BRAIDED RIVER
February 6 - April 4, 2026
Arsenal Contemporary Art, New York, and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, are pleased to present Braided River, a group exhibition marking the galleries’ newest collaboration in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood. The exhibition opens Friday, February 6, and continues through April 4, 2026.
A braided river is a living system in motion: a network of channels that split, rejoin, and shift over time. Shaped by sediment, current, and seasonal change, it refuses a single route forward. Instead, it moves sideways, building strength through many paths at once. From above, a braided river can look almost woven—restless, adaptive, and bright with complexity.
Braided River takes this phenomenon as both metaphor and method. Bringing together Canadian artists David Armstrong Six, Elaine Stocki, and Nadia Myre with American artists Claire Colette, Catherine Fairbanks, and Melanie Schiff from Night Gallery’s program, the exhibition asks how distinct practices can meet without flattening into one voice. Each artist remains unmistakably themselves, yet together they form a larger system—linked through shared attention to material, perception, memory, and the body. Here, beauty doesn’t come from perfect unity, but from difference held in relation.
David Armstrong Six’s sculptures move between abstraction and figuration, pairing gestural form with lived experience and cultural resonance. His process often works through removal: like erosion, it uncovers what lies beneath. Traces of memory and identity surface as material is cut away, and each carved plane holds the mark of what’s been lost.
Claire Colette’s paintings approach transformation from the opposite direction. Built through layering and accumulation, her patterned compositions hover between landscape and gesture, image and atmosphere. Where Armstrong 6 excavates through reduction, Colette constructs through accretion—two complementary ways of thinking about matter, time, and change.
Nadia Myre’s practice is rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems, labor, and collective memory. Through beading, mark-making, and repetition, she transforms everyday and institutional forms into sites of reflection and reclamation. Braiding is present both literally and conceptually: personal, political, and ancestral narratives interweave into objects shaped by resilience and care.
Elaine Stocki shares this sensitivity to process and material response, but in a quieter register. Working with modest materials—dyeing and sewing canvas with an attentiveness that recalls quilt-making, and more recently incorporating silk, velvet, and watercolor—she makes work that feels fleeting yet deliberate. Like the temporary channels of a braided river, her forms seem to appear, fade, and return elsewhere. In different ways, both Myre and Stocki treat making as a kind of devotion: Myre honors memory and resistance, while Stocki asks viewers to slow down and notice subtle shifts in surface and structure.
Melanie Schiff’s photographs consider perception and the psychological charge of light, framing fragments of the world—fabric, reflections, weeds, architecture—so they become near-abstract fields. Her images locate the body within the exhibition’s wider currents, even when it’s not directly pictured.
Catherine Fairbanks extends this bodily awareness through atmospheric paintings where long horizontal forms suggest both horizon and flesh. Figures often remain submerged in the earliest layers of the work, lingering beneath the surface. Brushwork, drips, and dissolving edges move between control and release—echoing the way we negotiate vulnerability, care, and need. If Schiff offers moments of reflective stillness, like eddies within a river system, Fairbanks draws us into the current itself, where bodies and landscapes blur into states of becoming.
Together, these artists form a collaborative whole: practices that diverge and converge, carrying different materials, histories, and sensibilities. Braided River celebrates this shared motion—an exhibition shaped by intersection rather than alignment, where beauty emerges through entanglement, and the phenomenal takes shape through many currents moving at once.