtesy SPACE776 Gallery.

The artist and archivist Zak Vreeland uses resin and other materials to bring found objects to life. He showed five pithy well-made sculptures, smallish, each constructed from found metal and plastic objects with two also utilizing cement. The pieces have an awkward quirkiness to them and an awareness of Surrealism. I was partial to Compass, more awkward and elongated than the others and one of the earliest pieces—from 2020. He also showed pieces called Flower, (2022), Brush, (2025), Train Piece, (2024), and Lemon, (2025), which, like the others, had little in common with its title, although in the case of Lemon, it was a translucent yellow.

Lise Ellingsen, Comedian candle holder, 2025, Auðumbla, Banana candle holder, 2024, Isis the Goddess, 2024. Courtesy SPACE776 Gallery.
 

Lise Ellingsen is interested in her Norse background and in Norse mythology. The gallery seemed to “surround” her novel interactive claw machine for which visitors could buy tokens to mechanically pluck 3D-printed sculptural totems representing ancient Scandanavian mythological figures merging the Collective Unconscious with arcade gaming. Comedian candle holder was a 2025 reference to a 2019 artwork by Maurizio Cattelan's fresh banana affixed to a wall. Her 2024 Banana candle holder was similar but without the all-important duct tape. In another 3D printed figure, Ellingsen's constant companion, her dog Isis, was tranformed into a winged goddess effigy. Finally, her piece called Auðumbla, anglicized as Audumla, refers to another Norse ancient goddess-being who emerged from Ginnungagap, a primordial void at the beginning of creation, playing a crucial role of the first giants and gods.

Mary Tooley Parker, Entre Le Chien et Le Loup, 2013, Hooked tapestry, 15 x 26 in. Courtesy SPACE776 Gallery.

 
Mary Tooley Parker’s traditional textile rug works are tactile documentations that also weave together memories, experiences and identity. The Cottage, Back Room, (2019) was a hooked tapestry of a familiar scene, a dresser and mirror in a bedroom no doubt linked to something deeper, while Entre Le Chien et Le Loup, (Between the Dog and the Wolf) 2013, indicates netherworld critters who populate a mysterious netherworld threshhold, a clearing adjacent to a forest with a disconnect created by the contrast of ferocious carnivores with the soft material.

(Left)  
Dasha Bazanova, Pig’s head, 2024, Ceramic, 15 x 12 x 10 in.; (Right) Dasha Bazanova, Baby lamb, 2025, Ceramic, approx 22 x 19 x 13 in. Both courtesy SPACE776 Gallery.
 

The pack-dwellers in Tooley Parker’s ashen forest scene was deftly juxtaposed with a lush landscape featuring a bunny, a fox, a bird and more by 
Dasha Bazanova—of the Taiga Forest in the Arkhangelsk region of northwest Russia—another woodsy scene where many are said to have disappeared without a trace. In old Russian fairy tales about the danger of bears and other rapacious creatures, humans and smaller animals, alike, venture into these woods, never to return.

“I spent every summer at my grandparents' small farm, surrounded by goats, pigs, cats, and our neighbors’ cows... rooted in my subconscious and childhood memories,” she said. And so Bazanova’s current body of work is inspired by that forest as well as George Orwell's Animal Farm in which wild beasts perform in a theatre of the natural world—with humor, vanity, solitude, and companionship but also a tension between individual desire and collective human experience, between chaos and sincerity, using figurative distortion, and layered storytelling. And all while aspiring to “the satirical traditions of Russian literary greats like Dostoevsky and Gogol.” Yikes—yet Bazanova pulls it off, carefully steering clear of the dangers of the forest while living in New York City, feeling as vulnerable as the  little lambs or goats in her new series of works. Her ceramic figures, like the forest scene, become a lens through which to examine personal and societal complexities.

Chunbum Park, Playing with a Doll, 2021, Digital Photography / Unique Giclee Print, 12 x 18 in. Courtesy SPACE776 Gallery.

Chunbum Park’s self-explorations deal with gender identity including male actors who perform female roles in Kabuki theater. Their term onnagata means “woman's manner.” “People say that you shouldn’t judge people based on physical beauty alone, but physical beauty still matters to people a lot,” Park has said. “So a total rejection of physical beauty is not an answer because while beauty is dismissed, it still has immense power.”

