Marisa Newman Projects & Bill Arning Exhibitions

Presentation of works by Uta Bekaia and Matthew Gilbert

Both artists work with ancient, labor-intensive techniques - thread, fabric, clay - that resist the speed of digital culture. Their processes insist on slowness, repetition, and the intimacy of touch. The resulting works, whether sewn, stitched, or sculpted, remind us that myth-making remains a profoundly human act: a way of holding chaos, memory, and wonder in our hands.

Uta Bekaia creates ritual transformations. Working across ceramics, textiles, performance, and costume, the Georgian-born artist resurrects ancestral mythologies through a queer, speculative lens. His elaborately sewn and beaded figures - part totem, part garment - coexist with glazed ceramic creatures in a cosmos where human, animal, and spirit intermingle. Each stitch and scale links inherited craft traditions to contemporary identity and survival.

Matthew Gilbert embroiders quiet domestic chaos. His meticulous tableaux depict gothic bedrooms and disordered scenes in white thread on black denim. What appears charming - a quaint room, a Disney-like detail - reveals darker undertones: overturned furniture, creeping vines, uncanny stillness. These psychological interiors transform ordinary life into operatic settings of longing, humor, and dread.