The New York Art Residency & Studios (NARS) Foundation is pleased to present It would hurt us – were we awake – , a group exhibition featuring work from the Season III, 2025 International Residency Artists: Jayden Ashley, Doreen Chan, Elizabeth Chang, Alessando Di Lorenzo, Gill Gatfield, Kimin Kim, Shivani Mithbaokar, Maya Smira, Giorgia Volpe, Cass Yao, Kay Yoon, Tony Zhao.

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We dream – it is good we are dreaming –

It would hurt us – were we awake –

But since it is playing – kill us,

And we are playing – shriek –

– Emily Dickinson, “We dream – it is good we are dreaming –,” c. 1862  

We also live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams.

– Carl Jung, The Red Book, c. 1914-1930

It would hurt us – were we awake – brings together twelve international artists whose works drift along the mutable edge of sleep and waking life, where inner sanctuaries are unsettled by invisible architectures of external power. Shaped by today’s pervasive climate of ambient anxiety, the exhibition reflects on how sites of rest—mental, bodily, or built—are rendered precarious by elusive, often existential forces. Across media, the artists explore these fragile barriers, navigating the tension between safety, vulnerability, and the subconscious. 

The exhibition title, borrowed from a line in American poet Emily Dickinson’s Civil War-era poem “We dream – it is good we are dreaming –,” gestures toward the paradox of slumber as a temporary refuge that ultimately fails to shield us from the phantasms of worldly or psychic danger. Predating psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s expansive theory of dreams—wherein the unconscious speaks through symbolic language to reveal hidden desires, fears, or premonitions to the Self—Dickinson’s observation offers a more outward-facing truth: if rest is an act of release, then dreaming is a space where the mind continues to labor, sometimes gently, sometimes with violence, suspended between resolution and rupture.

This duality informs the exhibition’s spatial design, which unfolds across a bifurcated layout that plays with permeable boundaries between the zones that shelter the body and the body as shelter. Visitors first enter a gallery grounded in the material world, where artists engage not with the representation of dreams, but their ever-shifting logic and uncanny manifestations. These artworks reframe urban and domestic environments as unstable terrains susceptible to subconscious slippages, altering how place is sensed, occupied, and remembered. Bathing the gallery in an eerie glow, electric lime walls conjure both the rare green flash at sunset—an omen of clear horizons—and the unsettling green skies that signal a tumultuous storm. The hue acts as a chromatic metaphor for the exhibition’s charged atmosphere, echoing the uncertain conditions under which these contemporary artworks have emerged.

Building on the collision of waking and unconscious preoccupations, the next gallery interrogates latent psychic states' ability to catalyze somatic consequences. Recent research by neurologist Dr. Abidemi Otaiku indicates that adults who experience nightmares on a weekly basis or more have a threefold increased risk of premature mortality before age seventy, linked to stress during sleep. This empirical finding sharpens the conceptual stakes within the artworks, which grapple with trauma, grief, and death—the proverbial final slumber—expressed through fragmented corporeal forms and symbolic absences. Positioned at the veil between sleep and death, nightmares emerge not merely as warnings; they are active agents of harm, driving the body's gradual unraveling through lingering nocturnal wounds.

Throughout It would hurt us – were we awake – the artworks inhabit a threshold where the mind’s hypnagogic reverie intertwines with tangible bodily and structural unrest, reminding us that dreaming itself is a political act in a world where rest is never promised.

Expanding on the artists’ meditations on twilight shadowlands, a collection of unique artist-made Dream Zines complements the exhibition. They are freely accessible online via the NARS Foundation website.

Zones that Shelter the Body–Topographies of Disquiet

In her series Impermanent Paths (2025), Brazilian artist Giorgia Volpe overlays gestural painted marks onto photographs taken during bike rides through New York City, producing digital collages that unravel the rigidity of the urban grid. Drawing on daily encounters and embodied movement, Volpe reimagines the city as a porous Escherian environment shaped by memory, affect, and sensory drift. Emerging from her ongoing investigation of liminal spaces between public and private, individual and communal, the work proposes the cityscape not as fixed infrastructure but as a dynamic zone contingent on continuous emotional and spatial negotiation.

Italian artist Alessandro Di Lorenzo’s Astronomer with Compass IV (2025) etches layered circular marks into paper, the abstract drawing housed within a metallic frame that recalls construction scaffolding. Glimpses of yellow notebook paper peek through the work’s edge, pointing to the speculative design practice of an imagined architect. Relating to the ancient practice of augury, in which Roman seers interpreted the flight of birds to divine spatial and political fate, the Astronomer emerges as an attempt at cosmic realignment through uncertainty. Like the mythic account of Romulus and Remus—where the founding of Rome was determined by a contest of signs in the sky—Di Lorenzo’s work conjures a world in which cities might still be guided by celestial rhythms rather than systems of control or extraction. 

