Spring Pop-Up Series
The Unseen Threads
Anikoon · Artica · Paul Choate · Adam Umbach
May 15 – 21, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, May 16, 6-8 pm
sponsored by Style & Haus and Makku
Jakupsil is pleased to present The Unseen Threads, a group exhibition featuring recent works by Anikoon, Artica, Paul Choate, and Adam Umbach. Through painting, sculpture, and drawing, the exhibition excavates invisible systems—technological, emotional, architectural, and mnemonic—that structure both internal lives and external realities. The title alludes to interconnected threads running through diverse practices: Choate's machine-assisted drawings interrogate human creativity within technological automation; Artica's paintings map tension between organic impulse and architectural constraint; Anikoon's robots embody psychological narratives beneath social masks; and Umbach's meticulous objects transform personal memory into shared experience. Within a cultural landscape defined by artificial intelligence and algorithmic mediation, the works engage systematic structures as sites of inquiry, examining what remains human in an increasingly mechanized world. The Unseen Threads points to what resists visibility yet exerts force: memories shaped in silence, algorithms operating below awareness, emotional states masked in performance, and societal structures woven into daily life. Rather than centering the machine as object, the exhibition approaches the mechanical as metaphor, mirror, and framework through which subjectivity is constructed.
System Mapping: From Digital Automation to Cognitive Cartographies
The exhibition presents a dialogue between four distinct artistic practices that reveal conceptual resonance despite visual diversity. Paul Choate navigates between manual craft and technological automation, probing how advancement reshapes creative expression. His practice examines how personifying technology reflects human absurdities and existential concerns. Working with AI assistance and robotics, Choate seeks not to replace artistic intent but to enhance it through human-machine fusion. His approach acknowledges the challenges of producing tangible art through technological means while critiquing humanity's tendency to overcomplicate reality. By positioning the machine as interlocutor rather than mere tool, his works offer insight into what remains irreducibly human within automated creative systems—a visual dialogue between artistic intention and algorithmic execution.
Artica's painterly and sculptural explorations function as a mapping of the mechanistic frameworks governing contemporary existence. As Nam June Paik uttered, "Cybernetics is the exploration of boundary regions between and across various existing sciences... I want to shape the sensory space around us.”1 Artica’s work traverses boundaries between scientific precision and urban entropy, drawing from cellular morphology and metropolitan architecture. Influenced by microscopic structures and macroscopic urban chaos, she merges empirical observation with gestural marks. The Fly and Signal Interference combine painting with found materials—magnets, circuitry, conductors—creating spatial metaphors for cognitive processes. Her paintings explore transitional zones—threshold spaces we move through rather than inhabit—revealing correlations between architectural structures and neural architectures. Through light and electricity, her work renders thought visible: kinetic, resistant, alive within containing structures.
Vulnerable Machines
Anikoon's distinctive robot figures eschew the sleek aesthetic often associated with robotic representation to instead embody human vulnerability. Carl Jung observed, "The persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is."² This insight resonates through Anikoon's practice, where robots function as the masks we all wear—externalizations of the personae adopted in modern life. Originating from a chance encounter with an abandoned toy robot at a New York flea market, his series explores the impermanence inherent in both consumer goods and human emotions. Through expressions ranging from playful bewilderment to profound melancholy in series like Rusty Robot and Heart to Heart, Anikoon visualizes the gap between external appearance and internal voice. His exploration reveals a core element running throughout his work: an interplay between cartoon-like imagination and longing for innocence, coupled with the recognition that such purity remains elusive. His work draws on Levinas' concept of face-to-face encounter as a site of ethical recognition, suggesting that accepting others as they are ultimately leads to self-realization, and genuine connection emerges when we perceive the vulnerability behind technological facades.
