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UNAVOWED
Opening Sun. December 14th, 3-6pm
A group show curated by Delia Cadman, featuring works by Case (Ieva Lygnugaryte & Xavier Muchel), Danyela June Brown, Kiani Kodama, Sean Livingstone, Mauricio Perdomo-Doncel, and Loren Yuehan Wang.
Against this reductive transparency, a force of opacity is at work. No longer the opacity that enveloped and reactivated the mystery of filiation but another, considerate of the threatened and delicious things joining one another (without conjoining, that is, without merging) in the expanse of Relation.
GIORGIO AGAMBEN,
THE COMING COMMUNITY
THE COMING COMMUNITY
CLUBLAND COUNTERFEIT is pleased to present UNAVOWED, a group exhibition including works by Case (Ieva Lygnugaryte & Xavier Muchel), Danyela June Brown, Kiani Kodama, Sean Livingstone, Mauricio Perdomo-Doncel, and Loren Yuehan Wang. Exploring the unspoken, UNAVOWED looks to the failure of archive, redaction, fracture, blur, coded language, substitution, allegory, secrecy, and mis-translation as strategies shaped by surveillance, discipline, and self-preservation. Absence and things left unsaid or that cannot be said become the subject of the work, obliquely.
Unavowed, meaning not affirmed, mentioned, or openly declared, is a word of gaps and in-betweens. It evokes things that cannot be spoken, due to impossible translation, threat of incrimination, or cultural taboo. It is a word about limits, about the furthest reaches or what can be shared or grasped in community predicated on loving as unknowing about each other. It is also about skirting – a survival strategy of tacit acknowledgement (if-you-know-you-know) of the existence of a thing, without concrete confirmation. Often instrumentalized as a means of control, such tacit acknowledgment is here refigured as a folk technology of survival and collective endurance.
Sean Livingstone and Maurico Perdomo-Doncel explore the act of unsaying as it is instrumentalized by systems of domination and control, by performing this unsaying in a way that makes it hyper-visible. In Sean Livingstone’s Untitled Spaces he re-photographs models from architectural magazines, highlighting the implicit voyeuristic and fetishistic gaze lurking behind utopic architectural visions. Mauricio Perdomo-Doncel works in a similar register, elucidating the archive as an expression of the limits of procedural knowledge gatekept and transmuted through the institution. Through abjection, free association, and intentional withholding, Perdomo-Doncel demonstrates how the archive can also become a site of transgression, identifying the power and significance of re-membrance, even if re-constructed, as resistance. Provenance is withheld or displaced, forming a historiographic commentary on regulation, erasure, and mis-translation.
Loren Yuehan Wang’s Infrastructure of Sundown continues this thread of historiographic commentary through literal illumination – challenging racist, institutional and infrastructural non-disclosure by literally “shining a light.” From October 2024 to January 2025, Loren Yuehan Wang would examine the civil and cultural infrastructures of historic sundown towns in Connecticut. Arriving at the sites in total darkness, they would scan the exterior structures with an emergency flashlight equal in lumens to a car's headlight.
Case’s video Some Type Armor, approaches the theme from the perspective of translation, especially the labor of translation as invisibly assumed by the minoritized subject. The unnamed subject’s desire to assimilate, elucidates the covert valuation assigned to “proper” forms of expression, linking language to currency, exchange, symbolic luxury and counterfeit.
In speaker, listener, Kiani Kodoma uses げんき I & II: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese, as collage material, evaluating instructional language books as mechanisms of settler colonialism and mediators of sensual fantasy. Language textbooks are suffused with implicit underlying ideologies baked into something disguised as a neutral pedagogical tool. By appropriating textbook imagery, Kodama shows how not only language learning but the methods by which language is taught bolsters a status quo suspicious of the perverse or strange, especially in regards to gender roles and expression, sex, and crime.
Danyela June Brown’s untitled works round out the exhibition, reframing opacity as a strategy of projection, protection, and implication. Scrolls of paper (receipt paper, butcher paper, toilet paper) recount on the one hand, five weeks of conversations recorded in the artist’s studio at Bard while the artist was simultaneously conducting Medicaid intake interviews for unhoused clients, assisting them in reconnecting with case managers in Washington, D.C., and on the other a stream-of-consciousness outline smuggled into Bard – what the artist describes as “a philosophy of perception that treats blindsight as a refusal of visual mastery, foregrounding trans and disabled interior intersubjectivity against dominant models of vision.” Together, these works ask how neurogendered and Mad speech acts remain structurally unavowable, due to affect, nonlinearity, bureaucratic preemption, and conflicts of access, interest, and personality. Extracted from their original surveillance contexts, case-management documentation and academic prose, the transcripts briefly evade legibility, only to collapse again through overuse and compromised material form.
Together, the works in UNAVOWED both refuse legibility and illuminate it, treating opacity as an ethical material strategy.
CASE was formed through a keen infatuation with imposing poetics onto everyday life; or in turn integrating the poetics of the everyday into their practice. With a sensitive attentiveness to the properties of language, the built environment, and a commitment towards rendering the familiar back into oddness; their works unravels parts of reality that are taken for granted.
DANYELA JUNE BROWN is a set-maker and witness from South Arlington, VA interested in hacking, having nice things, and automating the bullshit. She has presented at Bard College, Performance Space New York, and Touchstone Gallery, and danced for the Houses of Mizrahi and Khan. She completed EMERGENYC (2020) and Dia Art Foundation's Learning and Public Engagement Fellowship (2019-2021). She holds a BA in African American Studies from Stanford and is pursuing sculpture at Bard MFA (2028). Brown served as inaugural Artistic Director of DMV Kiki Nights (2022-2025) and Curator of Performance for Queer Art Salon (2024-2025).
KIANI KODAMA (b. 1996, Seattle, WA) is a Brooklyn based artist. They received their BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art in 2020 and studied at Kyoto Seika University in 2018. Kodama was a recipient of the Liu Shiming Foundation Art Grant (New York, NY; 2023) and has recently held residence at Studio Kura (Fukuoka, Japan; 2025) and Pillowfort Arts Center (Andes, NY; 2025). Their work has been exhibited at RAINRAIN Gallery (New York, NY; 2024), Susquehanna Art Museum (Harrisburg, PA; 2024), and Vox Populi Gallery (Philadelphia, PA; 2023), among others. In 2026 Kodama will be a Core Fellow at Penland School of Craft (Bakersville, NC).
SEAN LIVINGSTONE works in series. Currently, he is exploring ideas, methods, and materials to remove his hand from his work. He has turned to his collections and archives (audio cassettes, vinyl records, magazines, crossword puzzles, dry transfer sheets, etc...) for form and medium in hopes that by doing so, he can explore ideas more thoroughly. Themes found within his work often deal with anonymity, authorship, surrogates/copies, loss, violence, memory, and sentimentality. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
MAURICIO PERDOMO-DONCEL (b. 2004, New Jersey) is an artist, writer, and teacher. He primarily works in sculpture, video, and text around questions on the processes of history and memory. He is currently studying to attain his BFA at The Cooper Union in New York.
LOREN YUEHAN WANG is a transdisciplinary artist, militant researcher, and relational practitioner living and working in Southern California. Currently pursuing MFA in art at UC Irvine. They persistently dig into the slippages between militarization, infrastructure, and institutional archive. Engaging with video, performance, sound, and text, they embody a mediatory position that unifies archival and affective research methodologies.