Elsewhere: Cartography of the Dream
Monira Foundation: Legacies Gallery
888 Newark Ave, 2nd fl.
Jersey City, NJ 0730
Elsewhere: Cartography of the dream
Elswhere, a new exhibition curated by Ysabel Pinyol Blasi, brings together Z Behl, Stanley Casselman, James English Leary, Omari Douglin, Chris Martin, Sean Mellyn, Azikiwe Mohammed, and Alice Naegel, eight artists who explore the precarious terrain between sight and imagination. In these works, the eye is not merely an organ of perception but a portal, opening onto memory, instinct, and the unruly logic of dreams.
Surrealism serves each artist not as a stylistic echo but as a living method of making. Whether through a brushstroke, the alteration of a vessel, or the shaping of clay, artists work with a willingness to suspend certainty, follow associative leaps, and trust images that arrive unbidden. Each summons a different texture of the dream-state.
Together, their works invite viewers into a landscape where waking reason loosens its grip. The exhibition asks: What does vision become when freed from the task of describing the world, and what might we learn from the images that look back at us from the dark?
About the artist Z Behl
Z BEHL, b. 1985, is a New York based filmmaker and visual artist. An interdisciplinary artist, she most often works in sculptural installation, performance, and film. Culling myths to narrativize trickster archetypes exploring gender and power, Z is concerned with chaos, attachment, and the role of the artist as a world breaker.
Z has performed at PIONEER WORKS, exhibited at Mana Contemporary and the CAC New Orleans, and been commissioned to make monumental sculptures in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Her film “Geppetto” was selected for the Venice Biennale Cinema College. She has received awards from the Pollack-Krasner Foundation, NYFA, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Z has also curated exhibitions around collective trauma with the 9/11 survivors community, and Hurricane Sandy— featuring artworks that were damaged/improved by the hand of the storm. Her work has been reviewed by Art News, the New York Times, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic and the Wall St Journal. She has been a resident of the MacDowell Colony, Collarwork’s Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency and Radio 28 in Mexico.
About the artist Stanley Casselman
Stanley Casselman is a New York-based artist whose sumptuously calculated surfaces are motivated by a sense of awe and wonderment in the intangible spiritual elements of our being. The known and speculative forces that create the lattice of our physical reality are what swim in the right side of his brain and the fundamental belief that absolute truth lies only within abstraction, occupies the left. Baroque yet highly calculated, his process towards picture making reveals itself through a spectrum of layers strokes and gestures exploring a range of emotions in an efficacious search for higher consciousness. Casselman is deeply committed to the notion that color, line, and form have the ability to change cognizance.
Casselman received his Bachelor of Arts from Pitzer College, Claremont, CA. His works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries and museums, including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL; Gazelli Art House, Baku, Azerbijan and London, UK; Secci Gallery, Milan, Italy. His works are in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; and Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul.
About the artist James English Leary
James English Leary was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1982. The artist received his BFA from Cooper Union in New York City in 2004. Leary’s works have been exhibited internationally and included in the Whitney Biennial, the Liverpool Biennial, MoMA PS1 and the Sundance Film Festival. Exhibitions of the artist’s work include: Tennis Elbow at Journal Gallery in New York City; Patter at Nina Johnson in Miami, Florida; Small Fishes Swim Around Inside of Large Fishes at Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer in Vienna, Austria; and Hoi Polloi at Nathalie Karg Gallery in New York City. Leary is a founding member of The Bruce High Quality Foundation. The artist is a Tiffany Foundation Award recipient and a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation resident. Leary lives and works in New York City, where he teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art.
About the artist Omari Douglin
Omari Douglin (b. 1992, Brooklyn, NY) lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2019, Douglin received an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2015.
Solo and two-person exhibitions include Art Basel Miami Beach, Matthew Brown and Ramiken, Miami, FL (2024); boutique O, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2024); Four Paintings, Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles (2023); Scam Likely, with Lukas Quietzsch, Ramiken Crucible, New York (2023); Wave Gods 2, Ramiken Crucible, New York (2023); The People of Micki Meng, Nicki Meng, San Francisco (2022); Montage Ontology Domain, Theta, New York (2022).
