From February 15th through April 27th, 2025, Project for Empty Space presented Fragile Intangibilities, a solo exhibition by 2023 - 2025 Artist In Residence Daphne Arthur at PES Ironside Newark (110 Edison Pl.)

Fragile Intangibilities comprised 11 hand-sewn silk organza camping tents. Each tent was suffused with ink drawings inspired by Arthur's interviews. Arthur, a Venezuelan-born immigrant, conversed with fellow first-generation immigrants and migrants in New York City and Connecticut. 

These floating, translucent mobile homes depict the unique and personal stories as kaleidoscopic spectrums of amalgamated memories. They contain depictions of personal mythologies that families reproduce. Interrelated sequences do not merely establish human action in time; they also establish themselves in memory, which repeats and re-collects the course of events. Engaging the theme of movement and confronting these histories, the travelers’ retelling requires a return to the past, reformulating the story in the present, and bringing it forward to the possibilities of the future.

Each tent reaffirms diaspora as a living condition of resilience, family reunification, and sacrifices made in aspiring for viable futures. They propose that migration be a process that allows for a hybrid identity, not defined by a single location or by belonging to a monolithic group. The lack of a specific place to call home challenges the universal reliance on origin, nationality, and family as the only principles on which an identity can be based. Arthur’s work signifies how identity, thus, stops being something inherited or constructed based on an affiliation to a socially or geographically prescribed group. Instead, identity evolves in relation to movement through social and geographic spaces. Moreover, the self emerges as a result of the encounters with others that these spaces afford. The transitory and intangible nature of these homes is a metaphor for the memories we carry and conjure within our bodies, connecting sinews, grafted in our psyche, of site-specific occurrences that, beyond chronology, expand collectively into time immemorial.

Capturing migratory experiences, each tent reflects on the subject's views and interpretation of deterioration, transformation, and the stakes of historical change. Echoing recent and contemporary patterns of gentrification, the works re-focus on the corrosion of marginalized communities and their local histories. Meanwhile, exploring notions that foster a sense of belonging and identity through landmarked boundaries. The transitory and intangible nature of these homes is a metaphor of memories we carry and conjure within our bodies - connecting grafted sinews in our psyche of site-specific occurrences that expand beyond chronology, collectively into time immemorial.

Installation images by Carlos Hernandez.
Opening reception images by Sam H. Lee.