Terra Incognita
Kate Bancroft, Georgia Hourdas, Amy Moon, Joan Reutershan, Jennifer Sullivan, Mary Temple, and Kenzie Wells
Curated by Matty Logsdon
September 17th, 2025 - October 12th, 2025
The term terra incognita on ancient maps indicates a space outside of known territory. It induces a shiver of mystery and curiosity about the opulent, unpredictable realm of the unknown.
The eponymous Field of Play exhibition presents seven artists who work across painting, assemblage, relief and sculpture. They each see their work/practice as an encounter with the terra incognita of their own life experience, interests and mediums. The intention of this show is to present A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, where terra incognita is a recurring motif, alongside the artwork. The essay is offered not as means to unify or interpret, but rather to accompany on the same poetic plane; to affirm a kaleidoscope of meanings, and preserve the openness of the individual works.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a collage of the author’s own experiences, combined with stories collected over the course of a lifetime. Solnit has said she took a new approach in this book, writing by the “rules of night”—association and intuition—rather than the “rules of daylight”—chronology, analysis, argument. Solnit’s process was inseparable from its overarching theme: embracing loss and being lost, uncertainty as a prerequisite for discovery, and faith that “one right encounter or idea will pull an existing collection into a pattern.”
Visiting the studios of artists in this show and organizing Terra Incognita was something of a similar experience. In this press release, I leave you with the essential gems of this process—context from each artist’s studio, paired with some of the most generous passages from this book, selected for their resonance with works in the show.
A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city—its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands—and in this truly bring it to life. With ruins, a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped. This is the same transmutation spoken of in fairy tales, when statues and toys and animals become human—though they come to life, and with ruin, a city comes to death, but a generative death, like the corpse that feeds flowers. An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and it is in some way an ideal home for the art that also falls outside the ordinary production and consumption of the city.
The contemporary urban landscape is exploded in Joan Reutershan’s Bluebird, a mixed-media assemblage bursting with the energy of NYC. Traditional approaches to representing the city are replaced with a punchy jumble, suggesting an evolving social and psychological landscape.
For Amy Moon, the experience of being in flux—belonging everywhere and nowhere—led her attention to “non-places”: construction sites and scaffoldings, and the transient nature of water and dust. Her paintings layer atmosphere and residue to hold what’s slipping.
Mary Temple also engages with a sense of everywhere and nowhere, beginning by painting familiar scenes from the natural world alla prima, then subjecting them to an abrupt break—scraping away paint until it becomes unrecognizable. The result is foreign terrain, both in image and in material, presenting a new challenge to resolve—setting the painting off into uncharted territory.
Transformation factors again in the sculptural work of Kenzie Wells, who explores the queer potential of the beach, visually referencing its textural decay, pitted surfaces, and pearlescent growths. Found trinkets are fossilized into surfaces; water is portrayed as a mystical, queer force; and glittery surfaces suggest the fluidity of nighttime spaces where queer folks are in charge.
The process of transformation (from a caterpillar in a cocoon into a butterfly) consists mostly of decay, and then of this crisis, when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt.
But the changes in a butterfly’s life are not always so dramatic. The strange, resonant word instar describes the stage between two successive molts, for as it grows, a caterpillar—like a snake—splits its skin again and again, each stage an instar. It remains a caterpillar as it goes through these molts, but no longer one in the same skin. There are rituals marking such splits: graduations, indoctrinations, ceremonies of change—though most changes proceed without such clear and encouraging recognition. Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that—a buried star, oscillating between near and far.
Prototype #2 by Georgia Hourdas carries a similar paradoxical feeling—metal spikes protrude off the canvas, suggesting stars deep in the recesses of space. Echoes of the “unknown knowns” arise,
Things we don’t know that we know, which is precisely the Freudian unconscious—the ‘knowledge that doesn’t know itself,’ as Lacan said.
Knowing oneself—and the limitations of our ability to do so—present in Kate Bancroft’s paintings, which reference Dutch Golden Age still lifes and double as fragmented self-portraits. Eyes gaze back at the viewer through dinnerware and food, acting as lenses, portals, and mirrors.
Two works by Jennifer Sullivan are among the first of a new project to be shown publicly, painted from nativity figurines reassembled into new, composite families. Composing a sort of spiritual dollhouse, these figurines provide a tangible reference with both familiar and surprising details, allowing for imagination and intimate feelings to mix with archetypal references in their representation.
Representation is always partial—else it would not be representation, but some kind of haunting double. But the terra incognita spaces on maps say that knowledge also is an island surrounded by oceans of the unknown. They signify that the cartographers knew they did not know, and awareness of ignorance is not just ignorance—it’s awareness of knowledge’s limits.
ARTIST BIOS
Kate Bancroft is a Brooklyn-based artist who earned a BFA in Painting and Art History from the College of Fine Arts at Boston University and an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. She has been an artist in residence at Camden Arts Center, The Slade School of Fine Art and CCA Andratx. Her work has been exhibited at Long Story Short, NYC, GHOSTMACHINE, the Camden Arts Centre, the Box at Phillips Auction House, Massey Klein Gallery, and New Uncanny. She has been featured in ArtMaze Magazine, Bombastically Analogue and New American Paintings.
Georgia Hourdas is a Brooklyn based painter and curator from Tarpon Springs, FL. She began her art career in 2013 at a now defunct DIY gallery, where she was a curator. She received her BFA in painting from the University of South Florida in 2015. She was a member of the Tampa Bay based artist collective Quaid until 2016 when she moved to New York. From 2021 to 2023 she was a member of the curatorial collective Underdonk. Her work has appeared in Marvin Gardens, Underdonk and Fjord Gallery. In 2024, she was featured in Maake Magazine.
