(No) Recess
May 14 – June 20, 2026
Peggy Ahwesh, Ina Archer, Lili Chin, S Emsaki, Copper Frances Giloth, Narcisa Hirsch, Chihiro Ito, Hey-Yeun Jang, Marni Kotak, Jahi Kijo Lendor, Jeanne Liotta, Rachel Phillips, Yao Qingmei, Kevin Reuning, Lamar Robillard, Joel Schlemowitz, Matt Town
Opening Reception Thursday May 14, 6-8pm
Microscope is excited to present “(No) Recess,” a group exhibition opening Thursday May 14 featuring mostly new and recent paintings, sculptures, single and multi-channel video, installation, photography, and drawings by a selection of emerging to established artists including those from our roster with works by Peggy Ahwesh, Ina Archer, Lili Chin, S Emsaki, Copper Frances Giloth, Narcisa Hirsch, Chihiro Ito, Hey-Yeun Jang, Marni Kotak, Jahi Kijo Lendor, Jeanne Liotta, Rachel Phillips, Yao Qingmei, Kevin Reuning, Lamar Robillard, Joel Schlemowitz, and Matt Town.
The exhibition title “(No) Recess” is partially inspired by the gallery’s experience during the past month of a sudden move and the resulting break in our programming, due to the loss of our gallery space, and our return last week to a new, temporary location in the building next door. It also refers to the themes of time, transition, disruption, and the fragility of our lives and experiences that frequently emerge from the highly varied works.
As a group, the works in “(No) Recess)” point to the contradictions between one’s intentions for their lives and enjoyment on this planet and the realities of it when confronted with authority, power, and control. What is free time, who gets free time, and for whom is free time for are among the questions raised in the show.
Multi-channel 3D animations and video installations, paintings, and E-ink works were made on the job; deal with labor and work conditions; or refer to incidents of gun violence or historical protests. The scenes and settings of these work extend from BP gas stations in Bushwick, Brooklyn to oil fields of Colonial Iran; from rural Walmart stores in the American mid-west to the gardens of China’s Tiananmen Square; as well as from the back shelves of art auction houses in Manhattan to luxurious environments depicted in the advertisements of golf and leisure magazines.
Several paintings, videos, and illuminated installations take their inspiration and content from activities often consider to be time-wasters. However, the doodling, playing puzzle games (e.g. Sudoku), diary-keeping, and other activities reveal lives and situations that are far from stress-free and set within the contexts of mental health crises, constant breaking news and other issues of our current times.
Other works in painting, drawing, and installation feature imagery from or alluding to sports or arts and literature. The imprints of the soles of Nike Air Force 1s; a portrait of costumed singer in a “Soundie,” (a 1940s version of music videos); and the face of Angela Davis on a stained, found T-shirt draw attention to the perceived values and appreciations of these activities, especially in relationship to socio-economic class, gender, and race, while often subverting or reclaiming negative or stereotypical imagery.
Themes of the show subtly surface through the processes and materials used in the making of the works. A ceramic wall sculpture, resembling natural elements, takes shape by joining delicately molded sections of previously unfinished works. The outline of a missing gun is almost completely contained within a case made of aqua-colored silicone rubber. A delicate colored lumen photogram of ferns is imprinted onto a scrap of raw steel. An installation revolves around an old door, outdated technologies, and is augmented with drawings of components that are missing.
Lastly, a realistically rendered sculpture of a slide projector created with cardboard and paint considers the technological means humanity has developed for the recording and preserving of our experiences. And, a single-channel videos offers a philosophical interrogation of time itself and its collapse — in which we see life, from birth to death, flash before us in an instant — and challenges us to consider the possibility no pause or recess ever exists.
(No) Recess opens on May 14 and continues through June 20 with an Opening Reception on Thursday May 14, 6-8pm.
Please note our new temporary address: 527 W. 29th Street, New York, NY 10001. Contact information remains info@microscopegallery.com, 347.925.1433.
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Peggy Ahwesh is an artist working primarily with film, video, and installation whose practice is an inquiry into feminism, cultural identity and genre. Her work engages political and social topicality, handled with theoretical rigor, while at the same time using humor and mistakes in an open embrace of the inexplicable. Her works have screened and exhibited extensively in the US and internationally. Institutional exhibitions include at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Kitchen, NY, NY; Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France; Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway; Spike Island, Bristol, UK; JOAN, Los Angeles, LA; and George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY among others. Ahwesh has received numerous grants and awards including from the Guggenheim Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Creative Capital, New York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA)and the Alpert Award in the Arts. She is the recipient of the 2025 Stan Brakhage Vision Award. Her works are in the permanent art collections of the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, among others. Peggy Ahwesh was born in 1954 in Canonsburg, PA and lives and works in New York, NY. Her works are represented by Microscope Gallery, New York.
