Above: Harry (2025), by Amelia Biewald.
In this imaginative review, writer Lina Revere guides readers through Dream Junk & Cosmic Dust, a collaborative exhibition co-presented by PARADICE PALASE and GLORIA’S from April 11 to May 4, 2025. Featuring eleven artists from the PARADICE PALASE membership network, the show brings together an evocative mix of small and large-scale paintings, drawings, hanging fibre sculptures, video installations, ceramic wall works, and mixed-material assemblages.
Artists in the exhibition include Agustina Markez, Amelia Biewald, Caroline Cloutier, Jacob Hicks, Katie Kotler, Mallory Concetta Smith, Mike McGuire, Ruth Jeyaveeran, Sonia Redfern, Helena La Rota López, and Kat Ryals.
Dream Junk & Cosmic Dust is the first of two group exhibitions in a spring-long presentation hosted at GLORIA’S Project Space, 5 Eldridge Street, ground floor, in New York City’s historic Chinatown district.
Installation Photos by Kat Ryalls
Dream Junk & Cosmic Dust: A Rabbit’s Path
Prologue: A Half-Remembered Poem
Dream Junk & Cosmic Dust lands like a half-remembered poem or a lyric on the worn sleeve of a 70s prog rock LP. It lingers in the mind, emotional, symbolic, slightly unplaceable. Both intimate and expansive, it carries us across thresholds, from the cluttered subconscious of inner life to the distant glimmer of interstellar space.
As a title, it conjures two seemingly opposite forces: the aspirational residue of the everyday and the slow drift of planetary debris. Dream Junk gathers the personal detritus of fantasy—discarded symbols, unfinished thoughts, lipstick traces, browser tabs, and the soft mythologies passed between bodies. It speaks to what I have come to think of as emotional archives. These are unlabelled envelopes of remembered sensations, half-formed dreams, and gestures of tenderness. The work moves in the language of unfiled memory.
Cosmic Dust, meanwhile, is both scientific and symbolic. It is the trace material of comets and collapsing stars, scattered and nearly imperceptible, yet foundational to life on Earth. We are made of it. The phrase becomes a kind of equation: dream junk plus cosmic dust equals a cosmology of devotion. This offers a framework for honouring what is fragile, unsorted, unresolved, and deeply charged. It becomes a soft resistance felt through texture and atmosphere.
Together, these words propose not a contradiction but a bridge. They link the domestic with the galactic, the handmade with the mystical. Within this space, Dream Junk & Cosmic Dust becomes less a narrative than a field, a constellation of haunted objects and tender propositions. A place where things resonate rather than resolve.
Meeting Harry
I arrived at GLORIA’s on Eldridge Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan just as dusk fell, the sky an indeterminate grey. In the entrance alcove radiated Jacob Hicks’ Woman 63, a highly rendered, futuristic oil painting flanked by hovering paper butterflies. Hicks refracts femininity through sacred geometry and speculative power, crafting an image that feels more like a portal than a portrait.
Mallory Concetta Smith’s My Butterflies are a fragile swarm of delicate cutouts made from embroidered and bedazzled sewing patterns, receipts, and packaging. The work suggests metamorphosis through the most banal forms of domestic detritus. These pieces welcome us, offering something toward memory and DIY beauty. Small flurries of these escaped butterflies also appear scattered throughout the exhibition, like dreams that dared to take shape and drift beyond their margins.
Then, abruptly and halfway down the gallery, I saw the rabbit.
Harry, a sculpture by Amelia Biewald, stands frozen mid-stride. Alert yet poised, his ears are pulled back and down like the answer to a sad question. His fur is felted with the static of forgotten dreams. His wide amber eyes glow with uncanny empathy. He offers something.
“Follow me,” the rabbit might have said, had he used words. Instead, he blinked and hopped off his plinth. Together, we began our circuit of the gallery with Harry leading, and I following. Not in a straight line, but in a kind of zigzag. Rabbits move like this when evading predators, making quick, unpredictable turns to throw others off their trail. Harry is not being chased, but he carries that same alertness. He moves by instinct, not efficiency. Our path unfolds through interruption and curiosity, guided by shifts in light, breath, and texture. We move side to side, back to front, crossing thresholds rather than passing cleanly through them. It is not just a tour, but a lucid fever, already mid-sentence.
Harry is assembled from discarded feelings, mythic fragments, and soft things. He is not all-knowing, but he is wise to the terrain. He pauses at flames, lingers near fibres, and stops before portals made of canvas and light. What draws him is not logic, but resonance. In the cosmos of this show, Harry is not from the dream. He is the dream. Creature and companion. Junk and jewel. Avatar and apparition. He moves with care, listening rather than explaining. He invites us to do the same. To notice what shimmers at the edges, to linger with what feels charged but unresolved, and to honour what we might otherwise overlook or quietly brush aside.
Through the Rabbit Hole
The exhibition unfolds like a constellation across psychic time. The artists do not attempt to resolve a narrative. They scatter traces. Each work is a remnant, a signal, a fragment of personal cosmology.
