DOCUMENT is pleased to present Exhibit B, a group exhibition featuring works by Julien Creuzet, Natani Notah, John Opera, Tom Schneider, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Kazuhito Tanaka, and Claude Viallat. Opening on Friday, January 10, the exhibition will remain on view through February 22, 2025.

The exhibition builds upon and expands the themes of investigation explored in the Exhibit A group exhibition in 2024. Bending the limits of traditional media, repeating patterns and shapes, and referencing the history of art, literature, and cultures are some of the aspects which bring together the artists on view as well as DOCUMENT’s program at large.

The title of the wall sculpture by Julien Creuzet (b. 1986, Paris, France), Orpheus was musing upon braised words / Under the light rain of a blazing fog / Snakes are deaf and dumb anyway / Oblivion buried in the depths of insomnia, (King and peasant), is an excerpt of a poem by Creuzet which reflects on the relationship between periphery and center, questioning the idea of time and geographical location as fundamental concepts in understanding cultural production.

In her practice, Diné artist Natani Notah (b. 1992, San Bernardino, CA) connects maps, bodies, and objects to reflect on the larger social issues that repeatedly intersect the lives of women and men alike. With references to political activism, including the Land Back and Pro-Choice movements, her drawings also address the encounter of different groups, forces, and visions of territory in today’s social landscape.

The work of John Opera (b. 1975, Buffalo, NY) blurs the line between painting and photography in concept and appearance, while mirroring phenomena in the natural world. The images on view originate from analog film and are printed on canvas with color separation negatives using the nineteenth-century photographic process called gum bichromate. The effect the process has on the images reinforces a long term interest the artist has had in thinking about the nature of photographs, and the relationship between cameras and human vision.

Simultaneously influenced by and rejecting the visual language of the Chicago Imagists he studied under, Tom Schneider (b. 1963, Evanston, IL) paints eyes and mouths in checkered patterns over pointillistic, fantastical scenes in Martian Minotaurs and Their Monster Plants (2022) and Ohio Melon Heads (2024).

The subjects photographed by Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) are friends who serve as muses, collaborators, and intimates. In this collective form of image-making, the recurring presence and visibility of cameras, tripods, and studio lighting – all forms of equipment necessary in a photographic practice – highlight their role as a support to the artist’s practice.

Kazuhito Tanaka (b. 1973, Saitama, Japan) works at the thresholds between analog and digital, image-making and sculpture, and photography and painting. His Picture(s), abstract paintings and collages made of torn chromogenic photographs assembled onto the same canvases, suggest a series of dialogues emerging from their two distinct materialities.

Claude Viallat (b. 1936, Nîmes, France) has been a contentious defender of modernism since 1964, when he began working with the idea of a repeated pattern to refuse the artist’s subjectivity. Since then he has also eschewed stretchers or frames. The repeated shape – prominently visible in the large-scale work on view, 2016/391, has become Viallat’s trademark and signature and figures on all kinds of surfaces, from rugs, tents, curtains and other loose fabrics, endlessly repeating itself, yet always creating something new.