Material Gallery celebrates third anniversary with expanded space and “After the Unmaking: New Ground,” guest curated by Moses Williams
David Onri Anderson, Saturn's Return, 2023
Material Gallery is pleased to present After the Unmaking: New Ground, a group exhibition guest curated by artist and educator Moses Williams, featuring work by David Onri Anderson, Isabella Covert, Elise Drake, Fawn Krieger, Ron Lambert, Kiera Ohrn, and Jacob Riddle. Coinciding with Material’s third anniversary, the exhibition marks the gallery’s reopening and the first exhibition in its newly expanded space following two months of renovations and expansion. After the Unmaking: New Ground will be on view from August 29 through October 9, 2026.
After the Unmaking: New Ground begins with the premise that the political and economic structures that have shaped Western society have not simply failed— they have unmade themselves. Rather than looking toward restoration, reform, or a return to what came before, the exhibition asks what might become possible when familiar systems and predetermined outcomes no longer define the limits of our imagination.
Working across painting, sculpture, textiles, video, performance, and mixed media, the seven artists turn toward material, bodily, and experiential forms of knowledge as starting points for imagining what might come next. Their works explore relationships among bodies, environments, technology, labor, consumption, identity, and the natural world. Across the exhibition, making becomes a form of inquiry: an adaptive process grounded in encounter, experimentation, and the possibility of discovering something not yet known.
In his curatorial statement, Williams describes the artists as moving beyond inherited systems toward “experiential knowledge” and “corporeal relation”— grounds from which other futures might be built. After the Unmaking does not propose a singular solution or idealized utopia. Instead, it embraces uncertainty and the possibility of futures that have yet to be conceived. As Williams writes, “The future we reach for is not a better version of the past. It is something else entirely.”
Material will celebrate the opening of After the Unmaking: New Ground, its third anniversary, and the reopening of its newly expanded space with an opening reception on Saturday, August 29, from 6–9 p.m., including a brief curator talk at 7 p.m. The exhibition will also be open to the public with new extended hours Thursdays–Sundays, 11 a.m.–5 p.m., during Gallery Stroll on Friday, September 18, from 6–8 p.m., and at a closing reception on Friday, October 9, from 6–8 p.m., preceded by an artist and curator talk at 5:30 p.m. The exhibition is also available by appointment.
About the Guest Curator
Moses Williams is a multidisciplinary artist and educator living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His practice examines relationships among bodies, materials, objects, and the natural world through phenomenological, contemplative, and somatic approaches. His work is grounded in community, collaboration, Indigenous teaching, and a respect for the sacred material earth.
Williams is a professor in the MFA program at Watkins College of Art at Belmont University. He received a BFA from Watkins College of Art, Design & Film and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. His work has been exhibited and performed throughout the United States and Europe at venues including Apexart, The Andy Warhol Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and David B. Smith Gallery. He recently published Parable Bodies, a collection of images and essays exploring his body of work of the same name.
About the Artists
David Onri Anderson is a Sephardic-Jewish artist from the Algerian-French diaspora whose paintings, drawings, and broader world-building practice exploreidentity, sexuality, nature, spirituality, mythology, and cosmology. A graduate of Watkins College of Art, Anderson has exhibited nationally and internationally and is the founder and curator of Nashville’s artist-run Electric Shed Gallery.
davidonrianderson.com
Isabella Covert is a sculptor and painter whose work investigates the posthuman potential of the body through questions of synthetic biology, reproduction, gender, gestational labor, and family structures. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, and she currently lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey.
isabellacovert.com
Elise Drake is a sculptor and research artist based in Nashville and Brooklyn. Working across textiles, sculpture, and digital fabrication, she transforms archives, accumulated materials, and domestic remnants into works that examine contemporary systems of productivity, consumption, care, and the relationship between physical and digital life.
elisedrake.com
Fawn Krieger is a New York-based artist whose multi-genre practice examines touch, ownership, exchange, and the intersections of private and public experience. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at The Kitchen, Art in General, and the Rose Art Museum. Krieger is a 2019 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award Fellow and serves as Program Director at The Keith Haring Foundation.
fawnkrieger.com
Ron Lambert works in sculpture and video, investigating the intersection between psychology and the construction of our environment. His work has been exhibited and screened throughout the United States and internationally, including in Seattle, Nashville, Philadelphia, Budapest, Serbia, Romania, and Beijing.
ronlambertart.myportfolio.com
Kiera Ohrn is an interdisciplinary artist based in Salt Lake City working across video, performance, and sculpture. Her practice examines surveillance capitalism, self-commodification, beauty, desirability, and the ways bodies are shaped by structures of power, while also exploring the body as a site of wonder connected to technological and natural systems.
Instagram: @queera_cakes
Jacob Riddle is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work explores connections between technology and the natural world. Drawing from his background in construction, labor, and rural Appalachian life, his practice centers resilience, resourcefulness, play, and the coexistence of digital and natural systems. Riddle was the 2026 Marva and John Warnock Artist in Residence at the University of Utah, and his work has been exhibited internationally.
thisisjacobriddle.com
About Material
Material is an artist-founded, community-centered contemporary art gallery and creative space in South Salt Lake, Utah. Through exhibitions, public programs, performances, collaborations, and community engagement, Material creates opportunities for artists while fostering meaningful connections between contemporary art and the communities it serves.
