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PROXY GALLERY PRESENTS
Beginning with Robin Mitchell's exhibition in September 2024, Beyond Baroque has graciously hosted Proxy Gallery. Proxy opened on January 13, 2013. It is a one cubic foot box, open in front, usually placed on the wall at face level. It has hosted more than 90 exhibitions so far, mostly one-person shows, with a few group shows and 2-person collaborations. Annetta Kapon is the owner and director, and Proxy is part of my her production. For more information please visit www.proxygallery.com.
Proxy Gallery Presents
xiouping:
modalities: the body keeps time
March 28 to May 9, 2026
The work of artist xiouping is a 12-minute video and sound installation composed of a looped single-channel video. The camera stays in a fixed position inside a bedroom. We see a woman pushing someone in a wheelchair off camera, and then the same woman coming and going, tidying the room and the bed, carrying cups and bottles away from the bedside table, arranging medications, emptying the commode and changing the lining, placing new mattress protectors on the bed, and performing many actions indicative of caregiving to a disabled person, who is off camera. Also off-camera there are sounds of language fragments in English and Taiwanese, and English subtitles. The work is organized by the tension between the seen and the unseen, produced through strict formal constraints: cleaning, feeding, and tending. The patient is unseen, while the caregiver’s body and labor are centered. Care persists without exit, and rest is structurally withheld.
The actions happen for someone, by someone else. The actions are repeated, interrupted, paused, taking a certain amount of time in real time, constituting the conditions and the duration of care, hence the artwork. Emotions are neither shown nor implied. The receiver of care is not visible, perhaps for privacy and dignity, or perhaps because the video is primarily a portrait of the caregiver. In medical terminology, modalities are specific methods, tools, or techniques used to achieve a particular result, commonly applied in healthcare to treat conditions, or in physical therapy to relieve pain. But here modalities are also the formal devices that structure the video but also the conditions of its reception by the viewer who sees what is in front of their eyes, by they are also given the time to free-associate, imagine, empathize, assume or presume: is the caregiver the same person as the artist? Are we not witnessing the invisible labor of women and immigrants? Is the caregiver a professional or a family member?
In many ways, this one long take video is informed by the tradition of films of “ordinary experience” as Frederick Wiseman called them, the intentionally boring observations of everyday rituals and situations, or the immersive, static shots of Chantal Ackerman. What xiouping’s video shares with Wiseman and Ackerman is also its unrelenting materialism, refusing metaphor or explanatory voice-overs and focusing as it does on everyday actions in real time. The body indeed keeps time, both for the receiver and for the giver of care.
The “walls” of the proxy Gallery mirror the walls of a room and underscore the idea of a boundary. Special conditions of viewing arranged by the artist take accessibility into account: The gallery is placed at a lower height to be visible from a seat or a wheelchair. In this way the installation does not assume a default upright, able-bodied viewing position. Instead, it allows for multiple physical orientations to the work — standing briefly, leaning, or sitting. Care reorganizes how bodies relate to space, and the viewing condition reflects that variability rather than prescribing a single normative stance.
For more information visit Proxy Gallery online here.
Proxy Gallery Presents
Sandeep Mukherjee:
Observer, Observed
January 31 to March 14, 2026
It is common to assert that form and content are inseparably intertwined, but with this work, the artist launches them into dialogue by presenting a fragment of language, a phrase without a verb. Without other context we cannot know whether abstraction is the opposite of the real, the opposite of representation, or the opposite of “here;” and, what is “convenient” about it.
Language is by definition an abstract system, so its material form becomes singularly important; like a head with an open mouth, the Proxy Gallery pours forth a cascade of letterforms and words repeated and entangled with each other, that in their resistance to being read, call attention to their presentation in a way that is in dialogue with graphic design and communication design.
This particular piece of language has concrete form: size, color, texture, transparency, volume, and the font is ‘Not Caslon.’ The medium is translucent milky vellum, a substance that often indicates intermediate iterations and preparations before a final design. There is no ink anywhere, nor is there voice or sound. The phrase itself was mechanically produced by laser cutting.
