05/21/2026
Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to present “Object Poetry,” an active observation and engagement with sculptures that inhabit the lacunae where language lapses. The featured works–spanning performance, kinetics, and assemblage–use sound, light, video, movement and found objects as structural mnemonic devices. Across three “verses,” or participatory environments, the presentation asks, “What possibilities do these forms make actual?” Guided by this central question, adopted from artist, Intermedia theorist, and Fluxus co-founder Dick Higgins, the exhibition engages the viewer as a physical and emotional participant. “Object Poetry “opens June 11th and will be on view through September 12, 2026.
Rather than representations, the human and non-human sculptures by artists Ian Burns, Bruce Conner, Tony Oursler, Chiffon Thomas, and Cajsa von Zeipel are reconfigurations of the psychological, physical and meta-physical human experience. Thomas embodies a new modality of existence through a sonic and performative inversion of human and architectural faculties, while von Zeipel situates post-capitalist themes in a futuristic, human-object cyborg, and Burns in a kinetic live-feedback sculpture of everyday objects. Oursler’s audio-visual sculpture projects a media-saturated consciousness onto an electronic entity, and Conner reduces feeling to a conceptual melding of found objects. In between each point of origin from which the artists build, and augment, are constructions united by their intermedial entanglement with sonic vibrations, lo-fi experimentation, digital performance, and ephemeral qualities.
Artwork details: Chiffon Thomas, “Untitled (Dome, Figure I),” 2023;; Tony Oursler, “RGB2,” 1996-97; Ian Burns, “Outpost,” 2008; Cajsa von Zeipel, “Aquarius,” 2019; Bruce Conner, “UNTITLED SCULPTURE,” 1979
