Studio
Worlds Within Worlds
Exhibition, 2025at Context Collective
95 4th Street
Troy, NY 12180
July 25 - August 23, 2025
Exhibiting Artists:
Nuveen Barwari
Berly Brown
Ruben Castillo
Katie Chin
Ally DeRusso
Cara Hanley
Maura Jasper
Giselle Lora
Annabelle Mona
Patrick Read
Karley Sullivan
Victoria van der Laan
Christian Henry Wechgelaer
The exhibition title alludes to the complex realities of creating and exhibiting art. I’ve had many conversations with local visual artists and non-artists alike, regarding the Capital Region’s art scene. I notice the direction of these conversations often ends up describing culture as a kind of gradient: New York City is imagined as the most saturated point—vivid, intense, overflowing with opportunity. Moving up the Hudson Valley, that color begins to fade. By the time it reaches Troy, it’s often perceived as washed out—a place where cultural vibrancy thins or disappears entirely.
This exhibition challenges that scarcity mindset. While “the art world” is often imagined as a singular, centralized structure, Worlds Within Worlds recognizes the many art worlds that quietly coexist within local scenes, studio practices, and artist-built relationships. Some are informal, some are experimental, some are temporary—but all are real, meaningful, and worthy of attention. Something adrienne maree brown writes in Emergent Strategy:
“Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.) [...] There is a conversation that only these people in the room can have. Find it.”
Rather than drawing solely from a geographic pool, this exhibition draws from a proximity of practice, i.e. artists who have spent the past year in dialogue with one another, showing unfinished work, asking questions, and building a rhythm of mutual presence. That proximity isn’t just convenient or logistical; it’s relational. If, as brown writes, the large is a reflection of the small, then perhaps this is one way to begin building a more grounded, professional art world locally.
Visually, Worlds Within Worlds collects material evidence of smaller, self-contained cosmologies—worlds built through personal mythologies, metaphysical inquiry, and acts of preservation. Across the exhibition, the works function like remnants of a quietly spiritual culture: stone-carved archaic figures, a brushed lunar cycle, quilts, Kurdish textiles, hand-drawn materials from queer archives, and wood-fired ant hills. Within these smaller worlds are systems of meaning, survival, and transformation—ones that don’t always seek visibility in dominant art structures but assert their presence nonetheless.