Founders and curators Genevieve Nollinger and Talia Markowitz. All images by Alexandra Gold. 

Isolde the Palimpsest

“I answered you: ‘Isolde.’
Isolde. The world became a word.”
— Jeanette Winterson

You may know the character Isolde through the medieval legend Tristan and Isolde or the Wagner adaptation currently showing at the Metropolitan Opera. Soon you’ll know her through Greenwich Village’s newest gallery.

Six flights up at 55 West 8th Street, an apartment becomes a world for artist-run space Isolde’s debut exhibition, Isolde, Isolde: a group show featuring Praise Fuller, Christopher Gambino, Tristan Higginbotham, Bennett Koziak, Weihui Lu, Helene von Schirach, and Claudia Corujo.

Isolde’s co-founders and curators Talia Markowitz and Genevieve Nollinger decided on the name together as an embodiment of who they want their gallery to be—a character through which they can develop an ongoing narrative outside of themselves, one that cuts across time and space. “People still find so much meaning in these old stories,” says Nollinger, who brings a comparative literature background to the art world, noting her love for narrative-driven work.

Isolde is built upon an already storied world, in Markowitz’s actual apartment, with a view of a constantly changing block. The space and its stewards lean into the active residential purpose, incorporating the show’s thirteen works into the built-in cabinets and windows.

“In New York, space is at a premium so things are constantly being reused and repurposed,” says Markowitz of transforming her apartment into a gallery. “This is also about, what will it be like for me to go to sleep every night in this space? But art is meant to be lived with.”

The wind and the rain by Bennett Koziak

Bennett Koziak’s The wind and the rain, a violin sculpted with additions of cow and coyote bones and gut strings, is perched in the half-open window looking out onto the fire escape. Inspired by the Aeolian harp, an instrument played by the wind, the curators and Koziak saw the window as an almost fated installation opportunity. Nearby, Koziak’s Cruel sister violin—sculpted with back muscles and a pronounced butt—sits on the gallery’s only white pedestal. The accompanying instrument case, molded to accommodate the anthropomorphic carvings, sits in the nearby corner cabinet.

“The first decision we made was actually to set the video (Helene von Schirach’s Mal schauen or Present Tense) in the bathroom,” says Nollinger. The curators wanted the opening to be intimate, almost domestic, and they placed chairs for attendees around a table displaying The bonny swan, a violin sculpture by Koziak with strings crafted from his and Nollinger’s hair.

Bennett Koziak’s Cruel sister and Christopher Gambino’s Madame steps out onto the balcony at two in the morning

On the Friday evening of the opening, walking through the crowded exhibition with new people constantly cascading in, I noticed a perfectly circular spill of red wine under Christopher Gambino’s sculpture, Cowardly Isabelle, constructed from a chair, stockings, resin, and a white heeled shoe. Each work developed in real time with the heightening energy of its human environment. Cowardly Isabelle almost appeared as if the titular character were thrown (or jumped?) from the apartment’s second level, the white staircase visible behind the piece as I viewed it from the center of the room. “We knew [with Gambino’s work] that where we placed them would steer the show’s whole narrative,” says Markowitz.

Gambino’s second shoe sculpture, Madame steps out onto the balcony at two in the morning, is placed by the same window holding Koziak’s The wind and the rain. Madame is either crawling in or stumbling out, but her placement brings the outside in and stretches the gallery and its developing narrative beyond its walls. And with heels clicking all around, the sculptures transformed into gallery guests, my mind wanting to fill in the blanks of their stories.

Cowardly Isabelle by Christopher Gambino in a sea of shoes

There was a fluctuating union of wine, perfume, and body odor in the air. It was ultra human, friends uniting as if celebrating a housewarming. Even as the evening’s end neared, people were still climbing the stairs up to the gallery. “It’s totally full,” one man said to his friend when he arrived at the sixth floor—but his friend disregarded him and slid into the crowd.

In the entryway, right next to the continually ringing buzzer, clustered attendees parsed through a selection of works in what Nollinger describes as a “cabinet of curiosities.” The wooden cabinet includes copies of Are.na Annual Volume 7, “Pool,” the Ecoslay anthology, and curated books from micro-bookstore Trains, such as Sartre’s The Psychology of Imagination and Mishima’s The Sound of Waves. There was also a selection of small handcrafted pewter acorns by artist Claudia Corujo, inspired by the book The Gift by Lewis Hyde. My boyfriend, accompanying me for the evening, left the show with a set of three acorns, as advised by the curators and artist on a card that reads:

One for you, one for me,
one for the place
we’d like to remember.

