come closer

Through tactility, coded narrative, and elements that conceal or reveal, Ezra Benus, Marie Franco, Woomin Kim, and Sydney Kleinrock open a dialogue about the ways we make ourselves and our communities visible. Beckoning the viewer to come closer, look closer, and even at times to touch the artwork, the works on view highlight the web of relationships that sustain us.

Each artist approaches time, labor, community, and touch as shared concerns. Their practices intersect through a shared investment in the textures of experience and the intimate infrastructures that shape how we move through the world. 

Marie Franco’s oil paintings portray the South Florida Swap Shop at daybreak, capturing a community in the charged moment of a new day’s beginning. Bathed in sunrise, the portraits and scenes carry a quiet exuberance, an atmosphere shaped by the rhythms of immigrant labor and the rituals that anchor the Swap Shop’s social world. Franco’s luminous palette and attentive regard for her subjects transform the market into a site of shared vitality and possibility. 

Woomin Kim’s sculptures and textiles echo this energy through a different vernacular of communal space: the nail salon. Her individual nail sculptures highlight the specificity and personality embedded in everyday acts of adornment, while her textile work gathers these forms into a collective constellation. Together, they evoke the salon as both workplace and gathering space, a hub of immigrant labor where intimacy, creativity, and mutual care unfold in small, tactile gestures. 

Ezra Benus’ mixed media works extend this attention to the infrastructures of care into the realm of medical experience. Using hard-edge geometric abstraction, a palette drawn from the colors of their daily medications, and metal plaques that evoke institutional language and doctor’s office nameplates, Benus considers how medical systems structure intimacy, dependency, and the expectations placed on the “good patient.” By slowing down the visual rhythms of routine care, their work dwells on the complex boundary between imposed structures and chosen forms of closeness.

With oil painting on quilted canvas, Sydney Kleinrock turns her attention inward, exploring the body as a site of reflection and porous exchange. Isolated vignettes and drawings behind doors surface like fleeting impressions calling for further inspection or thought. Her work reveals an interior register of relation, one that mirrors the exhibition’s broader attention to how experience is held, shared, and cared for.

Together, the exhibition foregrounds embodied experience as both subject and medium. The works on view are deeply personal and collectively relevant, bringing the viewer into an ecosystem of interdependence and shared vulnerability.

 

Please join us for a reception on Thursday, April 30th from 6-8pm.

 

Ezra Benus has exhibited nationally at Print Center New York, BRIC, Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College, NYU Gallatin Gallery, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Dedalus Foundation, EFA Project Space, The Shed, and internationally with Shape Arts (UK), Museion (IT), Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt (DE), Doris McCarthy Gallery (CA), Art Gallery Windsor (CA), Migros Museum (CH). They have received support as an Art Matters Foundation Artist2Artist Fellowship, and had residencies with Art Beyond Sight’s Art + Disability Residency, Wave Hill Winter Workspace, EFA SHIFT Residency, BRIClab Contemporary Art. Ezra is also one half of Brothers Sick (with Noah Benus), a sibling artistic collaboration steeped in explorations of disability justice, politics and histories of illness, spirituality, Jewishness, and care. Their work has been reviewed and featured in publications such as Artforum, Pin Up, Mousse Magazine, Ocula, Art Agenda, Publico ípsilon, and Welt Kunst. ​Ezra Benus is the Disability Futures Manager at United States Artists, and is also an artist, educator, and curator raised and based in Brooklyn. They received degrees in Jewish Studies and Studio Art at CUNY Hunter College. Ezra is a 2026 Bronx Museum AIM Fellow.

Marie Franco is a Peruvian-Venezuelan artist living in South Florida, whose practice focuses on storytelling and describing community through painting. She explores social connection, moments of everyday life, and shared immigrant experiences within emergent immigrant communities such as flea markets. She has a special focus on the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop, a representative space for immigrants and culture in South Florida that is tied to her family history. As a public artist, Marie has contributed murals to organizations such as Hispanic Unity of Florida, the City of Dania, and Broward County Public Schools. She is a recent graduate of New World School of the Arts with a Bachelor’s degree in Painting and a minor in Art History. Her work has been exhibited at the YoungArts Gallery, the New World School of the Arts Gallery, and the historic Alfred I. duPont Building.

Woomin Kim is a South Korean artist currently based in Queens, NY. Through her textile and sculptural projects, she examines the active materiality of daily objects and urban landscapes. Kim has participated in exhibitions and residencies at the Queens Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Art Omi and Boston Children’s Museum. Kim has received fellowships and awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Noguchi Museum and Korean Cultural Foundation. Her works have been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz and BOMB Magazine. Kim holds a B.F.A from Seoul National University and received an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sydney Hunter Kleinrock (b.1996 Long Island, NY) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She designs, constructs, and quilts canvas structures that become the substrate for her paintings. She received a Bachelor’s degree from Hampshire College and has since exhibited work in New York City, Richmond, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, as well as in a solo show at Club George in Northampton, MA. Most recently, she was part of a three-person exhibition at IRL Gallery in NYC. She has participated in residencies at Vermont Studio Center and ChaNorth, and showed work at Upstate Art Weekend in 2025. Her work was featured in issue #176, the Northeast issue of New American Paintings.