Jack Barrett presents Industrial Dry, a group exhibition curated by Francesca Altamura that brings together artists whose materially driven practices examine the shifting contours of the urban landscape through abstraction. Working across media—acrylic, cement, cardboard, petroleum, silver, steel, wool, terrazzo, and more—these artists foreground a deep material engagement and tactile processes that speak to questions of place, identity, labor, and memory. In their hands, craft becomes more than technique: it is a mode of survival, a way to reckon with fragility.

Many of the works draw from the overlooked materials of city life—worn surfaces, structural remnants, found textures—and reshape them into meditations on presence and loss. Greg Carideo welds together rusted metal, discarded fabrics, and a lost shoe heel into precarious forms that echo shelters in states of ruin. Pap Souleye Fall weaves over thirty feet of cardboard into an architectural skin, blending African craft sensibilities with playful structural logic to evoke temporary habitats. Zhi Wei Hiu manipulates century-old photographic plates and silver-gelatin prints to reveal the “noise” behind image-making, unearthing what lies beneath surfaces both literal and metaphorical. Similarly invested in material transformation, Ficus Interfaith hand-pours terrazzo into resilient, pattern-like forms that are both devotional and utilitarian. Ana Villagomez builds her paintings through cycles of sanding, peeling, and repainting—acts that conceal and reveal, evoking time's layered erosion. Nora Normile and Patrick Carlin Muhundro work with stoneware and glass, respectively, to craft objects that are familiar,  alluring and confrontational—seductive in their finish. 

Other artists approach abstraction through the lens of selfhood and memory. Pauline Shaw felts wool into layered compositions that merge ancestral memory, cosmology, and archival research. Jesús Hilario-Reyes explores how moving bodies blur and merge in club spaces, using welded steel to map dancefloors and trace fleeting moments that reflect queer and diasporic experience. Douglas Rieger constructs sculptures that fuse the mechanical and the bodily, drawing on the aesthetics of industrial decay and familial labor histories with a touch of humor. Christopher Paul Jordan uses the strappo technique—normally meant to preserve fading murals—in a demented way that splits the painting into two fractal-like halves, capturing not just the image but also the ghostly trace of its original composition. María Elena Pombo’s weavings of cured petroleum and algae—gathered from her hometown in Venezuela—speak to ecological precarity and cultural dislocation. For Nikita Seleznev, the act of making is quiet: in his hands, craftsmanship becomes a tender response to instability, a way to root oneself through a desire to endure.

Together, the works in Industrial Dry form a textured meditation on material as both subject and witness—one that holds the imprint of bodies, histories, and cities in flux. In a time when so much feels disposable or obscured, these artists insist on processes that dig deep, uncovering and preserving fragments of truth through their hands. Whether through the quiet grief of mural fragments, the stubborn unpredictability of cured petroleum, or the shimmer of expired photographic emulsions, each work is a gesture toward preservation and reinvention. The result is a collective meditation on how making—deeply felt and insistently handmade—can offer refuge amid the difficulties of contemporary life.

-Francesca Altamura