Curated by
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June 6, 2026
Image: Colby Lamson-Gordon, 'I can see the moon, and sometimes I wonder', 2025, Video with sound, 4:17 min.
Saturday, June 6, 1–2 PM
NARS Communal Space
As part of our Art in Dialogue and the NARS Artists Present: An Offering for the Public series, NARS Foundation is pleased to present a screening of works by artists-in-residence Erika Choe and Colby Lamson-Gordon, organized by NARS Curatorial Fellow Vu Thien An (Thea) Nguyen.
Bringing together three video works developed alongside their residency practices, the program reflects on the role of moving image as a space for intimacy, narration, memory, and embodied reflection.
Erika Choe’s womb explores mothering, birth, rebirth, and loss through a video-based performance that examines permeability, vulnerability, and bodily transformation. Through the slathering of clay across the skin, Choe approaches material as both armor and cleansing, navigating the unstable boundary between protection and exposure. The work confronts viewers with questions of endurance and abjection, using mothering as a vessel through which soma, memory, and psycho trauma become entangled.
Colby Lamson-Gordon’s Return is a time that I sought and I can see the moon, and sometimes I wonder navigate adoption, emotional distance, and the search for familial connection through archival footage, digital mapping, and personal narration. Across both works, memory and geography become unstable terrains shaped by longing, displacement, and imagined reunion.
The screening will be followed by a conversation moderated by Hebin Rachel Shin, Creative Manager at gmtc-golden monkey trading company.
About the artists:
Erika Choe is a Brooklyn-based artist working across sculpture, performance, video, and installation. She creates abstract portraits of bodies in mid-movement, taking on positionalities of weightedness, gravitational yield, subversion, pain, and grief. The bodies negotiate with constraint and separation - contained within the vessel bound by membrane, and disassembled into batched-out body parts that toe the line between recognizable and indistinguishable. Her sculptures store the implicit memory of her actions, where the imposition of her body lands as an imprint of a gesture, and the work becomes an archive of a performance that is no longer present for the viewer. Choe holds an MFA from School of Visual Arts and a BA with highest honors from University of Virginia. She is recipient of the NARS Foundation Full US Fellowship 2026, James Bernard Haggarty Scholarship Award by NYC Crit Club ‘25, Artist Sculpture Award by Zola ’25, Ceramics Residency by NYCxDESIGN Festival ‘24, and the Ruth Caplin Dance Award for Artistic Excellence ’15. Erika performed at renowned venues like The Shed NY, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Fridge Art Gallery NY, and Schrittmaacher Festival in Germany, performing for international choreographers like Akram Khan, Alejandro Cerrudo, and Yin Yue.
Colby Lamson-Gordon is a Brooklyn-based artist working across image, video, andsound. Adopted from China to the United States, they explore (dis)placement andimagined memory through processdriven images and experimental documentary.Their practice draws on the archive and embodied knowledge to probe longing andthe instability of personal history. Lamson-Gordon’s work has shown atRidgewood Off-Kilter Film Festival, East Village Film Festival, ResidencyUnlimited, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Mannes School of Music, and GalleryZXY. They hold an MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Designand a BA in Economics from Barnard College, where they received the O’ConnorAward for best economic thesis. An upcoming resident at NARS Foun-dation andVermont Studio Center, they live in Brooklyn and teach at Parsons.
About the moderator:
Hebin Rachel Shin is a designer and activator who searches collective environments across senses, space, materials, and technology. Based in New York, Shin serves as Creative Manager at gmtc-golden monkey trading company and holds an MPS from NYU's interactive telecommunications program.
About the Curatorial Fellow:
Vu Thien An (Thea) Nguyen is an emerging curator and art researcher based between New York and Hanoi. Her research considers how translation and communication operate within studio practice, tracing how ideas move across languages and forms of making. Grounded in care, her practice nurtures and presents evolving voices. She works as a facilitator and bridge-builder to bring together people, concepts, while responding to cultural narratives.
Recently, Nguyen curated Leah Liu's solo exhibition susurrus at the Chinese American Arts Council | Gallery 456 (New York), and co-curated Womb of Fire, a traveling exhibition and publication project featuring 100 works by Vietnamese and diasporic Vietnamese women and non-binary artists. She is part of Parsons School of Design, Design History and Practice Program Class of 2026 and currently serves as Curatorial Assistant to guest curator Phil Zheng Cai for the 2026 NYC-Based Artist Residency Program at Residency Unlimited.
Support for NARS programs is generously provided by:
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