(They’re currently sitting on our windowsill as we decide on our shared place of remembrance to leave one.)

Claudia Corujo’s pewter acorns nested in the cabinet drawer

At the center of the exhibition, Praise Fuller’s ceiling-high cyanotype installation, The Weight of Wholeness Is No Trifling Matter, draws from and expands the archive. Fuller’s work is “making a new plane on which everything can exist together,” says Markowitz. Moving across time and space, a photograph of American sculptor Augusta Savage appears in the corner of the cyanotype alongside photos of Fuller herself. Nollinger tells me that Fuller was reading Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, which inspired the piece and its title, while finishing the prints and assembly.

The Weight of Wholeness Is No Trifling Matter by Praise Fuller

Using another sun-based alternative photographic process, and mining her personal archive, Weihui Lu’s anthotype on handmade paper is positioned at the top of one of the gallery’s two massive arched windows. (“Everyone wanted the windows,” the curatorial duo added as an aside while giving me a tour.) The paper is made from bamboo harvested at a residency Lu attended and modeled after the bamboo grove outside her childhood home in Flushing, Queens. During the opening, the work appeared almost as if a semi-sheer curtain had been placed on the window. But when I later visited the space during the day to chat with the founders, the sun illuminated each speckle on the pale handcrafted paper and revealed a photograph of bamboo. Because the anthotype process is all natural materials, it has no fixed state, so the image and paper change and change again. It’s as impermanent as its subject.

The Grove by Weihui Lu

As a majority of the exhibited artists are working with renewed archives and experimental sculpture, there’s a gentle embrace of found materials and natural processes through the show. Tristan Higginbotham, who also works as a licensed wildlife rehabber, displays five hand-size sculptures pinned at eye level on the wall, made from a wide mix of materials—including shell, reishi mushroom, and found metal—primarily gathered in New York with the intention of molding them into something new and chimeric.

Of Higginbotham’s work, Nollinger says, “You don’t know what you’re looking at, but it feels familiar.”

Familiarity and change keep arising in our conversation, perhaps because with this endeavor, Markowitz and Nollinger are renewing a past relationship between themselves—the two met in Los Angeles at UCLA when they worked on The Hammer’s student-run publication, Graphite, and took a painting class together.

Markowitz and Nollinger preparing for our walkthrough

In recent years, the two both took steps back from the art world to reconsider what they wanted from it—and what they felt it could give. “I had been promised that art was able to do something I no longer felt it was able to do,” says Nollinger. “But when Talia approached me, it felt like we were both ready to re-enter this world… You can’t foresee the things that will happen when you have a shared project outside of yourself.”

“I think we both had a crisis of faith about the art world,” Markowitz adds. With Isolde, they seek to provide a space for emerging artists of all ages and backgrounds to display work that may be more difficult to sell while pushing at the boundaries of their practices.

“The times that I experience art and feel really connected to it are usually not in a box gallery,” says Nollinger. The duo cite some of their shared inspirations: a recent Los Angeles show from the Julia Stoschek Foundation with five stories and hours of video installation work that was only open at night, 1301PE, O-Town House in LA’s Granada Buildings, and the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

“We love an experiment. We love a research-based practice. We love work that feels earnest without taking itself too seriously,” the two previously shared in an Are.na interview.

The curators’ friend, Carlita Rowley, assists with gallery setup as the evening begins.

Despite the different backgrounds they bring to the space (they emphasize that their preferences sometimes diverge) and their “East Coast versus West Coast” sensibilities (Nollinger is a West Coast native, and Markowitz grew up in Greenwich Village), I glean that the two share a notable interest in archival and time-based work. On the gallery’s Are.na page, they shared a quote from Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory: “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.”

Isolde’s debut asks not only what space can become through time, but also how space can operate. The sense that home is a superimposed memory, a dream, and a premonition permeates the show—becoming and transforming are eternal processes. Space is constantly building upon its history, especially in New York. As the exhibition text reads: “Isolde is the palimpsest.”


Isolde, Isolde is on view Sundays 12pm–6pm or by appointment until April 6th. Upcoming programming includes solo shows from Ariel West in April and Alex Westfall in June. Follow Isolde for updates.