Industrial Dry

Jack Barrett presents Industrial Dry, a group exhibition curated by Francesca Altamura that brings together artists whose materially driven practices examine the shifting contours of the urban landscape through abstraction. Working across media—acrylic, cement, cardboard, petroleum, silver, steel, wool, terrazzo, and more—these artists foreground a deep material engagement and tactile processes that speak to questions of place, identity, labor, and memory. In their hands, craft becomes more than technique: it is a mode of survival, a way to reckon with fragility.

Many of the works draw from the overlooked materials of city life—worn surfaces, structural remnants, found textures—and reshape them into meditations on presence and loss.

“For Nikita Seleznev, the act of making is quiet: in his hands, craftsmanship becomes a tender response to instability, a way to root oneself through a desire to endure.”

Together, the works in Industrial Dry form a textured meditation on material as both subject and witness—one that holds the imprint of bodies, histories, and cities in flux. In a time when so much feels disposable or obscured, these artists insist on processes that dig deep, uncovering and preserving fragments of truth through their hands. Whether through the quiet grief of mural fragments, the stubborn unpredictability of cured petroleum, or the shimmer of expired photographic emulsions, each work is a gesture toward preservation and reinvention. The result is a collective meditation on how making—deeply felt and insistently handmade—can offer refuge amid the difficulties of contemporary life.