Repetition, seriality, mechanical reproduction are favored processes of graphic art. Here Mondor proposes a gallery that speaks, but in a language that is not just a thought or an idea, but a sculptural thing, almost precluding us from simply reading it.
For more information visit Proxy Gallery online here.
Proxy Gallery Presents
Leo Mondor:
Just a Short Distance from Here to the Convenience of Abstraction; rendered four times.
October 18 - December 13, 2025
It is common to assert that form and content are inseparably intertwined, but with this work, the artist launches them into dialogue by presenting a fragment of language, a phrase without a verb. Without other context we cannot know whether abstraction is the opposite of the real, the opposite of representation, or the opposite of “here;” and, what is “convenient” about it.
Language is by definition an abstract system, so its material form becomes singularly important; like a head with an open mouth, the Proxy Gallery pours forth a cascade of letterforms and words repeated and entangled with each other, that in their resistance to being read, call attention to their presentation in a way that is in dialogue with graphic design and communication design.
This particular piece of language has concrete form: size, color, texture, transparency, volume, and the font is ‘Not Caslon.’ The medium is translucent milky vellum, a substance that often indicates intermediate iterations and preparations before a final design. There is no ink anywhere, nor is there voice or sound. The phrase itself was mechanically produced by laser cutting.
Repetition, seriality, mechanical reproduction are favored processes of graphic art. Here Mondor proposes a gallery that speaks, but in a language that is not just a thought or an idea, but a sculptural thing, almost precluding us from simply reading it.
For more information visit Proxy Gallery online here.
Proxy Gallery Presents
DiLos
Only Child
July 18 - October 4, 2025
Closing Reception: October 4, 2025, 3:00-5:00 PM
DiLos is the name used by Mexican artist Delia Perez Salinas Tijerina. Her 2025 installation in the Proxy Gallery consists of 9 “magic boxes” connected to electricity that each contains a holographic GIF video. On each image is seen milk poured down from the top. Some of the images are recognizable- three anchor globes (sun, moon, and star). Other images are a GPT umbrella, a cherry with nine stalks, a golden knot from a cherry stalk, a cobra leopard, a 9 hole pierced cactus, Lamborghini Notre Dame.
In order to engage ideas of reality and unreality, and the distortions within them, the artist combined ideas of Vedic practice (rituals of cleansing with milk) with commands to Artificial Intelligence, thus producing unlikely pairings, with the sun, moon and stars used as anchors to signify the pure essence of the world.
By a process of successive abstractions, the artist is offering a fascinating and magnetic experience that approaches the confrontation with a magic that is simultaneously real. We try to decode what we are seeing, while at the same time we are irresistibly drawn to it. We experience seduction even before we can rationalize the attraction. We cannot know whether our attraction is to the objects depicted or to the technology itself; the movement in the gifs is making the objects animated, alive, almost human, and isn’t that the promise of AI? The creation of a lively intelligence without a body?
For more information visit Proxy Gallery online here.
Margaret Morgan
Laocoön
May 9 - June 21, 2025
In the winter of 2024 Morgan exhibited at Not There Gallery her work with found twigs and found language. The exhibition was called Please Try Again. On the wall, made of twigs combined, were words and phrases taken from the various WIFI networks that appeared in her cell phone as she drove around her neighborhood. Morgan then fashioned the twigs into letters and words. The sticks she found on the ground started as natural objects and ended up as symbolic language, but the language itself was also found, floating in the digital air and attaching to nature in unconvincing harmony. This installation, made specifically for the proxy Gallery, spells “Laocoön” with twigs. The letters are three- dimensional, different sizes and dispersed in the space of the Gallery. The twigs are glued together to form letters, and the letters hover in the air supported by visible strings. In relation to the text the Proxy gallery appears small or large depending on whether we see the gallery as a relation of size or of scale. This is significant because the twig fragments are their natural size, while language as such has no given size, color or font. Outside of conventionalized typography, black ink on white paper, this different kind of writing inevitably calls attention to its form.
