In Sun pairs the work of Kristan Kennedy and Marcus Fischer, two artists whose practices rely on accumulation, erosion, and perceptual uncertainty. Playing at the edges of two very different mediums, Kennedy with painting and Fischer primarily with sound, both eschew the notion of stable composition in favor of durational unfolding, which extends beyond the time of production to moments of active beholding.

Kennedy’s paintings might at first seem plainly apprehensible, but they present only the end stage of a long process of making, much of which is left invisible to the eye. Each one begins with unstretched linen that the artist dyes, stains, and draws upon with a range of materials both traditional and unexpected, ranging from sumi ink and markers to bleach and butter. Once Kennedy’s initial moves have seeped into the fibers of the cloth, she goes about disrupting what she has created, layering additional marks, erasing others, and throwing the whole thing into the washing machine, where dyes will set, bleed, migrate, or diffuse altogether, leaving behind just a shadow or outline of what was once there. She repeats the process as many times as it takes to arrive at a work that is “believable” as painting, maintaining an aesthetic at once deliberate and accidental. Her naming conventions, in which each painting is titled with a cryptic acronym, further underscore the sense of mystery, opacity, and depth central to her work.

Fischer’s sound installations also concern themselves with process, temporality, and uncertainty. In Memory Gates, 2026, he uses modified reel-to-reel machines to play multiple tracks simultaneously, combining instrumental compositions with field recordings of passing cars, woodpeckers, and water from day- and nighttime walks. The tapes are strung loosely between the machines, visualizing duration and creating the conditions of flux: because the tape loops differ in length, their sounds drift from any pre-planned alignment, producing a constantly shifting sonic field shaped by repetition and chance. Material erosion risks further destabilization, as the tape slowly sheds its iron oxide over the course of the exhibition.

Though there are strong signals of embodiment in Kennedy’s hand-worked paintings and Fischer’s field recordings, which often include the sound of his own footsteps, both artists also embrace a sense of unknowability. Though Kennedy is deeply engaged with painting’s long history as a medium of image-making, her works resist concrete representation. Recurring abstract forms move through her richly layered paintings like fragments of a private language, suggesting structures that might flicker with recognition but never fully resolve. Fischer goes even further, particularly in a series of sealed boxes featuring unspooled magnetic tape. The tape in each box has been recorded with sounds described by the works’ titles—“This is the Sound of Where the River Meets the Sea,“ for one, or “This is the Sound of Night in the Foothills.” The sounds are not available, just the material fact of their containment within strips of tape; viewers are thus asked to imagine what cannot be heard. As a result, the work exists as much in the mind as it does on the wall, and no two viewers will—or could ever—have the same experience of it. 

The interplay between the two artists—who know one another but have never before exhibited their work together—heightens some of their common concerns, even across divergent mediums. Their approaches are fundamentally generous, offering just enough ground for shared knowledge and experience while preserving the irreducibly individual nature of perception. In each case, the work remains slightly out of reach, not withholding meaning so much as refusing to fix it in place. What emerges instead is a field of possibility in which image and sound are continually made and remade in the act of encounter, offering an armature for attention that asks us to sit with what cannot be fully known.

Text by Andrea Gyorody