2025
Through Absence: The Presence of What’s Left Unspoken
James Cohan
Rigoberto Luna | NXTHVN Yearbook 2024–25
There are things that we carry that remain unsaid. They live in the crevices, in a gesture, embedding themselves in our unconscious or lingering just beneath the surface. Sometimes they flash through our minds as fleeting thoughts, surfacing in the in-between moments, neither here nor there. These unspoken fragments shape us. Though we may never say them aloud, they accompany us; they remain present.
Why are things left unsaid? Sometimes feelings are too painful to express. Other times, we lack the form, the language, or the permission to bring them to light. Silence can also protect us; it allows us to hold our secrets, shield our grief, or safeguard our truths still in the making. Some things remain silent as we search for clarity, and others because we don't yet have the words. What's left unsaid isn't always absence—it’s often presence in another form. And in art, we have the power to live with and even embrace that ambiguity. To express and withhold at once. To create on our own terms.
The work of NXTHVN cohort 06 exhibited as The Things Left Unsaid at James Cohan in New York is evidence of that reclamation. These works, pulsing with material process, spatial experimentation, and the remnants of reimagined rituals, hold deep historical and personal memory. They carry what each artist found essential and needed to express, and what they chose to leave undisclosed.
NXTHVN cohort 06 brought together seven artists from around the world: Barış Göktürk, Kwamé Azure Gomez, Patrick Henry, Kristy Hughes, Christopher Paul Jordan, Reeha Lim, and Napoles Marty. When a culturally diverse and geographically dispersed cohort comes together under one roof, it’s impossible to predict what will emerge. Will personalities clash? Will they find common ground? Can they live and work in community while holding space for each other's contrasting styles and modes of storytelling?
Every artist has their own rhythm—some rise with the sun, others find clarity late at night. But one thing remains constant: the need for space to think, make, and engage deeply and freely with their practice. Each fellow entered this residency carrying a past that informs their present. And despite their cultural distances and personal differences, common threads began to emerge—politics, faith, erasure, ritual, cultural practice, and the residue of nomadic upbringings. They arrived shaped by challenges they were still navigating. And even across continents, traces of those experiences and histories clung close. They carried them, lived with them, and began to transform and reshape them through their work.
Barış Göktürk reconstructs archival imagery and historical references into layered compositions that exist between painting, drawing, and sculpture. His work explores protest, erasure, and transformation themes through fragmented figures representing political and spiritual unrest. Initial investigations into self-immolation as an ephemeral monument have evolved into a series that considers fire as destruction and regeneration, seen in his work The Phoenix (2025). Drawing inspiration from personal memories and geopolitical conflicts, from Istanbul, Turkey to Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, Göktürk’s work bears witness to societal rupture and the complex persistence of hope. His practice confronts the visibility of suffering, the cost of dissent, and the power of disappearance to reveal something more enduring.
Kwamé Azure Gomez maps migrations across emotional terrain, translating quotidian movement into gesture and memory into mark. Raised in a traveling liturgical dance group, their earliest expressions of self were choreographed through rigorous discipline, dedication, and devotion. Within the group, gestures signifying meaning were meant to be legible—didactic motions led upward, always pointing to God. Yet Gomez's abstracted ideas about movement, religion, spirituality, higher self, and expression often conflicted with that clarity. They folded inward, burying that language deep—until now. In their large-scale works Figure 8/And I remembered my birth (2025) and A Love Supreme/Journey II (2025), painting becomes a choreography of reclamation. These vibrant, gestural compositions radiate joy and expressive movement, while channeling the unsaid: reverberations of opacity, refusal, self-affirmation, existential inquiry, and personal homecoming. If their ordained role was once to be a messenger of truth, then gesture now becomes irrefutable evidence marking proof of existence. A handwritten letter to the body naming its persistence. In Chicago's club and ballroom scenes, Gomez found liberation. Through painting, they compose on their terms—a personal parable, returning to the religion of self-acceptance.
