Before Language: What We Carry

About the artists:

Melika Abikenari is an Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based artist, educator, and organizer whose practice investigates the intergenerational inheritance of memory, matrilineality, ritual, and the body in relation to state violence through material inquiry, performance, and installation. Abikenari holds a BA from UCLA and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has exhibited in galleries and insti-tutions across the US, participated in NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, and completed residencies at Cerámica Suro, Art Cake, and the Textile Arts Center.

Christopher Paul Jordan is a painter and public artist who investigates the afterlife of memory, sim-ulating conditions of removal to reexamine human relationships. Lacing salvaged textiles such as window screens and debris netting with acrylic paint, Jordan separates his images from their origi-nal surfaces while generating new histories from the traces they leave behind. Through parallel practices in performance, installation, and sculpture, his inquiries are persistently situated in pub-lic space. Jordan’s first museum exhibition: In The Interim - Ritual Ground for a Future Black Ar-chive, buries African American predictions of the end of the world on the grounds of the Frye Art Museum until the year 2123. His 20ft bronze, aluminum, and steel sculpture andimgonnamissev-erybody (2021) is the centerpiece for The AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle. Jordan has completed residencies at Bemis Center for the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Mahler and LeWitt Studios, Museum of Glass, and NXTHVN. Jordan is a Leslie Lohman Museum Fellow, A Queer|Art Fellow and holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art (2023).

Colby Lamson-Gordon is a Brooklyn-based artist working across image, video, and sound. Adopted from China to the United States, they explore (dis)placement and imagined memory through pro-cess-driven images and experimental documentary. Their practice draws on the archive and em-bodied knowledge to probe longing and the instability of personal history. Lamson-Gordon’s work has shown at Ridgewood Off-Kilter Film Festival, East Village Film Festival, Residency Unlimited, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Mannes School of Music, and Gallery ZXY. They hold an MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design and a BA in Economics from Barnard College, where they received the O’Connor Award for best economic thesis. An upcoming resident at NARS Foun-dation and Vermont Studio Center, they live in Brooklyn and teach at Parsons.

Sabrina Herbosa Reyes is Filipina-American architect and interdisciplinary artist (sculpture, painting, movement, film, performance) interested in the relationship between spirit and matter as it exists across temporalities and explored through materiality, ritual and craft. Reyes creates environments through large-scale sculpture and installation, as a way to evoke the sublime, inward reflection and daydream. Alluding to nature and “home,” Reyes pulls from her memories of the Philippines and New York to create relationships between environments and bodies. Through movement, the body is seen as a vessel to activate and respond to space, both natural and built. Through this process her work becomes a site that encourages communal gathering and ceremony, as a way to trans-mute spirit in the form of collective healing.

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About the Curatorial Fellow:

Courtney Zoa Brown is an experimental visual artist, curator, and cultural facilitator based in Brooklyn, originally from the West Side of Chicago, Illinois. Their practice engages experimental and interdisciplinary forms across di-asporic contexts, with a focus on sculptural, ritual, and spatial languages. Grounded in African-Diasporic sociality, Brown’s practice investigates how communities navigate displacement, archive lived experience, and build forms of resistance through embodied knowledge. Listening functions as both material and methodology in their curatorial approach.

Brown holds a BA in Art History and Africana Studies from Oberlin College. They have curated and programmed with institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Arts Council, South London Gallery and John St Gallery. Their notable projects include Through the Loop: Chicago’s Youth Artist Revolution at Jip Gallery (2021), a virtual exhi-bition exploring displacement, activism, and positionality within Chicago’s underground youth artist scene, and Firelei Báez: Sueño de la Madrugada (A Midnight’s Dream) at South London Gallery, co-curated as part of the inaugural 2023–24 New Curators international fellowship.