Amy Moon (b.1999, Seoul, South Korea) is a visual artist working across painting, drawing, and collage. Through a layered, mixed-media process, her work explores fractured perception, belonging, and material reality through a painting process that layers, dissolves, and reworks surface. Her paintings seek to hold what’s slipping - residue, atmosphere, and fragments in transformation. Her work has been exhibited at IRL Gallery, Hox Gallery, SVA, U.S Department of Education Headquarters, and various artist-run spaces in New York and Los Angeles. She received her BA from Columbia University and currently lives and works in New York, NY.
Joan Reutershan received her BFA summa cum laude in 2017 from Hunter College, City University of New York, where she was a Kossak Painting Fellow. She earned an MA Degree in Art History, also from Hunter, CUNY. Selected solo exhibitions include High Low Crow Go at @studioninedee, BKNY Street View at One River School of Art and Design, BKNY Street View II at Mariboe Gallery/ Swig Arts Center and New York at Eye Level in the Main Gallery, Florida School of the Arts. A museum group exhibition entitled Vision at the Danville Museum of Fine Art and History featured her work. She exhibits frequently in group shows in and around NYC: Lichtundfire Gallery on the Lower East Side, Plant 486 in Brooklyn, 5-50 Gallery and The Factory in Long Island City, NYC Crit Club Canopy Gallery in Chelsea. Reutershan enjoys artist residencies (Berlin Art Institute, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Cha North,). She is grateful to her community of artist-run organizations--New York City Crit Club, Paradice Palase, Odetta Digital, and Shoestring Press.
Jennifer Sullivan (b. 1978, New York) creates expressionistic, character-driven paintings that explore personal narratives with a diaristic sensibility, charting an ever-evolving inner life. Drawing on borrowed plot lines and protagonists from film, music, and, most recently, found nativity figurines—as well as her own life experiences—her work interlaces intimate feelings with cultural, mythological, and archetypal references. Over the years, her storytelling has taken varied forms, from autobiographical performance and video to her current focus on painting, drawing, monotype printmaking, and hand-painted t-shirts. Based in Ridgewood, Queens, Sullivan holds an MFA from Parsons School of Design and a BFA from Pratt Institute. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include The Tenderness (with Raychael Stine, Emma Gray HQ, 2024) and Sleeper (Turn Gallery, 2021). She has participated in group exhibitions at NADA Miami, Peter Blum Gallery, Marinaro, Klaus von Nichtssagend, and the deCordova Museum. Awards include fellowships with Paint School at Shandaken Projects (2020) and the Fine Arts Work Center (2012–13), as well as residencies at The Lighthouse Works, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Ox-Bow School of Art, and Yaddo. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and The Brooklyn Rail.
Mary Temple has spent the past 30 years making paintings that locate between spaces of intuition and conception, between abstraction and depiction. Beginning with the natural world, Temple responds to light and shadow, shape and color. Not a landscape painter, but a painter of experiences and observations of the evanescent, she communicates fleeting and specific encounters with natural environments. Her works are painted alla prima, with the goal of correlating the pleasure of the painterly process with that of witnessing the sublime. Temple has exhibited her work internationally and throughout the United States. She has completed commissioned projects for solo and group institutional exhibitions that include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SF, CA; SculptureCenter, LIC, Queens, NY; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Rice Gallery, Houston, TX; Western Bridge, Seattle, WA; The Drawing Center, NY, NY; Bunkamura Museum, Tokyo, Japan and many others. The artist’s work is held in private, corporate and institutional collections internationally, among those are the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; The GSA, Houston, TX; MTA Arts for Transit and NYC Cultural Affairs; NYC Percent for the Arts; The Brooklyn Museum; Fondation Francés, Senlis, France; the Salomon Foundation for Contemporary Art, Annecy, France; Bank of America, Charlotte, NC; Credit Suisse, Zürich Switzerland; Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, Boston MA; the Charles and Mary Kaplan Family Foundation, Washington, DC, The West Collection, PHL,PA and NYU Langone Medical Center, NY, NY to locate a few. Temple is the recipient of a 2024 Surf Point Foundation residency, a 2019 MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the 2010 Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship, the 2010 Basil Alkazzi Award for Excellence in Painting, a 2010 and 2007 NYFA Fellowship in Painting, and was NYFA's Lily Auchincloss Fellow in Painting in 2007. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic and ARTnews among other publications.
Mary Temple was born in Phoenix, Arizona and has lived and worked in NYC since 1996.
Kenzie Wells (they/them) is a mixed-media sculptor, fabricator, and educator currently based in Washington, D.C. They are a lover of all animals, co-parenting 5 pets with their partner, and has a robust collection of little-things-found-on-the-ground. Wells has attended the Wassaic Project Artist Residency, Oxbow School of Art and Artists' Residency, and Penland School of Craft. They have exhibited nationally in galleries, including: SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, MoCA Tucson, The University of Arizona Museum of Art, and Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City, MO. Originally from Knoxville, TN, Wells received their BFA in 2015 from the University of Tennessee, and MFA in 2020 from the University of Arizona. Wells currently works as a Display Artist for Anthropologie and Adjunct Professor at The George Washington University, and is an active board member of the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Of the Land: Knauber, Potts, and Wells, Lightwell Gallery, Norman, OK, MSA Select (group show), Vulcan Materials Gallery, Birmingham, AL, juried by Vanessa German, and Queer as Water (forthcoming, solo show), Relay Ridge Gallery, Knoxville, TN.
