The Empty Circle is pleased to present Swipe, a group exhibition of works by Samuel Draxler, Adriana Farmiga, and Fawn Krieger. The word “swipe” is not only a distinctly feline gesture but also an act of taking, and the included works are all multivalent and playfully enacted.

March 12 - April 20, 2025

Opening March 12, 2025, 6-8pm

Samuel Draxler’s photographic work explores desire, longing, and loss. His projects play with the contradictions between excerpting and cataloging, as well as between the presence of an index and the distance of a reproduction. In memento mori novies, Draxler superimposes small, square photographs of his former cat over atmospheric, floral, and landscape photographs. These embedded images are pops of color that float over black-and-white fields. The title – remember to die nine times – plays off memento mori, a symbolic reminder of death with roots in classical antiquity and Christianity. The embedded lighthearted images cycle the work between grief and transformation, endurance and ending.

In two works on paper and an oil painting, Adriana Farmiga depicts scattered pom pom balls – fuzzy and plush toys made from brightly colored yarn that cats bat around for hours of play. These still lives originate from a practice that focuses on double takes, play, and curiosity. Having just completed construction on a new studio in the Hudson Valley, the artist initially used this subject matter to get her hands moving, which in turn, became a study of how things transmute. The abstracted orbs shift into spheres, orbital systems, models for electrons moving – fading into moments of existence and proposals for quantum entanglement. In a floor sculpture, Farmiga dramatically scales up an assemblage of neon-colored emery boards, recreating them in painted plywood. Joined end to end, their interconnected pivots dictate the range of the structure's shape and orientation, creating an unconventional directional instrument.

Fawn Krieger’s work explores the physical and symbolic imprints of touch, impact, and impression. Engaging with materials such as foam, plaster, concrete, and clay, her sculptures play with the thresholds between artwork and artifact. In Soft Composition, fabric from pillowcases is vegetable-dyed, spray-painted, and stitched into a bed-like form, evoking intimacy and past use. Pirate & Miejette memorialize loss through felted fur from Krieger’s late cats, shaped into soft orbs that echo Soft Composition’s painted surfaces. Whereas Reverse Cookie 1 casts plaster from a plastic cookie tray, flipping absence into presence, the fired porcelain piece Waffles’ Gargas transforms pawprints into echoes of Paleolithic cave art. Across these works, Krieger explores domestic security and the threat of its erasure as they are embedded in the artifacts of everyday life.

Swipe brings together works in which playful gestures highlight the fluidity of memory, touch, and transformation.

About the Artists  

Samuel Draxler is a writer, photographer, and curator based in Brooklyn, New York. Draxler's writing has appeared in publications including Texte Zur Kunst, Art in America, and Avidly. His arts programming has been featured in Artforum, Modern Painters, Bomb Magazine, and Art in America, among others. Draxler received his B.A. in Art History from Columbia University.

Adriana Farmiga is an interdisciplinary artist and a first generation Ukrainian-American. Farmiga's work operates in a realm of dichotomous iconographies that mirror her experience of cultural shifts, while also considering how identity is (in)formed within the world of the quotidian. Her drawings, sculptures, and video installations have been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad. Farmiga is a faculty member and Dean at the Cooper Union School of Art, where she is a vocal advocate for free education and community building. She holds a B.F.A. from Cooper Union and an M.F.A. from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. 

Fawn Krieger is an artist based in NYC, whose multi-genre works examine how memory is embedded from the body into matter, and can be used as grounds for recovery, revolution, and re-imagination. Krieger works both individually and collaboratively, having developed previous projects with artists including Neal Medlyn, Edwin Torres, and Tracy + the Plastics. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design, and her MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.  In addition to her studio practice, Krieger serves as Program Director at The Keith Haring Foundation, Adjunct Instructor in Sculpture at The Cooper Union School of Art, and she sits on the board of Soft Network, a non-profit agency that supports under-resourced artists, legacy workers, and artist estates.

About The Empty Circle  

The Empty Circle, located at 499 3rd Ave in Gowanus, Brooklyn, is a contemporary art gallery dedicated to showcasing emerging artists in their first solo exhibitions in New York City. Focused on fostering creativity, conversation, and bold experimentation, the gallery aims to be a cornerstone of the vibrant Gowanus art scene.

The gallery is open by appointment only.

Please contact matt@emptycirclespace.com for inquiries, images and requests.