Last Weekend – Closes Sunday Jan 26, 2025

Video features the work of Krista Gay, Ali Kaeini, Kitty Rauth, Sam Sherman, and Sasha Fishman.

Click on image to start slide show.

Show dates: January 11 – Janury 26, 2025

Westbeth Gallery
55 Bethune Street
New York,NY
Gallery Hours: Wed – Sun 1pm – 6pm

Westbeth Gallery is pleased to present Pairidaēza,a group exhibition featuring works by Sam Sherman, Krista Gay, Ali Kaeini, Sasha Fishman, Kate Stone, Kitty Rauth, and Charlie Manion.

Curated by Celeste del Valle.

Conjuring imaginations of absentminded leisure, luxury, and eternal life, the mythic concept
of paradise is both a primeval place of origin and an imminent, realizable future promised to
the virtuous few. Even in our “secularism,” this notion continues to occupy a significant
place in our collective consciousness.

The word “paradise” can be traced through Latin and Greek to a relative of the Iranian
language Avestan, the scriptural language of Zoroastrianism. Its near-Avestan root words
shape the compound word Pairidaēza, which translates as “to make or form a wall” and
“enclosed garden.”

In his description of Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint Angelus Novus, Walter Benjamin wrote of
the angel of history: a creature facing backward towards the wreckage of the past, forcibly
propelled into the future by “a storm blowing from Paradise,” which has “caught in his
wings with such violence that [he] can no longer close them,” despite the angel’s wish to
“stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.”
Taking Benjamin’s description of the storm in paradise as a cynosure, this exhibition
challenges the paradise garden’s utopian ideal with questions its etymology implies: who is
the garden for? For what function is the wall designed? At what cost is the garden
maintained?

The artists brought together in this exhibition explore the tensions and questions inherent to
the paradise garden through varied media, methods, and narratives. Emblems of ritualism
are interrupted and defanged, exposing cracks in the walls where a new telos may emerge.
– Celeste del Valle

Please join us for the opening reception of PAIRIDAĒZA on January 10, 2025, from 6-8
PM. The exhibition will be open to the public Wednesday through Sunday, 1-6 PM from
January 11 through January 26, 2025.