NEW YORK, NY.- Chapter NY is now presenting Willa Nasatir’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a new selection of paintings and photographs.

Nasatir’s practice investigates varied approaches to imaging. In both her paintings and photographs the artist transforms everyday objects to the point of the surreal, collecting and accumulating her subjects before distorting and abstracting their forms through various analog, drawing, and painting processes. Her work dislodges bodies and objects from ingrained associations and preexisting meaning, allowing them to merge into hybrid forms with porous edges.

Fragmented compositions suggest both psychoanalytic and psychedelic perspectives, engaging Nasatir’s own subconscious associations. Through abstracted form, she plays with dualities of meaning and proposes an unraveling of perceived boundaries as they relate to gender and power.

Informed by her background in photography, Nasatir creates paintings that intentionally evoke the translucency and flatness of photographic images. In the exhibition, embedded visual keys connect the paintings and photographs, further collapsing the relationship between mediums in Nasatir’s practice. Her work exists within a continuum, each one woven in and out of itself in perpetual circulation.

Willa Nasatir

Willa Nasatir (b. 1990, Los Angeles, California) lives and works in New York, NY. She received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2012. She has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; Gaylord Apartments, Los Angeles; Chapter NY, New York; and the White Room at White Columns, New York. Her work has also been included in exhibitions at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; the New Museum, New York; Hester, New York; David Zwirner, New York; Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles; Company Gallery, New York; and Drei, Cologne, among others.

Chapter NY is excited to present Stella Zhong’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, and first exhibition of paintings.

Zhong's work suspends existential uncertainty and humor. Through large-scale installation, sculpture, video, and painting, she builds vastly empty spaces punctured by barely visible, nonconforming objects in the periphery—highly idiosyncratic worlds that disorient authority. Immersed in physics and nonhuman elements, her work uses obscurity and lack of reference as the condition to observe strength in smallness, latent life, and moments where alienation and intimacy converge.

Like her sculptural work, Zhong's paintings display vantage points calibrated to both cosmic and microscopic scales. Spheres, desolate corners, grains of rice, buttons, cliffs, and reflective filaments are subjects that she repeatedly and almost obsessively paints into her characteristic muted environments, as if inside a particle or above the atmosphere. Visualizing incongruent spatial relationships is integral to Zhong's practice, in which she experiments particularly through painting.

In this exhibition, the constellation of new works refract Zhong's personal lens of global shifts and entanglements, and turn to humble yet tactile connections. In one painting, a monumental sphere gravitates towards a minuscule mote to exchange shadows; in others, entities of decidedly different dimensions intersect in a soft, playful touch. The objects foregrounded here are at once potent, helpless, and isolated, but never quite alone.

Stella Zhong

Stella Zhong (b. 1993, Shenzhen, China) lives and works in New York, NY. She holds a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. Selected solo exhibitions include Chapter NY, New York; Fanta-MLN, Milan; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; and Guan Shan Yue Art Museum, Shenzhen. Zhong has exhibited internationally at SculptureCenter, Queens, NY; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Galerie Marguo, Paris; in lieu, Los Angeles, CA; Peana, Mexico City; Mana Contemporary, Jersey City; HUA International, Beijing; M 2 3, New York; and more. Her work has been reviewed on ArtAsiaPacific, Mousse Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, The New York Times, Art in America, among others.

Chapter NY
Willa Nasatir & Stella Zhong
September 8th, 2023 - October 21st, 2023