If one can brave the mirages of moist heat and warm rain of New York August, they just might end up at 170 Forsyth Street, home of Ki Smith Gallery. At this time, the gallery is proud to present its 2026 juried group show: Critics Choice. With 24 artists ranging in age, background, and medium, the show brings together a contrasting array of mechanical and naturalistic work. This year, the works were selected by a panel consisting of Bob Krasner, Jackie Andres, Keith Estiler, Liam Otero, Vittoria Benzine, Jo Rosenthal, and Matilda Berke.
The writers and critics worked through hundreds of submissions to narrow it down to the 24 artists featured in the group exhibition.
The show consists of varied interplays between the organic and the technical. Through careful curatorial decisions, the materials are able to come to the forefront through juxtaposition; there is a feeling of a kind of fetishism, of materials being pushed to their limits, of a self-indulgent enlargement and hyper-awareness of the arts’ subjects. If you stick around long enough, a mechanical buzz from a permanently printing machine-sculpture myReplica.txt by artist Yichen Ji just might catch you off guard as you are caught up in the flow of waves in Robert Zumwalt’s Turnt hanging across.
While being hi-tech in a lot of ways, there is a distinctly 20th-century playfulness that serves as a throughline for the show. Delightfully avant-garde, in the historic sense of the word. There are loving homages to Duchamp, Man Ray, Pollock. The referential quality of some of the work makes the show into an easter egg hunt for points of connection, inviting unexpected comparisons and arthistorical hallucinations. Metal, breast-like droplets of Steven Rahbany’s Metal Drip are contrasted by eggshell sharpnell of James Nazz’s Walking On….
The viewer is invited to play a detective. Or a psychoanalyst. As the summer is wrapping up, there is still time to catch the show before it closes in September.
Quiet Lunch is a grassroot online publication that seeks to promote various aspects of life and culture with a loving, but brute, educational tinge. When we say, “Creative Sustenance Daily,” we mean it.