Even the Phrase Each Other
Adrian Aguilera, Elina Ansary, Andy Nicholas Li, Hyunjin Park, Sopheak Sam
Cornell MFA group exhibition

Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY
May 10 - 31, 2025

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, /even the phrase each other/
Doesn't make any sense.
– Jalaladdin Rumi, Interpreted by Coleman Barks, 1995

Examining intersecting themes of death, consciousness, destruction, and desire, these five artists draw on the cultural contexts that shape them. Working across interdisciplinary boundaries, their practices span painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Adrian Aguilera, born in Monterrey, Mexico, researches the intrinsic essence that resides in objects, often through dissection or corruption of common phrases. Andy Nicholas Li, a Cantonese-Midwestern artist from Chicago, conjures contradictions of identity and intimacy to uncover the queer and sticky construction of a person. Hyunjin Park is a Korean interdisciplinary artist whose work examines how the affective power of non-human beings unsettles the boundary between the modern and the pre-modern. Elina Ansary combines auspicious materials with painted images to build cohesive wholes out of contradictory parts, reflecting the discomfort and wonder of her experience as a Jewish-Muslim-Afghan-American. Sopheak Sam pieces together fragmentary memories of war, tracing the afterlives and afterimages of Cambodian refugees to remap the intersection of Buddhist, queer, and diasporic subjectivities.

Even The Phrase Each Other is itself a fragmented phrase. The ‘translator,’ Coleman Barks, does not speak Farsi. This remnant of ancient poetry was translated and retranslated through a global game of telephone. In a similar way, these five artists, whose lineages spring from opposite corners of the earth, have found themselves flung together, by chance and synchronicity, at Cornell University’s MFA program. Together these five artists reach across borders, of geography and artistic discipline, to create a new collective intimacy.

untitled (NEVEREVEN), 2025
CNC-ed wood, red, green and blue LED lights
7 in x 47 in

untitled (mutations in the contact zone), 2025
three-channel video, image, text, timestamp, color (RGB) and sound installation
dimensions variable

untitled (NEVEREVEN), 2025
Risoprint
11 in x 17 in
edition of 110 + 50 AP