Roots Unseen: Ana Cláudia Almeida, June Canedo de Souza, Bita Fayyazi, Katherina Olschbaur, curated by Yan Yu
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit describes “the blue of distance” as the space between longing and arrival—where one exists in the presence of what remains absent. It is a space where meaning arises not from possession or definition, but from the desire for what is distant, unattained, or unattainable. As Solnit suggests, there is beauty in allowing some things to remain opaque—acknowledging that not everything should be grasped or fully known. This is the realm Roots Unseen dwells within.
The works of Ana Cláudia Almeida, June Canedo de Souza, Bita Fayyazi, and Katherina Olschbaur, shape and unsettle experience in equal measure. Through their respective practices, these artists navigate longing, multiplicity, and the senses, prioritizing attunement over containment. Rather than seeking certainty, their works explore the potential of not knowing, where longing becomes not a void to be filled but a recursive force that resonates across the personal, political, and poetic.
In her diptych “monotype” Clavícula (clavicle), 2025, Ana Cláudia Almeida transfers hues of azure, cyan, and shades of mahogany from clear sheets of plastic onto cotton fabrics. The back then becomes the front, and the invisible is rendered visible, like the nostalgic yearning for places and people once known and now lost. Her installations are altars of memory, where soil and sky blur into a single breath. Here, longing is not a wound but an opening—a way back to places we never left, to hands we still feel in the dark.
June Canedo de Souza frames longing as an embodied, cyclical act. Her paintings trace the rhythms of care and creation, where color moves with the body—submerged, revealed, and concealed again. Lines and forms emerge, not as fixed shapes, but as traces of movement across the surface. In Dessert Table, 2024, the canvas is stretched, unstretched, punctured, folded. It migrates from wall to floor, gathering dust, then resurfacing elsewhere—always in flux, always beginning anew. In this way, her work becomes an almost-body, existing between subject and object, material and gesture.
Katherina Olschbaur begins each painting with an internal map, a negotiation between internal and external, where seemingly opposing colors resolve in a delicate balance. In Transparency of Memory (Visit of D.), 2025, Olschbaur traces glass objects, birds and hoofs intertwine with human forms in a dance of eroticism and sentimentality where dreamlike compositions dissolve the boundaries of foreground and background. These paintings are not merely seen but deeply felt—a quiet reckoning with the unresolved, or unrequited love. Olschbaur navigates the fragile spaces between connection and separation, capturing a longing that is both visceral and transcendent.
Bita Fayyazi’s ongoing sculptural series, Beautiful Creatures, transforms longing into a quiet act of resistance. Fragile forms—broken ceramics and found materials, carefully repurposed from her past works—are meticulously wrapped in yarn, resembling swaddled newborns. Suspended mid-air, they hover just above the ground, perpetually out of reach. It speaks to a moment of stillness where both body and mind remain grounded, yet simultaneously waiting and longing for movement, transformation, and change. There is uncertainty as well as an awareness of an approaching shift. This sentiment finds form in Heavenly Creatures, 2023, where the delicate balance of grounding and transcendence persists, shaped by emotional undercurrents as the forms shed their burdens and rise timelessly.
Longing is a universal force–an ache that propels us forward while simultaneously tethering us to the past. It is both a source of creative facility and a regressive well of knowledge; a paradox that reveals the depths of human nature. Roots Unseen does not seek to explain but to hold. In these works, longing is not a problem to be fixed but a force that binds us—to each other, to the past, to futures still unwritten. The exhibition invites us to sit with opacity, to find refuge in the unspoken, and to discover, amid the chaos, the regenerative power of art.
– Yan Yu
Ana Cláudia Almeida (b.1993, Rio de Janeiro) lives and works in New Haven. Almeida investigates materials through movement and mark-making to challenge the way function shapes our understanding of objects. By examining the tension between interior and exterior, individual and environment, Almeida explores the relationship between nature, urban landscapes, and social systems. Exhibitions include Roots Unseen, curated by Yan Yu, Nicodim Annex, Los Angeles (2025, forthcoming); Ana Cláudia Almeida & Tadáskía, Fortes D’Aloia e Gabriel and Quadra, São Paulo (2024); Ensaios sobre a Paisagem, Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho (2024); Guandu Paraguaçu Piraquara, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro (solo, 2023); Submersiva Ato II (with Carla Santana), Quadra, Rio de Janeiro (2022); Buracos, Crateras e Abraços, Quadra, Rio de Janeiro (solo, 2021), among others.