Harry twitches his ear and spins me in a slow circle. Behind the entry wall, beneath another quiet swarm of cut-out butterflies by Concetta Smith, a video monitor flickers. Underneath, a pair of headphones waits as an invitation.
Katie Kotler’s video works serve as the gateway into the thematic core of Dream Junk & Cosmic Dust. In The Anita Mann Case, psychedelic play-dough figures in vivid reds, pinks, greens, and purples enact a surreal drag performance that oscillates between seduction and collapse. The stop-motion animation’s tactile quality underscores the exhibition’s exploration of transformation and the ephemeral nature of identity.
New Beginnings complements this with dreamlike sequences where a young witchy woman drinks wine, lights candles, lounges in full hair and makeup, and engages in ritualistic gestures before a mirror. The video’s retro 1980s aesthetic and soft-focus lighting meld with retro-futurist overlays and analogue glitches, echoing the exhibition’s themes of nostalgia and speculative futures. Kotler’s use of early digital effects and green screen artifacts creates a sense of glamour frayed at the edges and a performance haunted by its own desire to transcend.
Next to the glowing screen, float the dark voids of Sonia Redfern’s Dust to Dust and Part of You is Part of Me. Made from black velvet, glass beads, and embroidery, their hexagonal forms feel both intimate and expansive. Each stitched scene becomes a night sky vista, a window that collapses the scale of human loss into the vastness of cosmic time. The softness of the materials holds something immense, as if mourning and wonder could share the same surface. Redfern offers quiet gravities, grief rendered through shimmer, and memory suspended in celestial patterning. These works invite us to look closely, to lose ourselves in their depth, and to recognize that even in fragments, we remain connected.
Harry tugs me, and we zig to what is now our right. I am already dizzy.
Hung high on the wall like distant portals, Helena La Rota López’s Nariz and Cintura remain in their embroidery hoops. Those soft circular frames holding the weight of the body with quiet intensity. These pale portals murmur rather than declare, mapping the memory of the sensory self through stitched fragments: an eye, a nose, a waist. Embroidery, a traditionally domestic and feminized craft, becomes here a method of attunement that is tactile, repetitive, and embodied. These works position the body as both archive and cosmos. They remind us that the intimate is never separate from the infinite, and that the domestic space is often where dreaming begins.
Material Drift
Across the room and below La Rota López’s third embroidery, Oculus, sits Agustina Markez’s, Where is the body?, like a relic. Part crystal asteroid, part industrial fossil, it is cast in translucent glass with black inclusions. It evokes a questionable space rock pulled from a southwest mineral museum or sideshow cabinet. Precious, strange, and quietly absurd. In the context of Dream Junk & Cosmic Dust, it captures the exhibition’s fascination with transformation and residue, imagining a future where discarded objects become sacred, where fantasy turns exogeological.
Space and time shift rhythm. Harry nudges me on. We nod toward another work by Amelia Biewald, his maker. The Argument pulls fragments of historical line illustration into a swirling atmosphere. Figures lean and barter across a marbled collapse of ethereal space. They reach toward timeless meanings already slipping away.
Next to The Argument, Mallory Concetta Smith’s blue pencil drawings drift between observation and reverie. Studio Bathroom Wall and a Chapel offers a veil of patterned marks, both accidental and devotional. Father Daughter Spirit gathers a portrait, a beer can, a box of cookies. Small, intimate artifacts bound by memory and affection. These are not grand relics but personal debris. The kind that hovers at the edge of awareness. Her drawings form quiet constellations of the everyday. She treats emotional residue and domestic detritus with tender regard. The sacred, here, is not above us but scattered softly across the floor.
Fittingly installed on a low pedestal beneath Smith’s drawings, we nearly trip over Sailor’s Slipper, a cast-glass Croc sandal by Kat Ryals. It gleams with irreverence. Echoes of mall culture and fairy-tale longing are folded into its glossy form, casting the ordinary as mythic. Humble, tender, and slightly absurd, it offers something from a parallel world where even the discarded is held with care. Like much of Ryals’ work, it blurs the line between kitsch and devotion. She treats mass-produced objects not as ironic detritus but as vessels for memory, desire, and transformation.
We make a sharp right, earthbound again by the weight of painted pigment. Jolly Old Saint by Mike McGuire meets us with a contrast of light and dark, tenderness and unease. Thick, looping paint is framed by shutter-like forms that suggest a voyeur’s gaze. The work echoes Bonnard’s intimate vistas, but stripped of softness. Built from the rough scaffolding of memory, McGuire’s painting holds nostalgia that is both tender and grotesque. Not preserved, but questioned. Within the exhibition, it grounds the drift of the cosmos. It pulls us into the smudged and heavy texture of cultural memory. A place where dreams linger but do not resolve.
