June 5 - July 26, 2025
Springs Projects, New York
Jacq Groves, Diana Sofia Lozano, Saar Shemesh, Erin Johnson, Sarah Davidson, Laur P, Jay Pahre, mosquito girlfriend (Gabi Dao and Lou Lou Sainsbury)
With a performance by Saar Shemesh in collaboration with sound artist and musician Mars Dietz.
Curated by Sarah Davidson and Nirvana Santos-Kuilan
Sympathetic Lightning features work by 9 artists who variously expand understandings of ‘nature’ through themes of haunting, dislocation, and non-linear time. The term ‘sympathetic lightning’ refers to the tendency of lightning to be closely coordinated across long distances, appearing in clusters when viewed from space. Underlining solidarities both within the works and between the artists themselves, this exhibition highlights queer and trans perspectives in a political moment where mobility is especially fraught. Brought together by artist Sarah Davidson and curator Nirvana Santos-Kuilan, the exhibition includes the work of New York based artists Jacq Groves, Diana Sofia Lozano, Saar Shemesh, Erin Johnson, and Sarah Davidson, alongside international peers Laur P (Montréal, Canada), Jay Pahre (Vancouver, Canada), and mosquito girlfriend (Gabi Dao and Lou Lou Sainsbury, both Rotterdam, NL).
Set against a misty mountainscape, mosquito girlfriend (Gabi Dao and Lou Lou Sainsbury)’s eco-horror Resurrect Me as a Parasite plays on the nature of the vampire as a parasitic force. Interspliced images of Sint Pietersberg quarry in the Netherlands, and the Magdalene cave of Sainte-Baume Mountain in southern France–said to have been the site of Mary Magdalene’s exile and isolation–loom over the experimental narrative, conjuring cyclical ideas of life, death, gender and parasitism.
Jacq Groves’ series Embodied Infrastructures echoes ideas of cyclical entanglement, tracking time through movement as nature and object consume one another. Groves’ vignettes of trees molding themselves around architectural elements highlight the continuous nature of materials and the permeability of bodily boundaries.
Sarah Davidson’s layered compositions of plant and animal fragments also uncannily mesh worlds, troubling bodily boundaries through a mix of biomorphic abstraction and scientific illustration. The title of their painting, Crypsis–another word for camouflage–implies both the double edged sword of visibility and the queer potential of code-switching.
Saar Shemesh’s visceral sculptures THE LOST SALT and SATURN IN THE FOURTH HOUSE reference natural elements such as membranes and mucus, and integrate bodily substances like ‘communal piss’, to create wholly new forms. Oozing, dripping elements evoke monstrosity, otherness, and the abject body.
Boundaries are shown to be ever-shifting in Diana Sofia Lozano’s sprawling botanical hybrids. Embedding militarized maps in her work, the artist deconstructs boundaries of colonial identification, highlighting the fraught relationship of botany to geopolitical borders.
In Erin Johnson’s To be Sound is to Be Solid, tracking camera movement suggests a ghostly presence surveying the empty rooms of a seaside house. Voiceover of conversation with an oceanographer attempting to map the ever-shifting ocean floor parallels the filmmaker’s attempt to excavate the house’s uncharted queer history.
Jay Pahre’s ongoing Space Blanket is an intimate tracking of time and ritual, as daily testosterone gel packets are stitched together to form a space blanket, an object used for warmth and protection in the wilderness. The abstracted blanket infers the presence of the artist’s body while itself becoming a source of camouflage, reflecting its environment.
The reflective surface of Laur P’s Will our record misrecognize us too? echoes this strategy. Drawing parallels between fossilization and the act of painting, the artist highlights the trans-poetic potential of kinship across geologic time. In their writing about this work they ask “is it funny to imagine us fossilized, but safe?”