Memory Engines: Object as Archive
Adam Umbach's practice operates at the intersection of personal mythology and collective nostalgia, employing meticulous technique to transform ordinary objects into vessels of emotional resonance. Benjamin noted, "Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories"³—an insight illuminating Umbach's approach. His method—juxtaposing photorealistic rendering with gestural marks from his non-dominant hand—creates a formal dialectic mirroring the tension between structured recollection and unmediated emotion. Working in luminous color fields between abstraction and representation, Umbach constructs images functioning simultaneously as taxonomic specimens and animated presences, inviting viewers into spaces where memory becomes both archive and encounter. This transformation is evident in Another Garden Scene #9, where butterflies serve as tributes to his late mother's love of gardens, and in Duck Light (Bright Blue), where a childhood toy assumes monumental presence through isolation and chromatic intensity. Umbach crafts memory machines—systems processing lived experience through visual representation that transform private nostalgia into shared territory where viewers' own memories find resonance.
Systemic Threads and Self
The exhibition examines the dialectical relationship between systems and subjective experience, revealing how mechanical frameworks—technologies, social architectures, cognitive patterns, or representational conventions—both shape and are shaped by consciousness. The title references hidden connections: between technological production and artistic expression, between environments and thought processes, between mechanical representation and emotional states. In our era of technological acceleration and AI anxiety, Anikoon, Artica, Choate, and Umbach offer perspectives neither uncritically celebrating progress nor retreating into nostalgia. The works engage the machine as both subject and medium, exploring how mechanical systems reveal humanity through their otherness. The Unseen Threads invites contemplation of how meaning emerges at the intersection of consciousness and systems, offering inquiry into what constitutes humanity in an age defined by our relationship with the seen and unseen threads connecting us to technological, emotional, and social infrastructures.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
¹ Nam June Paik, Global Groove 2004, eds. Nam June Paik, Jon Ippolito and John G. Hanhardt (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2004), 107.
² Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), 415.
³ Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 486.
The Unseen Threads
Anikoon · Artica · Paul Choate · Adam Umbach
May 15 - 21, 2025
Hours: 10AM - 6PM Daily
30-43 31st Street, Astoria NY
VIEW MAP
Inquiries:
T. +1 215 906 5200
E. brett.jakupsil@gmail.com
W. www.jakupsil.com
IG. @jakupsilny
WORKS ON VIEW
ARTISTS
Inquiries: brett.jakupsil@gmail.com | +1 215 906 5200
> Anikoon examines contemporary identity and human connection through the metaphor of robots. Moving away from sleek, high-tech representations, his robots appear deliberately awkward and vulnerable, displaying expressions ranging from playful bewilderment to profound melancholy. This exhibition showcases his acclaimed robot series alongside new works inspired by American consumer culture, incorporating iconic brands like McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Air Jordan. Through these mechanical intermediaries, Anikoon explores how we wear multiple masks in life and the possibilities for genuine connection when inner voices meet authentically.
> Artica's paintings investigate the intricate structures of our mechanistic world and how they influence our perception and behavior. Her work visualizes the formation of memory and thought from individual perspectives within our shared reality. Artica's canvases depict transitional urban spaces—locations we pass through rather than inhabit—drawing connections between old and new technologies, departures and arrivals. Her paintings suggest cohesion between observation and understanding while highlighting the structural similarities between our external environments and internal mental processes.
> Paul Choate has dedicated his artistic career to exploring the evolution from manual craft to technological automation. His work examines how advanced technologies like AI and robotics can enhance rather than replace artistic expression. Using machines as creative partners, Choate creates pieces emphasizing the challenges of producing tangible art through mechanical means while offering a critique of humanity's tendency to overcomplicate reality. His pieces in the exhibition demonstrate how the fusion of human creativity with machine precision can reveal new artistic possibilities.
> Adam Umbach creates works that serve as powerful acts of remembrance, transforming everyday objects into portals of memory and emotional resonance. His precisely rendered butterflies, lighthouses, and childhood objects float in dreamlike color fields, evoking nostalgia and existential isolation. Umbach's paintings juxtapose meticulous photorealistic depictions with expressive marks made with his non-dominant hand, creating a contrast that recalls the thrill of artistic discovery familiar from childhood. His work invites viewers to project their own memories and associations, making each encounter deeply personal.