Bita Fayyazi (b.1962, Tehran) lives and works in Tehran. Fayazzi actively engages in collaborative and performative projects with artists and individuals with no artistic backgrounds. By embracing such interactions, she explores the power of shared creativity, fostering meaningful connections and broadening the boundaries of artistic expression. Exhibitions include Roots Unseen, curated by Yan Yu, Nicodim Annex, Los Angeles (2025, forthcoming); Crescendo, In Collaboration with In Cahoots, curated by Vali Mahlouji, Parallel Circuit, Tehran (2024); Forms, Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch, Miami (2023); Who Created Winter?, Museum Archive Nasser Bakhshi, Tabriz (2023); Some Seasons: Fereydoun Ave and the Laal Collection, Art Jameel, Dubai (2023); A Selection of 70 Years of Iranian Sculpture, Art Center, Tehran (2023); Spring Frame, Khak Art Gallery, Tehran (2022); One by One, Azad Art Gallery, Tehran (2020); I Love You Because You’re Sweet and Tender, Khak Gallery, Tehran (solo, 2018); Vaudeville, Khak Gallery, Tehran (solo, 2017); Sculpture Exhibition, Salsali Private Museum, Dubai (2017), among others.
June Canedo de Souza (b.1989, Newark) lives and works in New York. Canedo de Souza is interested in the translation of gestural language and its regional nuances, considering how movement, surface, and color shape meaning. Her work often, though not always, explores how migration is mediated by memory. From multimedia installations to durational performances, her work mainly borrows from the domestic culture and the cultural memory of the women in her family. Exhibitions include Roots Unseen, curated by Yan Yu, Nicodim Annex, Los Angeles (2025, forthcoming); Witness, LaForce x Speciwoman, New York (2025); New.Now, Hamiltonian, Washington D.C. (2025); A River Seeks it’s Source, MIMO, New York (2024); Memory-Material, The Geffen at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2022); A Queen Within, Fresno Museum of Art, Fresno (2022); and New Visions, Fotografiska, New York (2020), among others.
Katherina Olschbaur (b.1983, Bregenz, Lake Constance, Austria) lives and works in New York. She graduated from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria. The Austrian-born artist was emboldened by her move to Los Angeles in 2017 to push the boundaries in exploring the tenuous relationship between representation and abstraction, creating the distinct viewpoints on light, color and form for which her painting practice is recognized. Her work deals with Systems of chaos and order, creation and destruction, the fragility of culture and personal experience and the relationship between obsession, devotion and the collective and individual unconscious.
Exhibitions include, Roots Unseen, curated by Yan Yu, Nicodim Annex, Los Angeles (2025, forthcoming); Sweet Expulsion, Perrotin, Paris (2024,solo); Becoming the Sea: Black Rock Senegal x Harvey B. Gantt Center, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Charlotte (2024); Vampire::Mother, curated by jasmine Wahi, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2024); Sirens, Dangxia Art Foundation, Beijing (2024, solo); Midnight Spill, Perrotin, Hong Kong (2023, solo); Somatic Markings, Kasmin, New York (2022); Prayers, Divinations, Nicodim, New York (2022, solo); Dak’Art: African Contemporary Art Biennale, Dakar (2022); Live Flesh, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2021–2022, solo); Dominique Fung and Katherina Olschbaur: My Kingdom and a Horse, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2021, two artist); Night Blessings, Union Pacific, London (2021, solo); Tortured Ecstasies, Nicodim Upstairs, Los Angeles (2020, solo); Dirty Elements, curated by Allyson Unzicker, Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, UC Irvine, Irvine (2020, solo), and others. In 2021, she was selected for the second year of Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock residency in Dakar, Senegal.