c/Bodies: Interval Arithmetic

Sitting Room Gallery is pleased to present the opening of c/Bodies: Interval Arithmetic, featuring work by Rubeen Salem and Donna Dimitrova. The exhibition brings together two artists whose practices examine the shifting boundaries between internal states and external worlds. Rubeen Salem is an artist living and working in New York City. Through a raw, expressive approach to painting, Salem explores themes of transformation, emotion, and the unseen forces that shape human experience. Blending abstraction with figuration, his work layers vibrant color, bold gestures, and dreamlike symbolism to evoke movement, energy, and impermanence. His deeply intuitive practice engages in a dialogue with the subconscious, where personal and collective narratives intersect. For c/Bodies: Interval Arithmetic, Salem presents works from A New Light, an eight-piece series of contemporary paintings that reveal how context, color, and atmosphere can refract familiar scenes into fresh understanding. Salem’s work has appeared in both gallery and underground art spaces, spanning public interventions, live painting events, and immersive installations. His projects include As Good As It Gets (2024) at All Street Gallery, among other solo and group exhibitions. Bulgarian-born artist Donna Dimitrova contributes a concept-driven, interactive practice that probes contradictions of inner power and their reverberations through human connection. Working fluidly across video, sculpture, lighting, programming, and interactive design, Dimitrova selects each material in service of idea, grounding immersive environments that encourage contemplation and connection. She holds an MFA in Digital Interactive Arts from Pratt Institute, and her internationally exhibited work has earned recognition including the Prof. J. Michael O’Rourke Award for excellence in Digital Arts. At Sitting Room Gallery, Dimitrova presents 299 792 458 m/s, a performance named after and conceptually anchored in the speed of light. For ten minutes, the artist alternates between stillness and choreographed movement atop a slow-turning, custom-built platform, personifying a small world rotating in its own orbit. The living body becomes a celestial object—glowing, breathing, spinning—while remaining tethered to something larger. A light worn on the artist’s chest reflects onto a mirrored chandelier suspended above. As the platform turns, the bent mirror fractures the light into motion, sending rippling reflections across the gallery walls. The performance embodies the tension between emotional fluidity and the constancy of time, drawing on the Hermetic phrase “As above, so below” to suggest a connection between sky and earth, light and reflection, motion and stillness, and the human and the divine. Salem and Dimitrova’s works in c/Bodies: Interval Arithmetic dialogue how emotional, perceptual, and temporal intervals shift and transform us. “Our work coincides in how we touch upon connection between others in a metaphysical sense. Everything and everyone being related and held together through invisible threads,” Salem said, “Our collective transformation and emotional wellbeing as humanity grows and evolves together.”