"While he was endeavouring to quench his thirst, another thirst grew upon him."
–Ovid

Dupes. Mirror images. Doppelgängers. Sisters. Lovers. Stereotypes. Rivals. These are twofold tropes and foils which implicitly fuel the artist’s process. Nemesis seeks to investigate questions around the psychic drive that foments ambivalence for what reminds us of ourselves.

A central diptych by Augustina Wang opens into a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which the goddess Nemesis curses Narcissus for being too self-absorbed with his own image to reciprocate romantic pursuits from a nymph named Echo. The artist's internal turmoil, like the fable, is to ward off the social isolation of narcissism.

These rivalries, whether petty and covert or ballooned into epic proportion, invigorate artistic practices with substance and purpose. Regardless of whether they might try to disguise these motivations, artists compete with their idealized virtual realities, projections, personas, and even with other artists. Throughout it all, Nemesis is palpable. She seeks to eliminate hubris by striking down mortals who harbor it. Consequently, fixation on unfairness sustains her, and is the very justification for her existence and power; it is her “occupation.”

A through line in Nemesis is the artist’s awareness of self or “superego” and how it interacts with and exerts power over its creations. Allan Rand's landscapes reflect this kind of ressentiment that becomes an all-encompassing, totalizing world–a becoming into Universe (2024). His Snake Pits series portrays the internal landscape of a melancholia where menacing cavities in the earth await just below the surface. Cécile Lempert's split-screen watercolors depict uncanny transitions in time; in the artist's words, the figure "becomes an observer of itself." Chaeheun Park describes her paintings as dry, humorous diaries of images encountered on German eBay, an economy of images vying for purchase that reflect the individuated personalities of their sellers and buyers. The painting This Fish (2024) is deliberately placed behind reflective glass, in order to incorporate the viewer's own visage. A painting by Sof’ya Shpurova evokes Narcissus's mythologized transformation into a flower as ultimate punishment for his vanity, in its depiction of a human figure that dissolves into abstract gestures.

Nemesis may thrive in contradictions and tensions in between. British-German artist Lexia Hachtmann takes an interest in social hierarchies and missed communication to depict moments of vulnerability, such as the uncomfortable silence after a disagreement. In Ted Gahl's painting Death Leading Woman to River (2024), a morbid fate is both a woman's friend and foe–at once a comforting shadow and a killer.

Scholar and writer Sianne Ngai has explored the importance of antagonism in forming alliances, while Gayatri Spivak has written, “Freud has remained one of my flawed heroes, an intimate enemy.” Perhaps in each of these mortal lives, the work of Nemesis is to define who we are not.

About the curator:
Danielle Wu is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently Communications & Database Manager at Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) and was previously a Digital Fellow at Democracy Now! Her reviews have been published in Art in America, Artforum, Frieze Magazine, The Offing, and other publications. Notable curatorial projects include Just Between Us: From the Archives of Arlan Huang with Howie Chen at Pearl River Mart, New York (2023); Water Works at International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York (2022); and Ghost in the Ghost with scholar Anne Anlin Cheng at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York (2019). She is a recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts Grant (2022), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Manhattan Arts Grant (2022), the Critical Minded Grant from Allied Media Projects (2020), and the Brooklyn Arts Council Grant (2019). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, ArtNews, South China Morning Post, WNYC, and other media outlets.