Traveling to the South Bronx, there is a contemporary art gallery that is quite unlike anything I have written on previously. It is not a traditional white cube, nor is it a DIY pop-up space, and it certainly is not a domestic-based gallery. Reform Architecture is an architecture firm founded in 2019 by Karim Ahmed and Dionisio Cortes Ortega that prioritizes forward-thinking, eco-friendly design principles for residential, cultural, and commercial buildings. Yet, this architecture firm distinguishes itself in doubling their office as an exhibition space for contemporary artists to exhibit their pieces, to which I was invited to see the works of Nathalie Basoski in Reform Architecture’s third exhibition earlier in the Summer.
Nathalie Basoski (Dutch-Macedonian, b. 1995) melds two mediums that I seldom see paired: photography and textiles. The two creative strains could not be more distinct from one another: the former being a lens-based medium where vision is the main sensorial evocation, whereas the latter is much more entrenched in tactility with little concern for image. For Basoski, these mediums are collapsed into one another reflective of the elasticity and instability of memory as perceived through our mind’s eye.
For every hour, day, month, and year that passes us by, our minds become cluttered with memories: major life events, recurrences, randomness, and all sorts of other non-categorizable things. We are incessantly trying to piece together bits and bobs of information stored away in our consciousness, while at other points exercising neurological power to recall certain details without losing focus (mentally analogous to a fisherman trying not to lose a writhing fish caught on a rod). Basoski’s cross-disciplinary interventions speak to the human urge to maintain a firm hold on memories lest they be fated to an inevitable fleetingness resulting from the unceasing march of time itself.
A collaged aesthetic makes the most sense for how Basoski concocted the works for this show as her collation of imagery, patterns, and textures feels as though it portrays the lightning-fast speed at which our minds move, complete with the internal overlay of imagery that occurs at the same time.
Waiting to Forget (2026) is defined by a loose grid framework in which misshapen rectangles and squares of alternating beige and brown shades made from cotton and linen support two photographic transfer images. The larger image on the left shows a dog in the middle of a cemetery, with gravestones all around and possibly an early evening shadow cast over them. The second image in the slightly smaller photograph up and to the right of this is a different view within the same cemetery, with our perspective oriented towards a building seen as if crouching behind one of the headstones (which enters into frame for about a third of the image). From a textiles standpoint, the asymmetrical arrangement of rectilinear forms reminds one of the patterns on a quilt. But now that those somber cemetery photos have been brought into the mix, those shapes could just as well be an abstraction of grave plots seen from a bird’s eye view. Grief, longing, and acceptance are probable candidates in ascertaining what emotions jump out in a work of this contemplative and sobering demeanor.
One of my favorite works in the exhibition, Inside Out (2026), could just as well be the most accurate depiction of whenever I attempt to mentally conjure up an image of one of Jennifer Bartlett’s famed counter-level, still life paintings. On the one hand, the image feels pretty legible and specific - flowers and other vegetal forms seemingly in a window or balcony setting - but that is only with the quickest of glances. Spend some more time with this work and you discover much surface-level nuance is at work with the bleed of layers that Basoski synthesizes, which achieves an almost painterly effect that led to my connection to Bartlett’s style. Are we looking out or are we looking in? Those plants could be along a balcony, but the opaque white strips that overlap with the image may suggest otherwise, as if we are looking through a window. Or is it black stripes that are keeping us away from the objects at hand? The title doesn’t simplify, but complicates perceptual matters here. And then, the realization kicks in that this might be a completely separate scene in which we are looking downwards at the ground marked with leaves and plant roots (again, another bird’s eye view like in the cemetery work). The last interpretation here suddenly gains more credence when appreciating Basoski’s lively rows of interlocking denim-blue squares and rectangles framing the photo transfer that have the look and feel of a picnic blanket spread on a warm Summer’s afternoon.
Our minds play all sorts of tricks on us whenever we think that a particular memory is tightly in mental view with absolute crystal clarity, only for flickers of doubt to set in that perhaps such-and-such details are a little murky. Basoski’s flirtation with memory goes to a whole other level upon recognizing that each of her works alter in appearance depending on the angle from which you are standing, proximity to the work, and the changing of atmospheric conditions as the day progresses (a good dose of the lighting in the gallery is natural, stemming from the overhead skylight). While perambulating and edging in-and-out from the works, some images will become clearer, others blur, all the while the more abstracted details are automatically adjusted in tonality and shade, either increasing or decreasing.
Years ago, I learned that our minds never truly forget anything, that every lived experience and sight witnessed remains forever tied to our memories. It is only a matter of “unlocking” that brings them out to the fore, replaying (almost) in our brains like a home movie. So it is that Basoski’s works make the most out of a collaging of textiles and photographic images to demonstrate the mysterious ways our minds function with how memories get filtered, lost, retrieved, lost again, and then reinterpreted.
