Multiple Fiefdoms
June 11 – July 25, 2026
KC Crow Maddux, Adam Easterling, Ruth Jeyaveeran, Yi Hsuan Lai, Elise Thompson, Yage Wang
curated by Rochelle Voyles
To claim a fiefdom is to control or hold power over something. In modern times, the word extends beyond its traditional medieval roots of land and property and takes on a more abstracted connotation. Your fiefdom is whatever you are the lord of, whatever you hold sway over. Multiple Fiefdoms draws together the work of six visual artists, working across many mediums, whose practices claim many domains, and refuse to sit in a single category.
Yi Hsuan Lai dissolves our understanding of what is real versus artificially constructed in assembled environments that she photographs, collages, incorporates into new installations, and then re-photographs. The work oscillates between two and three dimensions, with cut sintra layered to create dimension, bending and warping the body, objects, and built environments.
Yage Wang looks to the history of craft objects in classical painting, transforming them and the painterly gestures of the worlds they come from into ceramic sculptures. Using both digital and traditional production techniques, his references have us dancing between the past and the present with clay imitations of notched wooden stretcher bars, and appropriated figures that look like something out of a digital rendering.
Adam Easterling transforms the simplest of household items—bubble wrap—into installations that contain the histories of his family and life, memorializing his relationships with care. Printmaking and photography are pulled into the realm of sculpture in back-lit light boxes that create a living, breathing collage of generations.
KC Crow Maddux’s work merges references to the body, architecture, language, and signage, collapsing these signifiers into sculptural forms that appear somewhat minimalist yet pack complex meaning. Using photography, sculpture, drawing, and painting, Maddux’s code-switching resists and complicates traditional notions of labeling, as it relates to both artistic genres and identity.
The works of Elise Thompson employ layered surfaces that call on the intricacies of transparency, both physical and figurative. Painting is pushed beyond its normal material limits with painted vinyl and wood layered into complex, portal-like dioramas, actively asking us to peer in and decipher.
Ruth Jeyaveeran’s felted installation works blur the boundaries of human, animal, flora, and artifact, using shapes that feel ambiguous yet eerily familiar. Her draped textile forms serve as sacred sculptural containers yet also as intricate drawings in the sky.
It’s easier to make works that act in a more linear fashion, employing the canon of what’s been done before. However, these artists choose to do many things at once, to cross pollinate many ways of working and materials into new amalgamations. It’s a brave choice to do what may not be understood fully, a choice informed by the broad spectrum of the artists’ identities and experiences.
To be the ruler of many fiefdoms is to wield great power and presence, to innovate in ways not yet seen. Each of these artists challenges our understanding of what constitutes a set method of working, blurring the lines of what we think we know. In these blurry places our assumptions are jilted, and we are delightfully transported to other realms where in making, nothing is off limits.
KC Crow Maddux is a Brooklyn-based trans artist whose work is intentionally difficult to categorize. Their work uses flat, graphic, code-switching language to reference the body, architecture, language, and signage. Using deceptively simple forms, the work evades simple reading due to its complex representational dynamics. Maddux has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the Fire Island Artist Residency, and Lighthouse Works. Their work has appeared in and been written about by ArtForum, Forbes, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, and others. Their work has shown at A.I.R. Gallery, the Renaissance Society, Tala, High Noon, Turley, and the Leslie Lohman GLBT Museum. Maddux has an upcoming solo at High Noon Gallery later this year.