Ina Archer is an artist working primarily with the mediums of drawing, collage, moving image, and installation, whose work examines the intersections of race/ethnicity, representation, and technology. Her works have been shown at institutions including Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Hill Foundation, New York, NY; White Columns, NY; The List Visual Arts Center at MIT, Cambridge, MA; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX; Portland Museum of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA, and many others. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times, among others. Archer was a Studio Artist in the Whitney Independent Study and has received grants and awards from Creative Capital, New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA), Harvestworks, and the American Academy in Rome. Archer received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University (NYU). Ina Archer currently lives between Washington DC and Brooklyn, NY. Her works are represented by Microscope Gallery, New York.
Lili Chin is an artist based in New York City. Combining installation, video and sculpture, her practice focuses on nature and architecture to explore rituals in time, bridging contemporary and ancient ideas that investigate themes of memory, duration, and spirituality. Her work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, Island Gallery, Below Grand, He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, STPI Print Center, Singapore, among others. Her work has been commissioned by the He Xiangning Museum in Shenzhen and the Ely Center of Contemporary Art in New Haven, CT. Her films have screened at Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, 601 Art Space, the Edinburgh Film Festival, and others. Residencies and fellowships include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, New York; Wave Hill, Bronx, NY; MacDowell Colony, NH; BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; The Studios at Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; Institute of Electronic Arts Fellowship, Alfred University, Alfred, NY; Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY; the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai, China; the Akiyoshidai International Art Village, Yamaguchi, Japan, and others. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute and MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Her works are represented by Microscope Gallery, New York.
S Emsaki is an interdisciplinary artist from Isfahan, Iran, currently living and working in New York City. Emsaki’s practice spans collage, printmaking, in-situ drawing, video, and archival intervention, examining petro-subjects, extraction, and material histories. She is a 2025-26 Studio Program Resident at Smack Mellon and the 2024 recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in Brooklyn. Emsaki is a recent alum of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York and earned an MFA from Yale University and a BA from UC Berkeley. Her work has been exhibited and screened at Smack Mellon, NY; Ashkal Alwan’s aashra Beirut, LB; the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, CA; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA; Westbeth Gallery, NY; and Gallatin Galleries, New York University. She’s attended fellowships and residencies at Yaddo Retreat, NY; the Fine Arts Work Center, MA; The Atlantic Center for the Arts, FL; the ICA, and the Paul Mellon Center in London, UK, and is a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant in 2025.
Copper Frances Giloth is an artist who has been working with digital media since the late 1970s, with much of her early work considered among the ground-breaking efforts in the then-early field of computer art and computer graphics. In 1980, Giloth became the first master of fine arts candidate and woman to graduate from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago after shifting her practice from sculpture to computer based moving image, drawings, and installations. Her work has also appeared at at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY; Museum of Moving Image (MoMI), Queens, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), Chicago, IL; Detroit Institute of the Arts; Detroit, MI; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC; ACM SIGGRAPH; among many others. Recent exhibitions include Digital Witness…” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Los Angeles, CA; “As I Said,” at Microscope Gallery, NY; and “Tomorrows – Folding, Flexing, and Expanding, Palazzo del Capitano Verona, Italy. Giloth lives and works between between Amherst, MA, USA and Aix-en-Provence, France. Her works are represented by Microscope Gallery in New York.
Narcisa Hirsch (Berlin, Germany 1928 – Bariloche, Argentina 2024) was the grande dame of Argentine experimental film. Today, many younger filmmakers in her home country, with whom she maintained an active exchange, consider her work to be a point of reference. Hirsch was born Narcisa Heuser in Berlin in 1928, the daughter of a German-Argentinean mother and the expressionist painter Heinrich Heuser. In 1937, she immigrated to Argentina with her mother via Vienna. Originally working as a painter, her interest in film arose during the documentation of collaborative public performances and happenings undertaken in the streets of Buenos Aires, New York, and London. Hirsch has completed 50+ films since the mid-1960s. Thematically, her films often deal with women, bodies, death, but also with the very personal cinematic appropriation of landscapes. Her films have been the subject of major retrospectives at venues including Viennale (2012, 2023), MoMA (2024), Media City Film Festival (2023), s8 Festival de Cine Periferico (2024). She is the author of several books including “Philosophy Is a Useless Passion” (2015). The Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch was established in 2019 to preserve her films and provide a cultural space for artists’ film in Buenos Aires. She was active as a filmmaker until the very end of her life, and her great influence on the following generations will remain. She lived and worked between Buenos Aires and Patagonia. Her works are represented by Microscope Gallery in New York.