In Between Glowing and Groaning (2025), South Korean artist Kay Yoon creates an altar-like assemblage of violin fragments, a vintage automotive horn, and salvaged table legs. Scaled roughly to the length of a child’s bed or piano bench, the participatory work enacts a ritual of absence: the bow’s gesture across the stretched strings produces vibration but no sound. Instead, a touch-activated sensor triggers a soft pulse of light within the horn’s hollow cavity, casting fragile shadows that echo dream’s flicker. Rooted in Yoon’s exploration of displacement, cultural memory, and embodied ritual, the piece reveals how quotidian objects, estranged from their original contexts, accrue a haunted resonance.

Chinese artist Tony Zhao presents an austere, formally restrained night scene in Roots (2025): a corner of a discarded mattress lies beneath the looming shadow of a pointed wrought-iron gate. At the bottom of the canvas, the subtle blurring of color suggests the fleeting shadow of a passing car or pedestrian—an indifferent movement that introduces a disquieting sense of detached voyeurism. The absence of a sleeping figure turns the mattress into a ghostly remnant of shelter lost, hinting at lives displaced and unseen. Through his layered, tactile approach to oil painting—where texture becomes a poignant language—Zhao sensitively confronts the antagonistic architecture of urban marginality and the precarity of shelter.

Located down the hall from the main gallery, Habeas Corpus (2025), a mixed-reality installation by Aotearoa/New Zealand artist Gill Gatfield, merges the aesthetics of a nursery, courtroom, and padded cell, creating a space that sets the stage for a material and conceptual unraveling. The Wall (2025), part of her Woven Fields series, meticulously patchworks plush cotton diapers into a visual weave that spans an entire wall. Nearby, the wall sculpture Freehold (2025), also from Woven Fields, mounts the same material onto a Russian birch panel, creating a white, topographical portrait that probes ownership: Who claims land, controls bodies, and how do material histories reveal injustice and exploitation?Despite the works’ soft surfaces and their evocation of safety and lullabies, embedded within are endocrine-disrupting chemicals linked to male infertility—a sinister irony implicating the volatile politics of reproductive control in the United States. At the installation’s center, a slender Carrara marble column—crafted from the same stone found in the U.S. Supreme Court building—supports a petite, gold-gilded barcode. When scanned by the viewer, it activates CHIP, an infant-sized, I-form AR sculpture carved from 45,000-year-old kauri wood. Merging ancient material with digital presence, CHIP hovers between the born and unborn; memory and potential; dream and matter.Further underscoring this liminality is Operating System (2025), an invisible network that animates the installation in real time, imbuing even passive interactions with a quiet volatility. Anchored in the legal principle of habeas corpus, the installation collapses juridical language and maternal architecture into a surreal space of suspended personhood—where liberty is neither granted nor revoked, but indefinitely delayed.

The scars of urban restructuring and racial exclusion are made manifest in Brooklyn artist Jayden Ashley’s No Letting Go (2025), part of his The Block Party’s Over series—a wall-mounted sculpture composed of wooden panels coated in concrete. The work’s brutalist geometry intrudes into the viewer’s space, embodying the rigidity and impenetrability of systemic social and economic barriers. Ashley appropriates the outlines of Harlem, a historic Black neighborhood shaped by redlining—a discriminatory financial practice that institutionalized economic marginalization and segregation—highlighting how such communities, once deliberately cast aside, have become sites of intensified desirability amid rapid development. Named for a Wayne Wonder song that often signals the end of a party, No Letting Go stands as a somber monument to the slow violence of displacement and the erasure embedded within gentrification.

In Unwind I, the first piece in a new series, Chinese artist Doreen Chan confronts generational anxiety through a large cyanotype window blind, created by imprinting acetate tape panels layered over incised fabric. Invoking childhood memories of her mother’s meticulous packing of samples for their family’s textile business in Hong Kong, the work channels the fear of harm that often underlies the labor of care. The title Unwind resonates on multiple levels: the physical act of unspooling tape and the psychological impulse to release accumulated stress. Though printed on thin cotton, the cyanotype captures the dense, pointillist weave of heavy insulating fabric. A kinetic piece, it winds and unwinds at intervals determined by the artist; its surface trembles with passive breezes like a silent shudder, struggling to carry the weight of the protection it evokes but cannot guarantee. 