In addition to the deceptively passive Playing with a Doll, 2021, a digital photography, giclee print, Park showed Taken By Haley Indorato 23 - Vines, 2020, which seems to question authorship as well as binaries and racialized societal norms—new ones and old ones. 

Ryan Schroeder, Ghost Overlays, 2024, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 in. Courtesy SPACE776 Gallery.

Ryan Schroeder’s double images in an oil painting, Ghost Overlays, of figures in surroundings, blur the subjects, blur reality and question perception. Is it double vision because of drugs, perhaps? or just the nature of time? Or time and space? Is this some post-modern Cubism re-do? He also inhabits the show with a couple of other images in The Case of the Tranquilizing Light, 2023 and Track Rabbits, 2024, an image of a political moment taking place in a subway car.

And so, like packs of wolves in a fraught environment surrounded by a non-material group mind, this group of human beings also operates discretely, independently, and in isolation. Sometimes, like now, for instance, our surroundings present us with irrational people with irrational expectations issuing irrational commands. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” Elon Musk said February 28th, calling the emotion, “a bug in Western civilization.” Despite marching orders, and perhaps even strategically questioning how and whether defining ourselves by our identity serves us, all artists are currently grappling with instructions to dare not be “woke” (in order to stave off Communism or some such nonsense?)(as if current events are less scary than anything a Bernie Sanders might “command” us to collectively do?). On February 23rd, Jane Fonda, once known as Hanoi Jane and later married to Ted Turner, accepting a Screen Actor Guild's lifetime achievement award responded to current events with, “Woke just means you give a damn about other people.”

Dasha Bazanova, Taiga Forest, 2025, Oil and acrylic paint on canvas in metal frame, 25 x 39 in. Courtesy SPACE776 Gallery.

What I saw in this exhibition differed from what currently surrounds us. I saw optimism, trust, and a willingness to examine both traditional and self-created mythology in pursuit of larger views.

Maybe this is corny or not relevant but I am reminded me of three Star Trek films in the 1980s that grappled with whether “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” (or “the one”). In  The Wrath of Khan (1982), the always left-brained Mr. Spock said, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” to which Kirk answered, “Or the one.”  Then in the film's last scene, when Spock is voluntarily kicking the bucket behind a wall of glass, much like Lise Ellingsen's claw machine, I might add, with his final breath, Spock repeats the phrase to Kirk, followed by, “Don't grieve, Admiral. It is logical.”

In the next film, The Search for Spock (1984), when the crew discovers that Spock might not be dead, they break the law and risk everything to save him. When Spock later questions this, Kirk answers, “Because the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.” Finally, as a third film (the best,IMHO), The Voyage Home (1986) opens, Spock’s mother, human and married to his always-rational Vulcan father, says to her son, “Your friends have given their future to save you.” When Spock acknowledges that humans are sometimes illogical; his mother affirms, “They are, indeed!”

Zak Vreeland Train Piece, 2024 Metal and cement, 7 x 6 x 2 in. Courtesy SPACE776 Gallery.

Later, Spock, insisting that the crew rescues Officer Chekhov, is asked by Kirk, “Is this the logical thing to do?” and Spock answers, “No, but it is the human thing to do,” knowing the needs of the many logically outweigh the needs of the few while suggesting that sometimes we must sometimes do the “human” thing, not the logical thing, and put the needs of the few (or the one) first.

The press release for this show stated that our surroundings are ecosystems, containers we are part of, while the artwork that artists create exists within a container, too—a smaller nesting doll within the artist. “How does the city contain its hidden codes of etiquette, manners, and behaviors that seek to civilize the wild and violent beast within us?”

Sometimes our surroundings are just other people: sometimes irrational, sometimes Vulcan, occasionally both. Brave artists must be willing to contemplate them and sometimes even leave the comfort of the nesting doll to confront them. WM

Dasha Bazanova, Lise Ellingsen, Sarah Fuhrman, Chunbum Park, Mary Tooley Parker, Ryan Schroeder, Zak Vreeland
Surroundings
February 21 - March 4, 2025
SPACE776
37-39 Clinton St., New York, NY, 10002