Chihiro Ito is a Japanese artist living and working in New York. His work is influenced by diaristic filmmaking and the Fluxus movement, ranging from painting to performance and moving image. In 2018, Ito traveled to New York on a grant from the Japanese government. There, he met Jonas Mekas and began to focus more on video and poetry production. His films have received more than 40 film awards to date. In 2021, Ito was a recipient of a City Artist Grant by New York Foundation of the Arts and the Robert Rauschenberg emergency grant. In 2023, Ito received the Jonas Mekas Fellowship from the Monira Foundation and Jonas Mekas Studio.
Hey-Yeun Jang is a Korea-born, New York-based artist. Her works have been exhibited in museums internationally, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Queens Museum (New York), Lincoln Center (New York), National Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul), Hangaram Art Museum (Seoul), Pacific Art Museum (Seoul), Carrillo Gil Museum (Mexico City), Centro Cultural Tijuana, Museum 63 Artist Commune (Hong Kong), Bund 18 Creative Center (Shanghai), and the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba (Havana). Her films have been screened at venues such as the New York Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Brooklyn Museum of Art, National Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul), Anthology Film Archives (New York), Los Angeles County Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, and Kabuki Theater (San Francisco).
Marni Kotak is a multimedia and performance artist presenting everyday life being lived. She has received international attention for her durational performances and exhibitions, most notably “The Birth of Baby X” (2011) in which she gave birth to her son as a live performance and “Mad Meds” (2014) during which the artist slowly withdrew from psychiatric medications prescribed for postpartum depression. In “Treehouse” (2017), Kotak — who had just experienced a devastating fire in her home — created a refuge for herself and others to pause from the overwhelming aspects of life and in “Dancing in the Oval Office” (2019) she danced each day within a recreation of the White House Oval Office. Kotak’s works have also appeared at the Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile; Artists Space, New York, NY; Exit Art, New York, NY; White Box, New York, NY Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY; English Kills Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn, NY; among others. She has performed extensively in the US and abroad. Her exhibitions have been featured in Artforum, Blouin Artinfo, Art Pulse, The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Times, Studio International, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Time Magazine, Washington Post, among many others. Kotak’s work also appear in books and publications including “The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption,” Bloomsbury (2022); Maternal Performance: Feminist Relations, Palgrave McMillian (2021); The Art of Feminisim: Images that shaped the Fight for Equality, 1957-2017, Chronicle Books (2018); and Blackwells Companions to Contemporary Art: A Companion to Feminist Art, John Wiley & Sons (2019), among others. Kotak has appeared on Good Morning America (ABC), CBC Radio, NPR, ZDFKultur, and other broadcasts as well as in the documentary “The Art of Making it,” (2021) currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Marni Kotak received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Brooklyn College. Her works are represented by Microscope Gallery in New York.
Jahi Kijo Lendor (b.1991, Brooklyn, NY) is a Black-Dominican American, NY/NJ-based artist whose work focuses on reflecting on how he sees life and his environment, which translates to a multi-melaninated reality of the Black experience. His work has been exhibited in at at the “Black Biennial” at the RISD Museum in Providence, RI; in “Assembly” curated by Katie Pfohl for NADA Curated; and in “Meridian” at Below Grand, New York, NY, among others. Lendor graduated with a BFA and a BA from Rutgers University, New Jersey in 2019. He was a Society of Presidential Fellows recipient at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, RI, where he received his MFA in Painting in 2023. His works are represented by Microscope Gallery, New York.
Jeanne Liotta works with film, photography, collage, drawing, installation and other mediums with thematics often located at the intersection of art, science, natural philosophy, and ephemerality. Liotta’s works have been presented in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, Colorado; The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; The Contemporary Austin Jones Center, Austin, Texas; Inova Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; The Camera Club of NY, New York; and the Halle für Kunst und Media, Graz, Austria among others. Her films have appeared in the New York Film Festival, New York, NY; Rotterdam International Film Festival, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Cinémathèque Française, Paris, France; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany; CCCB, Barcelona, Spain; The Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA; Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA; and many others. Awards include NYSCA, The Jerome Foundation, The Museum of Contemporary Cinema and The Orphans Film Symposium’s Helen Hill Award. Liotta has been a resident at the Experimental Television Center and a MacDowell Colony Fellow, among others. Jeanne Liotta lives and works in New York. Her works are represented by Microscope Gallery, New York.