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ERIN JOHNSON is a visual artist and filmmaker based in New York. Her immersive installations and short films explore notions of collectivity, dissent, and queer identity. In her shape-shifting videos, constellations of artists, biologists, and film extras address the imbrication of science and nationalism. Johnson was recently a current Working Artist Fellow at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY) and a Winter Resident at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY).
Johnson received an MFA and Certificate in New Media from UC Berkeley in 2013, attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2019, and has recently completed residencies at Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL), Lower Manhattan Community Council (LMCC), Hidrante (San Juan, PR), and Lighthouse Works (Fishers Island, NY). Her work has been exhibited or screened at e-flux (Brooklyn), Rencontres Internationales de Paris/Berlin, BIENALSUR 2023 (Buenos Aires), MOCA Toronto (Toronto), Munchmuseet (Oslo), Sanatorium (Istanbul), Times Square Arts (New York), deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Boston), Billytown (The Hague), and REDCAT (LA). https://www.erinjohnson.online/
GABI DAO (they/them) is an artist based in Maastricht, The Netherlands and is from the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations (Vancouver, Canada).
Dao’s practice culminates in collage, sculpture, sound and moving image installations with an insistence on multiple truths, blurry temporalities, sensory affirmations and ways of knowing otherwise. They work through long-gestating, fluid processes of gathering, breaking and repairing from their own world-making vernacular of audio/visual fragments, tactile collections of whatnots and scraps of linguistic detritus. Thinking with these materials, their work often begins within the slippages of ‘history’, archives and storytelling—towards channeling the ineffable tensions between grief and joy, alienation and belonging, dissidence and complicity, disassociation and sentimentality. From this juncture, Dao attempts to reclaim and re-enchant meaning-making from the ruins of capitalism and colonialism, especially in the ways they have extracted from racialized, gendered and more-than-human communities. In 2024, they started the collaborative project mosquito girlfriend with artist and filmmaker Lou Lou Sainsbury.
They have screened and exhibited their work at E-flux Screening Room (Brooklyn, USA), Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin (Lethbridge, CA), A Tale-of-a-Tub (Rotterdam, NL), The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, CA) and Vincom Centre for Contemporary Art (Hà Nội, VN). They were recently in residence at Triangle Astérides (Marseille, FR) and the EKWC (Oisterwijk, NL). They are currently in residence at Jan van Eyck Academy. https://www.gabidao.com/
LOU LOU SAINSBURY (b. 1994; London) is an artist based in Rotterdam & London, working across moving image, live-performance, poetry, drawing, sculpture and textiles. Sainsbury’s work seeks to tell stories exploring histories of resistance, transformation and entanglement. With collaboration at the core of her practice, rituals and invocations, collective study, domestic intervention, adaptation, songwriting and make-shift mutations make up some of her idiosyncratic research methods. Making connections between spirituality, medicalisation, colonialism and technology, her tricksterish work attempts to excavate a historical and imagined past of transfeminized and queer life within the brokenness of human and more-than-human worlds. In 2024, she started the collaborative project mosquito girlfriend with artist and filmmaker Gabi Dao.