Recent group exhibitions include Recent Acquisitions, Rubell Museum, Miami, FL (2024); PROGRAM, Matthew Brown, New York (2024); Averard, Ramiken Crucible, London (2022); Apple in the Dark, Harkawik, New York (2022); Their private worlds contained the memory of a painting that had shapes as reassuring gas the uncanny footage of a sonogram, curated by Sedrick Chisom, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2022); Stanley and Marta’s Holiday Fête, Stanley’s, Los Angeles (2021); Mother and Child, Friends Indeed, San Francisco (2021); and Deathbound and Sexed, Theta, New York, NY (2021).
About the artist Chris Martin
Working from a heterogeneous array of cultural traditions, Chris Martin (b. 1954, Washington, D.C.) makes paintings that serve as living documents of the eternal present. He privileges stylistic diversity and immediacy over predetermined aesthetic ideas, generating an art that can be as primal as it is knowing, as vibrantly joyful as it is meditative and hermetic. He has experimented with non-art materials, non-traditional installation, and extreme scale. For this reason, Martin’s career is characterized by an evolution of thematic cycles rather than strictly linear development. The overt influences—musical, spiritual, and art historical—that appear throughout his work are acknowledgments of his desire to return to a common well, or universally accessible source of inspiration.
About the artist Sean Mellyn
Satirical painter Sean Mellyn (pronounced mehl-ihn) has lived and worked in New York City for nearly 40 years. He graduated from Pratt Institute in the mid-1980s during the prevailing punk, drag and drug culture, the growing AIDS crisis, and the ascendancy of its fear-filled, reactionary conservatism. The high and low of the moment was not lost on the artist’s early development, where the iconic vocabulary he built at that time would continue throughout his career, reformulating with ever-changing times.
The representational imagery in Mellyn’s paintings, drawings and prints fall into thematic groups that all symbolize the role of the artist as mirror of the world. Comic or romantic illustrations of everyday objects, portraiture or landscapes bely deeper criticisms of political or social power dynamics. Precisely rendered, the artist’s personal lexicon includes lightbulbs, eyes, paper bags, eggs, nests, snowmen, pigs and flowers. Many images are lifted from archetypal American magazines or children’s coloring books, fostering the backdrop of overbearing purist ideology or oppressive perfection. Humor and beauty first present, then unfold with closer inspection into radical dreamscapes where three-dimensional cigars protrude from glory holes, Monet dons a pompadour, birch trees see, and children with mixed-up faces tend to animals on a farm.
About the artist Azikiwe Mohammed
Azikiwe Mohammed (b. 1982, New York City) is a multidisciplinary artist based in NYC. A Bard College BFA graduate, he rejects the notion of artistic “genius,” describing himself instead as a “guy who makes stuff.” His work—ranging from paintings and furniture to puppets, photographs, and tapestries—draws inspiration from the warm, everyday aesthetics of the Black homes he grew up in. Favoring materials like wood and neon, he often builds immersive, room-like installations designed to feel welcoming and familiar.
Guided by a belief in art as service, shaped in part by his father’s career as a photographer, Mohammed creates projects that provide real support to overlooked communities. He envisioned the fictional town of New Davonhaime, named after five predominantly Black American cities, as a framework for this work. Within it, he runs real-world initiatives such as Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime, offering free portrait photography, and the New Davonhaime Food Bank, which distributes food across New York City. Blending art, retail, and social service, Mohammed pushes beyond traditional boundaries to make creativity tangibly useful.
About the artist Alice Naegel
Alice Naegel is a New York–based visual artist whose work blends expressive figuration with abstract, emotionally charged forms. Trained in Paris and London, she studied at Ateliers de Sèvres, Central Saint Martins, and LISAA Fashion School, shaping an interdisciplinary practice that explores identity, the body, and the uncanny. Working across painting, sculpture, and performance, Naegel often incorporates mannequins as symbols of both beauty and estrangement, creating vivid, intimate worlds that blur the line between the animate and inanimate. She has exhibited internationally—including in Paris, London, Strasbourg, Colombia, and the U.S.—and continues to develop work driven by introspection, vulnerability, and human presence.