Near Contact

Brooklyn, NY

Near Contact exhibition featuring Hank Bhatia

Near Contact exhibition featuring Phoebe Todd

Julia Kim, Skin on Skin, 2026

Curatorial Statement

We often wonder if there is a truer self beneath the images we project and the roles we learn to perform. Screens, avatars, chatbots, front-facing cameras seem to create more layers between the self and the world as well as the sense that something immediate has been lost. But what if these technologies don't just distance us from ourselves? Can they possibly help bring the self, our cultures and histories into view? The artworks in Near Contact capture this ambivalence, thinking of technology as a vessel animated by desires, memories, and energies that flicker within.

Near Contact brings together three artists whose works find something primeval stirring inside contemporary machines. Using sculpture, sound, video, projection, and interaction, these artists capture the longing and intimacy of exchanges with technological objects and entities that simulate response, but only partially at best. These artworks are haunted by a possibility that is both eerie and generous: that the life that passes through screens, machines, and responsive objects is not separate from reality but reshaped into new forms no less real.

a. Hank Bhatia

In Hank Bhatia’s work, a laundry hamper catcalls you, a tiny screen gives hotness advice, a perfect day never quite happened, and a pixelated portrait both hides and reveals. Bhatia turns familiar objects and images into machines for wanting, where intimacy feels fake, funny, and strangely sincere. In her work, faux sentience speaks through borrowed scripts, turning seduction and self-improvement into awkward containers for human experiences that are already awkward enough on their own.

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b. Julia Kim

Julia Kim’s kinetic sculptures require two participants to come fully alive, briefly coalescing into a wholly other emergent organism. Their fleshy, semi-translucent surfaces resemble a body, but not one we can easily recognize as our own. Through their motions and textures, our own embodiment becomes newly strange.

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c. Phoebe Todd

Phoebe Todd’s installations feel like messages arriving from somewhere older than the devices carrying them. Crows, stones, rushing fields, and projected text become imperfect carriers for older forms of belief, as if folklore were trying to enter the present through whatever shapes it can still find. In her work, the past is never simply restored, unchanged. It returns altered, luminous, existing alongside us without asking to be understood.

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Authenticity isn’t waiting to be revealed in the artworks of Near Contact, at least not as we have come to expect it. It is already here, only stranger than we imagined, caught up in the images, roles, machines, and objects that make up everyday life.

Visitor Information

The exhibition is free and open to the public. Please email for updates, access notes, and additional documentation.