Her recent solo exhibitions include Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles (2024); Roodkapje, Rotterdam (2023); Gasworks, London & Humber Street Gallery, Hull (2022); and Well Projects, Margate (2020). She has presented in group exhibitions and festivals internationally including Rencontres Internationales (Paris & Berlin), Tate Modern (London), Chapter (Cardiff), Alchemy Film Festival (Hawick), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Nottingham Contemporary, La Casa Encendida and Yaby (Madrid). Sainsbury has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including Mondriaan Fonds (both 2023 & 2025) and Freelands Gasworks Partnership Programme (2021-2023). https://loulousainsbury.com/
DIANA SOFIA LOZANO (b. 1992, Cali, Colombia), is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work uses the language of botanical hybrids; the naturally occurring, genetically modified, and the imagined. Lozano presents biomimicry as metaphors for identity construction at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the politics of difference. She is interested in the deconstruction of botanical taxonomic failures in order to reveal and redefine the boundaries of colonial identificatory practices and geopolitical borders. Lozano has exhibited at Company Gallery, Deli Gallery, Proxyco Gallery, Rachel Uffner Gallery, and and Wave Hill Gardens in NYC; Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco; New Image Art in Los Angeles; Casa Prado in Barranquilla, Colombia; Örebro Konsthall in Örebro, Sweden; Parallel in Oaxaca, Mexico; Arto Kyoto in Kyoto, Japan; and Capsule Gallery in Shanghai, China, among others. Lozano holds an MFA in sculpture from Yale University. https://www.dianaslozano.com/
LAUR P's pictorial and sculptural work offers a speculative visibility of paleo-ecological compositions in becoming, an imaginary space that they investigate from a queer-crip perspective. In their works, fragments of inter-species compositions compress through a slow process of accretion, decomposition and re-emergence. Throughout this stratigraphic process they seek fossilization and indetermination while paying particular attention to the agential force of the materials they use. This intuitive and taphonomic approach allows them to visualize entanglements that are at once underworldly and topographical, micro- and macroscopic, and in which various temporal and metaphorical dimensions intersect.
On the periphery of eco-critical considerations of contemporary nature-cultures and the hauntings they reveal, Laur P’s assemblages of pictorial fossils invite a rapprochement between the formal contemplation of materials that are associated in their work and their intertwined intentions, which are, to disrupt speciesist understandings of evolution and natural phenomena, to disturb the tradition of the landscape as a space for humanistic representation of nature, to disorient ableist pictorial conventions, and therefore to resist anthropocentric myopia.
Laur P is a trans non-binary neuroqueer based in Tiohtià:ke-Mooniyang-Montréal. They hold an MFA from the University of Guelph (2021) and a BFA from Concordia University with Great Distinction (2015). Throughout their academic background, they received several awards including the Joseph-Armand-Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC, University of Guelph) and the Betty Goodwin Prize in Studio Arts (Concordia University), and their current program of work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Their most recent solo exhibitions include A Scape Unnamed (Galerie Nicolas Robert, 2021), More-than-ghosts (Virtual thesis exhibition, 2021) and It Once Was a Garden (Galerie McClure, 2018). Laur P's work is part of the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Hydro-Québec, Royal Bank of Canada and Scotiabank, among others. https://www.laur-p.com/
JACQ GROVES is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator based in Queens, New York. Their project-based practice explores relationships between urban and natural ecological structures and complex bodily systems. They were the 2024 recipient of a Queens Arts Fund grant awarded by NYFA to develop a new project Embodied Infrastructure. Supporting this new work, Jacq will be an artist-in-resident at Loghaven Artist Residency and Stove Works’ Artist Residency. Previously, they exhibited a solo, site-specific show for Wave Hill’s Sunroom Project Space in the Bronx. Their work has been included in NYC-based exhibitions at Essex Flowers, The Jewish Museum, The Wallach Art Gallery, the NARS Foundation, Chashama, Half Gallery, and more. Groves’ work has also been included in group exhibitions at Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans, LA), Yale University's Edgewood Gallery (New Haven, CT), White Page Gallery (Minneapolis, MN), Women's Studio Workshop (Rosendale, NY), and others. They've also been an artist-in-resident at Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) and the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY). Currently, Groves is completing a research and teaching fellowship as the Foundations Fellow in Arts + Sciences at Pratt Institute. In 2022, they received their MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. https://www.jacqgroves.com/
JAY PAHRE is a queer and trans settler artist, writer, and cultural worker currently based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ peoples. His work engages trans and queer ecologies, interspecies collaboration, and place in the context of settler colonialism. The use of metal, electricity, and heat has been instrumental in his work to think through conductive and transforming ecologies. Leaning on these moments of conductivity and transformation, his work seeks to ferret out alternative formations and futures of what queer and trans ecologies of being might look like while slipping through moments of temporal, embodied, and environmental precarity.