Adam C. Easterling is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist and designer whose work explores memory, materiality, and Black cultural archives. Using experimental printmaking techniques and unconventional materials such as bubble wrap, vinyl, and archival photographs, he creates tactile works that investigate preservation, family history, and identity. Easterling’s work has been exhibited at Ogunquit Museum of American Art and featured in projects with For Freedoms. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Ruth Jeyaveeran lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is rooted in traditional material practices and shaped by her experience as part of the South Asian diaspora. Jeyaveeran’s first solo exhibition was presented at Field Projects (New York, NY) in 2023. Other notable exhibitions include a two-person show at Fjord Gallery (Philadelphia, PA) and a solo installation at Main Window DUMBO. Her work has been featured at Transmitter Gallery, Smack Mellon, Fridman Gallery, the Brattleboro Museum, Queens Botanical Garden, All Street Gallery, ABC No Rio, Westbeth Gallery, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, The Border Project, and Bronx Art Space, among others. Jeyaveeran has been awarded residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Residency Unlimited, Lighthouse Works, Marble House Project, Willapa Bay, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, PADA Studios, and La Napoule Art Foundation. She has taught textiles and fibers at Parsons School of Design and frequently leads workshops on felting and the therapeutic potential of craft. She is currently an Associate Professor of Textile Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Yi Hsuan Lai is a Taiwanese-born, New York-based artist who integrates sculptural assemblages, found materials, and her body to create staged photographic works in two and three dimensions. Her practice explores themes of adaptation, uncertainty, and femininity. Lai received her MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in 2020 and will attend the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2026. She has been awarded residencies at SoMad (New York, 2025), Light Work (Syracuse, 2024), and Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT, 2023), and participated in the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program (New York, 2023). Recent solo exhibitions and presentations include Rubber, Rubber at SoMad (2025) and a solo presentation in the AIPAD Photography Show Focal Point Sector (New York, 2026). Her work has also been exhibited at Gallery 456 (New York, 2024), the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, 2024), and SPRING/BREAK Art Show (New York, 2020), and in group exhibitions at Photo London (London, 2023), Floor_Gallery (Seoul, 2023), the Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY, 2022). In 2022, her work was recognized among the LensCulture Critics’ Top 10.
Elise Thompson (b. 1988, Cincinnati, OH) received a BFA from Northern Kentucky University in 2010 and an MFA from Florida State University in 2016. She attended the Boom Gallery Fellowship + Residency in Cincinnati, OH, in 2015 via an FSU Exceptional Opportunities Award and received the Mary Ola Reynolds Miller Scholarship in Visual Arts in 2016. She was an honorable mention and a finalist for the Innovate Grant in 2022 and for the MyMA Grant in 2024, selected by Andrew Rafacz. Additional residencies include Vermont Studio Center (artist grant), The Wassaic Project, The Maple Terrace Artist Residency Program (inaugural AiR), DNA Artist Residency, Stay Home Gallery + Residency (fellowship), ChaNorth Artist Residency, and Bunker Projects Artist Residency. Thompson has been published in New American Paintings South #124, Friend of the Artist vol. 8, VAST Magazine vol. 1, Maake Magazine 14, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, and The Art Newspaper. Selected past exhibitions include The Spartanburg Art Museum (SC), The Wassaic Project (NY), Laundromat Art Space (FL), Westobou Gallery (GA), Blah Blah Gallery (PA), Bob’s Gallery (BK), SPRING/BREAK Art Show (NYC), Shepherd University (WV), Tinney Contemporary (TN), Ceysson & Bénétière (NYC), Helm Contemporary (NYC), The Delaware Contemporary (DE), Kristen Lorello (NYC) and TIAN Contemporain (QC). She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Yage Wang, born in Shanxi, China, is currently based in New York City. He earned his MFA in ceramics from SUNY, New Paltz and his BA in studio art and biology from Brandeis University. His work have been shown at Jane Hartsook Gallery (New York, NY; 2026), Hudson River Museum (Yonkers, NY; 2024), American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, CA; 2024), Peep Projects (Philadelphia, PA; 2024), Sculpture Space NYC (Queens, NY; 2023), and Asya Geisberg Gallery (New York, NY; 2021). Recent awards include the Sandra Shea ’56 Fisher Prize for Exceptional Achievement in the Creative Arts and the Remis Grant for the Arts. He has worked as a ceramic fabricator for several studios and as a teaching assistant in State University of New York and Penland School of Art and Craft.
Please join us for a reception on Thursday, June 11th from 6-8pm.
image above: Elise Thompson, Inflow, 2023, Acrylic and glass beads on paper, dura-lar, and clear vinyl; 48 x 72 x 3 in.