The Body as Shelter–The Flesh as Archive

Cycles of Eternity (2025) by Israeli artist Maya Smira projects a rotating mandala composed of photographs taken in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery, accompanied by collected sounds and birdsong from the site. Drawing on her yoga practice and engagement with diverse spiritual traditions, Smira layers fractured gravestones, mausolea, and vibrant greenery to meditate on the cyclical interplay of life and death, permanence and renewal. Raised amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, Smira, a longtime peace activist, brings a profound, personal awareness of mortality’s persistent presence. Created during the artist’s pregnancy, the work channels the fragility of the maternal body alongside the promise of new beginnings, the spinning mandala serving as a quiet hymn to existence’s enduring pulse amid loss.

Chinese artist Cass Yao’s In Concentrated Hypnotic Ingredients, Dead Dreams, Like That Arched Luminous Body Suspending Over the Insect, Emit a Strange Odor (2025) presents a dangling corporeal sculpture that defies easy classification—a wormlike, slumped figure caught between animation and collapse. Rendered in prosthetic silicone, horsehair, and torn stockings, and hung from thick metal chains, the desiccated form stages a tactile interplay of restraint, abjection, and eroticism. One side of its translucent, bluish-white flesh is carved open to reveal pendulous fatty sacks, pearls, and glinting piercings dispersed amongst blood-red folds, simultaneously suggesting traumatic injury and a florid morphology of intersex desire. In Concentrated Hypnotic Ingredients’ passive, slow swinging further conjures the cadence of a breath catching in the pause that follows somatic intensity—pain, ecstasy, or some other liminal undoing. 

An intimate-scaled diptych offers a personal meditation on loss in South Korean artist Kimin Kim’s Vessels (2025). Connected by decorative rows of white stars, two wood panels depict fragmented scenes. To the left, a bouquet of white lilies and chrysanthemums—symbols of traditional Korean mourning—evoke Kim’s grandfather’s funeral, the petals’ edges blurring into a black void that denotes the haziness of memory. Across the starry border, Kim’s own hands are drawn in moonstruck blue oil pastel on fragile Korean hanji paper; the paper’s delicate wrinkles intensify the hands' vulnerability, making them literally more fragile than the blossoms. With mastery of technique and material, Vessels becomes a poetic container for grief—reminding us that our presence is as fleeting as a blooming flower.

Indian artist Shivani Mithbaokar constructs a disjointed, spectral figure across four works: Ancestor’s Garden (2024–25), Burial Site (2022–25), and Corbel I and Corbel II (2025). On the floor, Ancestor’s Garden outlines a human-scaled, headless form in wispy white gouache and acrylic on found floral wallpaper, its elongated neck surging toward the wall. Punctuated by acid-green flourishes that hint at organic growth and decay, the figure lingers as a trace, simultaneously absorbed into and hovering over the work’s surface. Above, the painting Burial Site acts as a silent sentinel: hung at the height of the missing head, its small funerary mask in gouache and gold leaf on matching wallpaper casts its gaze downward. Mounted between the two paintings are Corbel I and Corbel II, glazed ceramic sculptures inspired by architectural supports from New York’s built environment. Their biomorphic phallic and vulvic forms reimagine stone ornament as soft anatomy, blurring structure and flesh. Together, the works assemble a disembodied anatomy trapped in limbo—an invisible presence indelibly imprinted on the imagined domestic space it once called home.

Separate from the main gallery, Bay Area artist Elizabeth Chang’s multisensory installation the rejection of closure (2025) generates an intimate constellation of three works that move through grief and memory without yielding to catharsis. The sound piece I heard… loops gently over thirty minutes, its titular phrase repeated in a calm, measured voice that offers reassurance, even as its irregular intervals withhold dependable rhythm. Layered beneath this, ambient recordings—muffled ocean waves and barely intelligible news reports of Trump’s reelection and the 2024 South Korean martial law crisis—fade in and out like flashes of a half-remembered dream. Here, politics are ambient, not absent; global events recede into the background of a personal desire for grounding and connection across language and culture. Spanning a wall, (on, into, in) (2025), is a sparse modular structure composed of painted white plywood and fishing line. Inspired by stories of Chang’s grandfather, a fisherman from what is now North Korea, the work operates as a thoughtful barrier; subtly interrupting physical space while indexing histories of familial fracture. Nearby rests for Ana (2025), a sculptural elegy cast in paper pulp from branches collected on Ward’s Island, where Chang once worked as a nurse practitioner at a men’s temporary housing shelter. Memorializing Ana Charle, a colleague murdered by a former shelter resident, the piece is constructed through a meticulous silicone casting process. Its attenuated, fragile medium becomes a poignant metaphor for the limits of healing despite laborious effort. 

– Daniela Mayer