He has attended residencies at the Western Front, Banff Centre, and Isle Royale National Park. His work has been exhibited across the US and Canada at traditional galleries and community spaces, and his writing has been published in academic journals and comic anthologies. He was selected for the 2020 Transgender Studies Chair Fellowship at the University of Victoria, as well as the Helen Belkin Memorial Scholarship (2020) and Fred Herzog Award in Visual Art (2019) at the University of British Columbia. https://www.julianpahre.com/
SAAR SHEMESH (b. 1991, New York) is an artist and educator whose creative practice uses the aesthetics of feminist abstraction and abjection to complicate bodily, spatial, and emotional binary logics through architectural interventions/ installations, sculptures, and text/ image-based studies. Through the use of materials like metal, silicone, foam, and wax that undergo a state change in order to take shape, they call upon visual references like mucosal membranes and craters to evoke visceral or destabilized feelings in viewers.
Shemesh has been an artist-in-residence at the NYPL Picture Collection (New York), Visual Arts Center (Richmond), RAIR (Philadelphia), Franconia Sculpture Park (Shafer), and SOMA (Mexico City). Most recently, their work has been exhibited at D.D.D.D. (New York), Current Space (Baltimore), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Artlot (Brooklyn), and Virginia MoCA (Virginia Beach). They hold an MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. https://www.saarshemesh.com/
MARS DIETZ has an extensive career history working as a solo sound artist, club DJ, musician and sound designer in the choreographic and performing arts community in Berlin, with commissions and performances at the Spinnerei Leipzig, Sophiensaele Berlin, Haus der Kunst Munich, PopKultur Festival Berlin, Creamcake Berlin's 3hd Festival, Kunsthaus KuLe, e-werk Luckenwalde, Ballhaus Ost, as well as the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Institute for Electronic Arts, ABC No Rio, Brooklyn College, and further locations in the United States. Mars' work has been supported by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, Musikfonds e.V., Alfred University, Creamcake Berlin, Amplify Berlin, and most recently Makerspace NYC. Mars performed as a resident DJ and collective member of BODYSNATCH, a monthly underground club night in Berlin focused on bass-forward music that sustained a dedicated cult following from 2011 - 2022. https://marsdietz.xyz/
SARAH DAVIDSON (b.1989, Canada) works primarily between drawing and painting to create compositions in which shadowy, biomorphic figures and delicate, foliated fragments mingle. Making reference to a history of discourses constructing the ‘natural’ world, their works investigate bodies, environment, observation, and the tangled strings which often bind them together. While often drawn directly from ‘nature’, their drawings diffract distinctions between embodied self and other through a queer ecological lens: critters and space collapse into one another, suggesting a permeable web. Both the eye and the mind work towards the known--animals, plants, brush marks, lines--but are caught in a space of undoing. A question floats among the forms: who’s seeing who, and how?
Davidson is originally from Canada, where they pursued their art education, at Emily Carr University (BFA, Visual Art, 2015) and the University of Guelph (MFA, Visual Art, 2019). From 2011-2021, they worked as a hiking and climbing guide, spending months of each year in remote locations in Canada, the United States and Scandinavia. In 2022, they relocated to New York. They have exhibited their work throughout Canada and the United States, including solo exhibitions at Auxier Kline, New York (2025), Shin Gallery, New York (2024), NARS Foundation, Brooklyn (2023), Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver (2022), Feuilleton, Los Angeles (2021), and Erin Stump Projects, Toronto (2019). Their work has been covered by ArtNEWS, Mousse Magazine, Canadian Art, Fukt Magazine, and more. https://sarahdavidson.ca/
NIRVANA SANTOS-KUILAN is a Brooklyn-based arts programmer and curator. She is currently the Manager of Public Programs at the Museum of Arts and Design. Previously, she has held positions at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and NARS Foundation. https://nirvanasantos.com/