Leaving behind the digital WIFI codes, this works leaps far back into ancient myth and art history. Laocoön is a very different kind of code-on the one hand a figure from (pre-Christian) Greek mythology, and on the other a famous ancient sculpture in the Vatican Museum. The Laocoön sculpture, depicting Laocoön and his sons struggling with sea serpents, was created in the 1st century BCE. Laocoön, a priest of Apollo, was the one who unsuccessfully warned the Trojans against accepting the Trojan Horse by saying the famous (per Virgil’s Aeneid) “Beware the Greeks bearing gifts.” The installation and the characters here appear not only as iconic signs, but also as symbols and indexes (in English:) a sculpture of a word, suggesting an image and a story. Laocoön is brought up to date as a prophet who is punished for his correct prophecy.
I can’t help but see this stick word as a reflecting the present historical moment. Beware the loss that appears as a privilege.
-- Annetta Kapon for Proxy Gallery
For more information visit Proxy Gallery online here.
Lorraine Bubar and Jody Zellen
Call and Response
March 17 - May 3, 2025
Lorraine Bubar and Jody Zellen’s Call and Response is a collaborative project that began in the early days of Covid 19 and is shown in an exhibition for the first time. Bubar and Zellen began their exchange in 2020 and have continued to send each other collages almost bi-weekly since then: the result is more than 500 digital artworks. When creating images in response to the one they received, both Bubar and Zellen pick an aspect of the picture to respond to — be it a color, shape or figure. Both draw from online repositories for their imagery and fashion these appropriated materials into personal collages. Zellen often uses news photos as the basis of her work, while Bubar culls from representations of nature.
For their Proxy exhibition Lorraine and Jody combed through all the images from their collaboration looking for pairs that resonated. They output them as lenticular prints — images that oscillate between two collages — which are presented along with mirrors to create a labyrinthine effect. A colorful poster with a grid of 100 images that showcases the range of the project will also be on view.
The full collaboration here: callresponselj.
For more information visit Proxy Gallery online here.
Phyllis Green
June 2024
February 1 - March 15, 2025
Proxy Gallery is happy to present Phyllis Green’s June 2024. Modeled from earthenware clay and colored with copper metallic surfacer and patina, the work nods to conventional busts and traditional techniques. Over the years Green has presented clothing without bodies, i.e. costumes for a constructed persona, hair without heads, boobs without torsos, masks without faces. It is as if the revelation of something is much less meaningful for her than the revelation of something not there. This is another way to say that form is singularly foregrounded in her sculptures.
For more information visit Proxy Gallery online here.
Sally Stein and Las Terminas In Dicey Times
... Voting Matters Most!June 2024
October 11 - November 30, 2024
The present work, created expressly for the Proxy Gallery and titled “In dicey times… voting matters most!” combines symbolism and literalism to powerful effect: The title already prefigures a contradiction: Dice, the aleatory, stand for chance, while voting stands for the strong desire to make a difference in the outcome of the elections. Both these versions are true: the elections could go this way or that, but what is at stake is democracy itself.
The exhibition is accompanied by a postcard designed by the media duo Sally Stein and Stephen Callis, AKA “Las Terminas” who have been presenting political postcards and other agitprop graphics intermittently for decades. This card derives from the famous etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco de Goya modified with graphic intervention by Stein and Callis of Trump and his followers.
For more information visit Proxy Gallery online here.
Robin Mitchell
... Garden and Cosmos
September 11 - October 6, 2024
In this newer work made specifically for the Proxy Gallery, the spirituality of nature is explored. Of course, nature in its broader form includes everything, human nature and the natural world, but here it is somewhat stylized and given form through choice of colors (yellow, red, white, and lots of blue,) and choice of elements. Found pictures of flowers, stones, planets and sea creatures are presented facing us to emphasize their center.
What the flowers, stones and planets have in common is that they all have radiating circular forms with centers, a theme that Robin Mitchell has cultivated in her painting practice for many years. Equally influenced by Indian gardens, Indian Kantha textiles and her own painting, she seeks to make sensory the beauty of nature.
For more information visit Proxy Gallery online here.
Gallery Hours:
Friday and Saturday 12-6:00 p.m. open