Ridgewood, New York
Group Exhibition
The More Loving One
TempestNathalie Basoski, Taylor Bluestine, Kristen Heritage, Aliza Katzman, Richard Medina, Shivani Patel, Anam Rani, Jenna Rothstein, Katrina Slavik There is a sweetness to Jenna Rothstein's painting of a young person, seen from behind, in a get-up recalling a recent past when pants were low slung, thongs were in, and if a young lady were perchance to lean over, you may have been treated to a similar view. Painting is devotion; hours and days spent achieving a conclusion wrought between body and mind. Careful consideration of the finished painting must include some regard for the subject as an object worthy of attention, and maybe even reverence, given the time, labor and commitment it demanded of the artist. Glowing in the generosity of the artist’s love and sacrifice, cradled in soft organza frills and bone like ceramic frame, Jenna has given us the likeness of a Saint. The 9 artists in The More Loving One approach their subject; nature, affection or eros, with a grace that overwhelms indifference and bathes their obsession in beauteous light. Nathalie Basoski - As a Dutch-Macedonian photographer and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY, foreignness is a cornerstone of my identity. Navigating my status as an immigrant, as queer, as a polyglot, I know familiarity to be fleeting and memory to be fragmentary, and my art similarly elides easy categorization. Through photography, textile, and mixed media, I visually examine the insufficiency of recollection, creating works that feel like a hazy childhood memory. I contemplate the condition of displacement and the struggle for assimilation through retrospective visual narratives in which I combine used materials like linen, curtains, and clothing with photographs printed on textiles that portray intimate landscapes, domestic settings, and the aftermath of inhabitation. Honoring the traditions of predominantly female quilt-makers, whose art for so long was seen as purely utilitarian, I transform images of the mundane into works that are both fantastical and inescapably human. By tightly cropping these images, I remove the wholeness of these photographs and video stills and reconfigure them to evoke the feelings of selective recollection. Taylor Bluestine is a practicing interdisciplinary artist and arts administrator. She currently serves as the Communications and Programs Manager at A.I.R. Gallery, a historic feminist artist cooperative located in Brooklyn, NY. She is a graduate of Barnard College. Her writing has been published in IMPULSE magazine. Kristen Heritage is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist creating paintings, mixed media works and performance. Heritage’s figurative works explore the phenomenology of contemporary life, investing everyday scenes and objects with layers of symbol and myth. Under the music project 3rd Floor Ghost, she creates stripped-down folk rock borne on the power of her voice and expressive fingerstyle guitar technique. Heritage studied Fibers with a minor in Art History at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Heritage is the recipient of a 2021 New York City Artist’s Corps grant and has attended the ChaNorth Artist Residency and the 33 Officina Creativa residency in Toffia, Italy. She has exhibited and performed in group shows in New York City, Savannah, Georgia, and New York’s Hudson Valley and serves as a Co-director at Tempest Gallery in Ridgewood. Aliza Katzman - I investigate the parallels between psychosocial and environmental landscapes, framing interactions with and within nature as allegories for human experiences. Through my interchangeable use of human and nonhuman subjects, I aim to question the assumptions of that boundary itself and the hierarchy it often invokes. I draw inspiration from various forms of visual and cultural storytelling: comics, scientific research, history texts, religion, and folklore all influence our understanding of the world. Engaging with the story as a construct, I aim to raise questions about the nature of stewardship, permanence, and entanglement. The coexisting potentials of friction and unity are central to my work: my subjects find themselves in ambiguous and precarious circumstances in which intimacy and violence, protection and freedom, and authority and autonomy coalesce. Importantly, the “environment” in my paintings is not a passive backdrop, but an active and animate force with causal narrative power. Aliza paints and writes out of Brooklyn, NY. Their queer identity and mixed heritage (Ashkenazi Jewish, Korean, and Irish) influences their interest in social cohesion, taxonomy, and storytelling. Growing up in the California Bay Area, they are strongly influenced by the constant interface between human society and our environments. They received a BA in Political Science from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute. Their work has been shown across the United States and abroad including spaces such as Studio in Factory, MIFA, Parallax Art Center, Steuben Gallery, Litografiska Akademin, the Santa Clara Ignatian Center, and the Pfizer Building. Their art and writing have been featured in publications including Suboart Magazine, With Friends Like These, Noise Mag, The Faraway Nearby, Lucero, and Voces Magazine. Previously, Aliza has been an Artist in Residence at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley CA, and at the New York Academy of Art in New York City. Richard Medina (b. 1999, Chicago, IL) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He has exhibited at Field Projects, A Space, 80WSE, Heaven Gallery, and Project 1612. He served as the Biennial Committee Co-Chair for the nonprofit organization Terrain Exhibitions, and co-directed the Terrain Biennial 2019 