Rachel Phillips (b. Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been exhibited in the US and internationally including at Cindy Rucker Gallery, Walter Wickiser Gallery, Brian Morris Gallery, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Galerie Protégé, Nurture Art, Chashama, and O’Flaherty’s in New York as well as at the Gran Sasso Science Institute in L’Aquila, Italy, and Salon Space, Berlin, Germany, among many others. Phillips’ work has been featured in Artnet, ArtMaze, Bedford & Bowery, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, and Talking Pictures Blog, among others. She was recently interviewed in “Decorated Youth Magazine.” Residencies include “The Stephen Pace Residency for a Mid-Career Artist” at Provincetown MA; Salem Art Works Residency Fellowship, Salem, NY. She was one of three artists and curators of the critically recognized Bushwick gallery The Parlour (2011- 2017). Rachel Phillips lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her works are represented by Microscope Gallery, New York.
Yao Qingmei is an artist based between Paris and Wenzhou who works across video, performance, and installation. Her practice stages situations that are both choreographed and susceptible to breakdown, where bodies confront systems of rules and constraint. Drawing on cinematic language, physical gesture, and scenographic frameworks, she explores the tension between control and instability; moments in which vulnerability emerges as the body slips beyond imposed structures. Through this approach, she transforms everyday actions into performative frameworks that expose and unsettle power dynamics and collective forms. Her work has been exhibited and performed at institutions including Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Haus der Kunst, Whitechapel Gallery, and the Shanghai Biennale.
Kevin Reuning (b.1989) is a Brooklyn-based artist working primarily with digital art, video, installation, and sculpture. His work often involves visual explorations of the tools the artist uses to build virtual worlds, but while almost all his work begins in the computer with 3D animation, it frequently evolves into a work in a medium that is more tactile than an image on a screen. The artist’s work as been exhibited in the “Digital Wellness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film” at Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA), Los Angeles, LA; Pratt Digital Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; NurtureArt, Brooklyn, NY; Boston University Arts Gallery, Boston, MA; and as part of Frieze x Ray Johnson Project at Frieze New York, among others. His work has been discussed in Artsy, ARTNews, ArtObserved, LVL3 (interview), The New York Times, and others. Publications include his ebook “A Few Visuals” and the zine “A Sphere,” distributed by Printed Matter. Kevin Reunion’s work are represented by Microscope Gallery where he has appeared in six solo and group exhibitions.
Lamar J. Robillard (b. 1991, New York) is a conceptual artist, photographer, and filmmaker working primarily with visual familiarity and found objects. Lamar’s practice is an act of resistance that takes a multidisciplinary approach to examining visibility, nonconformity and spirituality as it relates to identity, Black material culture and the self- coined “Unfavored American” experience. Inspired by various forms of literature, media, representation and history, he aims to insert his theory of second class citizenship into the canon through a lifelong exploration of the Unfavoured American experience while simultaneously providing authentic representation for Blackness with the absence of the Black body politic. Robillard has exhibited in Efa Project Space, Swivel Gallery, Collision Gallery, HAUSEN, Hangar Artist Research Center, Heath Gallery, The Long Gallery, Cleo The project Space, Gene Siskel Theatre, Art Port Kingston, Bed Stuy Art House, and Shim Gallery.
Joel Schlemowitz is an artist known for working with multiple mediums including celluloid film, collage, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. Schlemowitz’s work has been presented at institutions including at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Moving Image (MoMI), New York, NY; Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY; the New York Film Festival (NYFF), New York, NY; Tribeca Film Festival, New York, NY; Ukrainian Institute of America, New York, NY; Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Brooklyn, NY; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA; San Francisco Cinematheque, San Francisco, CA; The Images Festival, Toronto, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Cinema, Madrid, Spain; and numerous others. His work has been reviewed and discussed in e-flux, Hyperallergic, Millennium Film Journal, The New York Times, Vice, and many others. Schlemowitz’s work also appears in publications including “Cinema Expanded: avant garde film in the age of intermedia,” J. Walley, Oxford University Press, 2020; “Experimental Film & Photochemical Practices, K. Knowles,” Palgrave MacMillan, 2020; “Experimental Filmmaking: Break the Machine,” K. Ramey, CRC Press, 2018; and others. Grants include from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the Jerome Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others. Joel Schlemowitz currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His works are represented by Microscope Gallery, New York.
Matt Town (b. 1989, Sarasota, Florida) is a Los Angeles-based artist working with moving image, photography, painting, installation and sculpture. His work is primarily concerned with a sense of community and one’s role within it and has appeared at Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; Commons LA, Los Angeles, CA; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Last Projects, Los Angeles, CA; The Box, Los Angeles, CA; eyes never sleep, New York; and The Horse, Dublin, Ireland, among others. His works have screened at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Los Angeles Film Forum, Los Angeles; CA; Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY; Millennium Film Workshop, New York, NY; among others. His works have been discussed in Artnews, Artillery Magazine, ArtObserved, Currents Magazine, Hyperallergic, Millennium Film Journal, and others. Matt Town received a BA in Film & Media Studies from the University of Florida and an MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). His works are represented by Microscope Gallery, New York.