April 26 - May 31, 2025

Opening April 26, 2025, 2-4pm

The Empty Circle presents Thanatosis (Playing Dead), a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Daniel Kukla, marking his second exhibition with the gallery. The show brings together recent photographic and sculptural works that explore the fragile tension between preservation and loss, examining how aesthetic, scientific, and museological practices attempt to contain nature's transience. Informed by Kukla's background in biology, the exhibition reflects his ongoing engagement with the visual strategies used to capture, classify, and arrest natural phenomena.

Rooted in fieldwork and archival research, Kukla’s practice considers the archive, the specimen, and the image as charged sites where systems of observation collide with acts of disappearance. Images of extinct specimens and archival traces, made within a natural history collection, encapsulate this dynamic: remnants that mark presence through absence. This conceptual tension recurs throughout the exhibition, where the aesthetics of containment—pins, specimen cards, and photographic stillness—are interrogated for their complicity in both revelation and erasure.

In several camera-less photographic works, Kukla pierces and folds the paper, embedding fragments of black coral and burning holes through photographs. Photogram moiré patterns and marbling techniques introduce additional visual ruptures, destabilizing the image plane and inviting viewers to navigate an unstable field. A sculptural work made of marbled hog intestine, once used in preservation practices, confronts the viewer with both visceral materiality and ornamental beauty, embodying the exhibition’s central inquiry: How do we hold what is always slipping away?

A cyanotype exposed on a found blanket using stones as masks extends Kukla's exploration of elemental processes. The resulting image captures the environment’s touch not through depiction, but through direct impression, registering presence by way of absence.  Nearby, a self-portrait shrouded in black velvet and cradling the skull of an endangered Siberian tiger offers a meditation on visibility and authority. The figure is nearly invisible, subsumed beneath fabric while the relic gleams with taxonomic clarity, complicating hierarchies between subject and object.

Throughout the exhibition, paper marbling recurs as both medium and metaphor. Once used to embellish scientific folios, it becomes a resistance to fixed classification, its fluid, non-repeating forms standing in contrast to the rigidity of Victorian damask patterns etched onto butterfly specimens. This juxtaposition merges scientific display with decorative imperialism. Here, beauty and taxonomy are historically entangled, exposing the aesthetics of power embedded in collection practices.

Kukla crafts a visual language centered on fragility, interference, and the impossibility of preservation without transformation. Folding, burning, piercing, and painting are not only formal gestures, but interpretive tactics echoing his belief that attempts to hold on to what is in flux inevitably leave their own marks. Rather than seek restoration, Thanatosis (Playing Dead) acknowledges the layered consequences of loss, offering a quiet meditation on what remains and what refuses to be contained.

About the Artist

Daniel Kukla (b. 1983) is a visual artist whose work spans installation, sculpture, video, and image-making. Kukla's work has been exhibited at Aperture Foundation, The International Center of Photography, The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, RISD Museum of Art, Masin Museo de Art de Sinaloa, Williams College Museum of Art, among others. His work has been featured in the New Yorker Magazine, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Wallpaper Magazine, Juxtapoz, Granta Magazine, Guernica Magazine, The Washington Post and others. Kukla is a graduate of the International Center of Photography’s program in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism. Prior to his photographic education he attended the University of Toronto and received an Honours Bachelors of Science in Biology and Evolutionary Ecology.

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.