and 2021. He holds a BFA with Distinction from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2021) and is currently pursuing his MFA in Studio Art at New York University (2026). Shivani Patel is a Queens-based artist who transforms found materials into elaborate sculptures and installations. Originally from the Midwest, she earned a BFA in Painting with a minor in Ceramics from Michigan State University before spending two years substitute teaching and exploring welding. She later pursued an MFA in Painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she focused on material and sculptural studies. Her artistic path has taken her from Chicago, where she co-created Milanajuhui, an interactive installation exploring the senses, food, and community, to The Gambia and Michigan before settling in Ridgewood, New York. For the past four years, her Ridgewood studio has been a focus of experimentation, reflecting her engagement with transformation and assemblage. She has participated in group exhibitions in New York City and Upstate New York, showcasing her evolving practice in gallery settings. Anam Rani - My work emerges from the intersection of erotics, traditional Pakistani objects, and the creation of a queer safe space—a realm where my deepest imaginations take form. Growing up in Pakistan, where queerness was shrouded in silence, I dreamt a thousand times of an alternate reality where my queer body could exist freely. Through my work, I materialize these fantasies, building a world where love, desire, and power are tenderly woven into each piece. The tension between the objects lies a blasphemy against patriarchy, religion and the resulting socio-political force that shape the culture I was born into. Toying with objects from past and present, I reclaim agency over my story, celebrating the complexities of queerness through the merging of cultural traditions and imaginative new worlds. It is within these soft spaces that a futuristic love story unfolds—a narrative where past wounds meet present resilience and future possibility. Born in 1992 in Pakistan and based in New York City, Anam works with sculpture and installation to explore memory, transformation, and inherited traditions. Drawing from familiar domestic and cultural objects, her practice reshapes symbols of home and ritual into poetic forms of renewal. Rooted in a quiet queerness, Anam weaves together fragments of the past and present, crafting spaces that hold both tenderness and resistance. Through acts of casting, layering, and material experimentation, her works dwell in the tension between intimacy and distance, imagining new ways to carry personal and collective histories forward. Jenna Rothstein - My work thrives in awkward, funny corners of existence, moments that feel like inside jokes between strangers. A fish lying on the ground in Chinatown, leaking a mysterious fluid beneath the feet of prospective buyers. A nude woman, warped into absurdity by a funhouse bathtub drain. Strange finds that become raw material for painting, scavenged like treasures from my camera roll or advertisements, and then dressed up in handmade frames of plaster, ceramic, mosaic, or paper pulp. The frames don’t just hold the image, they accessorize it, turning each oddity into an ornament. Ultimately, I’m creating encounters that are just a little too much, where painting winks at sculpture, small but barely being contained, and the everyday gets reframed as ridiculous and tender. Katrina Slavik - My work incorporates quilting, embroidery, collage, and painting to visualize the ways in which individuals are interconnected through family, community, nature, and systems of consumption. My work is inspired by Carl Jung’s writings on dreams, synchronicity, and personal mythologies. I sew together old clothing, bedsheets, towels, and other upcycled materials that are given to me by family and friends. Sourcing fabrics in this way continues American working-class quilting traditions of repurposing textiles rather than throwing them out. Sewing, embroidering, and drawing brings tenderness to textiles that are mass- produced in anonymous factories around the world. The imagery and text in my work are inspired by dreams, community gardening, and researching systems of globalized consumption. I often play with scale to draw connections between points within a microcosmic landscape. Fabric spaces are flattened or distorted to create liminal places populated by memories or dream characters. Katrina is based in Worcester, MA, and Queens, NY. Her work is influenced by communal interconnections through consumption systems, contemporary mythologies, and dreams. She graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2014 with a BFA in Painting. Her most recent solo exhibition was on view in 2025 at the historic John W. Rea House at Passaic County Arts Center, NJ. Previous solo exhibitions include Tutu Gallery, Brooklyn (2021), and Wild Bird Fund Window Gallery, Manhattan (2020). Selected group exhibitions include: PS122, NYC; Mapspace, NYC; BlancSpace, NYC; All Street Gallery, NYC; Bob’s Gallery, NYC; Herearts Gallery, NYC; and Interchurch Center Galleries, NYC; among others. In 2025 year she presented two food art activations at MAPSpace and Tempest Gallery. Selected residencies include Bischoff Inn Residency in 2025 and NYC Audubon Society (Governors Island) in 2021. At Tempest, we want to talk about art in a maelstrom. We invite artists to be unafraid to broach difficult conversations and address colonial structures of violence through their practice in textiles, sculpture and installation. Launched in 2024, Tempest Gallery is nestled on the culturally rich border of Ridgewood and Bushwick. Through our programming, we aim to create community and a space for gathering and presenting work.