Future FAIR, New York CITY may 13-16, 2026

BOOTH U9

Daniel Kukla and Catherine WeBB

The Empty Circle makes its debut at Future Fair with a duo presentation featuring new works by Daniel Kukla and Catherine Webb. Through different media, including sculpture, painting, photographic collages and mixed media, the presentation explores shifting relationships between ecology, identity, materiality, and the human impulse to shape and understand the world around us.

Kukla’s practice examines the boundaries between natural history, ecology, and systems of classification. This presentation centers on butterfly specimens that Kukla raised from egg, their wings incised with delicate ornamental patterns that place them in an uneasy space between scientific artifact and decorative object. Through these subtle interventions, Kukla draws attention to the human impulse to collect, preserve, and impose order onto the natural world, while heightening the fragility already inherent within the specimens themselves. Alongside these works, Kukla presents a series of moiré works composed of marbled chromogenic photographs that have been folded, burned, and pierced with found black coral. Moving between clarity and distortion, the works trace processes of preservation, damage, and transformation, approaching containment as both a physical act and a framework for organizing knowledge. Throughout the presentation, further gestures toward display and preservation emerge across a range of materials and forms, creating an environment that moves between preservation and collapse.

Webb presents new oil paintings that merge portraiture, abstraction, and landscape through a vivid and materially expressive visual language. As an advocate for environmental justice, Webb is committed to ecological preservation and approaches painting as both an act of personal reflection and a way to communicate her desire for a better future. Applying paint directly to the canvas with a palette knife, Webb builds dense, tactile surfaces that feel simultaneously intimate and expansive. Her vibrant palette and physical approach to mark-making emphasizes painting as an embodied process, one deeply connected to memory, care and the natural world.

Together, Kukla and Webb create an immersive presentation grounded in transformation and perception. Moving between fragility and resilience, observation and emotion, their works consider how individuals relate to the environments they inhabit while proposing new ways of seeing, interpreting, and caring for the world around them.