Flanking Jolly Old Saint, Agustina Markez’s glazed ceramic sculptures, Colgando los botines (“hanging up the boots”), resemble deflated soccer balls mounted on the wall like fragments of a planetary chart. Their softened, sagging forms evoke both playfulness and melancholy. Drawing from childhood games and domestic spaces, they suggest intimate cosmologies under quiet gravitational strain. Markez repurposes discarded objects to explore how politics, place, and memory inhabit everyday forms, transforming failure into myth and junk into poetic markers of time and home.
Soft Orbits
Spinning left, we arrive at a tear in the space-time continuum. This is Ruth Jeyaveeran’s pocket universe within our broader cosmology. In a grey alcove behind the attendant’s desk, the six suspended forms of What Came Before hang like ritual objects. Felted in monochrome wool, they resemble alien fruit and ancestral tools. Each holds its own quiet gravitational pull, untethered from fixed time or category. They feel unearthed from another realm, one where the boundaries between human, animal, and plant have long since dissolved.
I am mesmerized as Harry veers us gently to the right, toward Witnesses, a hanging anthropomorphic totem also of felted forms. It traces the immigrant body in flux, continuously reconstructing itself from the residues of migration and memory.
Jeyaveeran’s fibre sculptures echo the quiet resilience running through Dream Junk & Cosmic Dust. They gather softness, residue, and care into forms that speak to survival and transformation. Like many others in the show, she turns the humble and handmade into a site of memory and becoming. Nothing here is fixed. What is discarded is never truly lost.
From the grounding of Jeyaveeran’s future primitive totems, we drift toward a different imagining. A vignette of speculative futures opens, like gallery-hopping in a world a century ahead.
Katie Kotler’s Dream of Perfection brings softness into the space of speculation. Printed on a throw pillow, it folds 1980s graphics and retro-futurist colour into something tactile and intimate. Something meant to be held. The form sits deliberately in between, part mass-produced décor and part emotional artifact. It invites us to take the domestic seriously. To see comfort and decoration not as distraction, but as meaning itself. Dream junk made tender. Cosmic dust made familiar.
Jacob Hicks returns with Woman 60 Na’ashjé’íí Asdzáá, where Indigenous cosmology and speculative futurism entwine. This intimate, highly rendered oil painting of a female figure radiates layered strength. It refuses simplification. Not a portrait of a singular woman, but a portal into mythic futurism. An invocation rather than an identity.
We slow down and sidestep left to Cribari Supernova III, Kat Ryals’ alien floral arrangement. A swirl of neon tracers and faux decadence, it glows like a dying star trying to hold itself together. Ryals embraces collapse and transformation. She treats trash and treasure with equal reverence, as seen earlier in Sailor’s Slipper. Her work gathers what might otherwise be discarded and renders it incandescent.
Through Flame and Shadow
Harry shifts direction and pauses at the rear wall, our final stop. His amber eyes shimmer.
At the back of the gallery, Caroline Cloutier’s oil painting Flame Gazing II opens a soft vortex of light in layered swirls of yellow, blue, and violet. It evokes the sanctuary of candlelight, where quiet repetition becomes both ritual and release. The painting invites stillness. It teaches us to look through the darkness, not away from it. At the top left corner, a final cut-out butterfly by Concetta Smith hovers. It is the moth to the flame.
Trailing behind Harry on this cosmic Mad Hatter’s tour, I am reminded that debris can also be destiny. The gallery is not an encyclopedia. It is a breathing field. What glimmers at the edges of forgetting might yet guide us toward something new.
Harry slips into the folds of shadow behind the last wall. The works remain, quietly pulsing. What lingers is not an ending, but a charge. An invitation to follow what flickers. To keep looking.
From Fragments, a Future
This was not a tidy show. It did not seek to resolve. Instead, within its haunted materials and speculative dust, it offered a kind of map. Not a map of place, but of feeling. The works invited us to drift, to remember, to imagine futures assembled from fragments. They asked us to see dream junk and cosmic dust not as opposites, but as kin.
What they offered was not answers, but constellations. Psychic weather. Reverent scrap. And perhaps, too, the quiet truth that what we once thought of as residue—the parts we nearly forgot—were the very things that might carry us forward.
Epilogue: A Collaborative Cosmos
Dream Junk & Cosmic Dust is a collaboration between the artists of Paradice Palase and GLORIA’S, two independent initiatives grounded in community building, intentional curation, and experimental formats.
Paradice Palase, co-founded by Kat Ryals and Lauren Hirshfield and now led by Ryals, is a Brooklyn-based gallery and studio network that centres emerging artists and equitable exchange. Their projects are shaped through conversation, care, and collective imagination.
GLORIA’S, founded in 2018 by curator and producer Lauren Wolchik, first opened in Ridgewood, Queens and now moves nomadically. With a DIY sensitivity and institutional insight, GLORIA’S creates room for risk, resonance, and psychic experimentation.
This collaboration opened more than a shared space. It opened a world, still unfolding, where the personal drifts into the planetary, where artists speak in fragments and frequencies, and where a rabbit might blink, turn gently, and begin to walk. You follow, not for answers, but to see what begins to glow.
Revere – 2025