Patrick Henry's work is rooted in seeking understanding, using materials as intermediaries that reveal insights about the world, the self, and creative potential. Deeply influenced by his Haitian heritage, Henry draws from the Caribbean’s rich visual, spiritual, and political histories to inform his sculptures and paintings. He employs the lyrical form to access a consciousness that captures internal transformation through robust three-dimensional wall works and free-standing sculptures. In Above my head (2025), No names in the street (2025), and The lost ones (2025), Henry blends, molds, and reconfigures construction materials to metaphorically rebuild what is fractured, suggesting processes of becoming. By reinterpreting mythical and social narratives, he hybridizes personal and collective stories through shifts in scale, color combinations, and everyday objects diverted from function. These works become sites of social geography—spaces of reinvention and relationships. By connecting disparate narratives, Henry transforms personal mythology into a broader dialogue about identity, migration, and shared cultural experiences.
Kristy Hughes creates vibrant, voluminous abstract sculptures that hold space for care, change, and becoming. Her work reclaims discarded materials and transforms them into vessels, altars, and shelters that ask: What does it mean to make something that holds me? That holds itself? Rooted in a personal history of invisibility and estrangement, Hughes's practice is a form of survival and self-recognition. As old belief systems fall away, she turns toward chosen family, toward new definitions of home and love. In pieces like Holding Change—When Does a Portal Become a Vessel? (2025), Hughes builds not just with her hands, but with intention—burying notes, prayers, and reminders that art is home. Her process involves collecting locally sourced, found materials from her neighborhood and consciously building up color combinations and a varied textural surface. Through this, she creates her own universe—one where she orbits, thrives, and shows up fully as herself.
Christopher Paul Jordan transforms salvaged murals into tactile, fragmented works that explore the emotional landscape of loss, displacement, and impermanence. Hijacking retrieval techniques historically reserved for art conservation and theft to detach painted surfaces from their original walls, preserving the image and the trauma of its removal. In his site-specific wall mural daytime moon meets morning star (2025), a warm, representational image from Jordan's personal archive is transferred directly onto the gallery wall—what remains is both a presence and a ghost. Jordan's practice examines what it means to survive catastrophe and how to carry memory through rupture. His works peel away time and structure, revealing the layered contradictions of belonging and exile. Jordan invites viewers to consider where a work has been and what remains in its place through material allegory and a sense of poetic absence. In his hands, mourning becomes movement—grief made generative.
Reeha Lim investigates the body's relationship with architectural boundaries, where structures impose perspectives and restrict movement. Growing up between Korea, China, and the US, her work reflects a layered sense of translation between languages, bodies, gazes, and histories. Stairs and thresholds become metaphors for desire, access, and control, influencing how the body moves physically and psychologically. Lim paints on silk, allowing color to seep through, creating surfaces that hover between clarity and absence, mirroring linguistic dissonance and diasporic displacement. In her large-scale double-sided paintings Close Your Eyes (2025), and Count to Ten (2025), fragmented bodies caught mid-motion resist architectural legibility, embodying hesitation and misalignment. Her spatial interventions create space for silence and unresolved habitation—the quiet contradictions of shelter and collapse, protection and fall. Through her work, Lim explores how we inhabit and are shaped by the architectures of both place and identity.
Napoles Marty's sculptural and painting practice is focused on the human body as a link to memory, myth, and cultural ritual. He creates figures that blend reality and fiction, using raw processes like carving and charring wood. His work channels personal history and Cuban spiritual protection. Capturing transformation—where fire alters surface and form, tying physical labor with emotional energy—a work like Reptile (2025) draws from Cuban folklore and the natural world, embodying guardian spirits of the forest. In Shieldmaiden (2025), Marty honors the strength and dignity of women who have significantly impacted his life, expressing support and care through the figure’s posture, presence, and scale. Drawing and sculpture are inseparable in his practice, combining to reveal personal and cultural narratives embedded in material and memory.
Together, these seven artists found resolve in constructing new worlds that resist the confines of what they've inherited. They practice asserting agency over their own narratives, choosing what to expose and what to protect. Not every story needs to be spoken aloud to be true. There is power in keeping something for ourselves. In the quiet. In the gesture. In the things left unsaid.
At NXTHVN, cohort 06 showed up fully, sometimes with clarity, sometimes in fragments. And they held space for one another to express themselves authentically. In this residency and temporary home, they made room for the full complexity of their truths—spoken, unspoken, visible, and hidden. They claimed space, not just physically, but narratively. And they left with the understanding that even the silence of the things left unsaid is not merely an absence but an area filled with potential.