Field Projects is proud to present A Partial Refusal, a group exhibition bringing together a wide span of works engaging with the themes of language and opacity.
In the era of didactic wall texts and large language models, when words are both overspent and undervalued, these artists grapple with language — as container, as gap, as site of censorship and struggle. They resist simplistic reads and rigid identifiers, and the extractive desire of singular meaning; they hover instead in the void of the redacted, the weight of the unsaid, the impossible space of translation.
Through sculpture, textile, drawings and papermaking, these artists employ different strategies of refusal as a form of self-protection, challenging viewers to a slow and earned — and at times partial — intimacy of understanding.
Clare Hu (b. 1996, Norcross GA) is a weaver and artist piecing together maps, trying to find something that’s missing. Hu is currently based in Brooklyn NY. Hu has recently exhibited at Tempest Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Stove Works (Chattanooga, TN), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Greenville SC), Artists Space (New York NY), and the Gibbes Museum of Art (Charleston SC). Hu completed her BFA with a focus in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and is a current MFA candidate at Hunter College.
Jenny Jisun Kim is an artist and translator based in New York. Her practice moves between painting and translation, examining how the two mediums inform and transform one another. Through this dialogue, Kim explores the indeterminacy of language, the fluidity of meaning, and the abstraction of image. Her paintings translate the generative and dissolving processes of meaning into visual form, while her approach to poetry translation draws from the openness and expansiveness of painting.
As a Bolivian-born Argentine-American artist, Maia Taber Ayerza has a specific perspective from the periphery of painting’s history. The lineage of abstraction informing her practice is marked by influences ranging from Pre-Columbian art to interpretations of European art movements (Constructivism, Concrete art, Art Informel, Arte Povera) translated to regional contexts (Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, Grupo Madí, Neoconcretismo, Informalismo). The particularities of this history contribute to her interest in thinking of painting outside itself and questioning the repercussions of painters’ practices.
Mikayla Patton (she/her) is a visual artist whose material based practice works at the intersections of sculpture, installation, papermaking, printmaking, quillwork, and beadwork. Known for her use of repurposed paper, Patton’s studio practice centers personal and archival research to intimately explore themes related to Indigenous autonomy, Lakota ontology, and material agency. Patton belongs to the Oglála Lakȟóta Nation where she was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Currently based in Pennsylvania, she holds a BFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Patton is a 2024 Forge Project Fellow and a 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellow. Her studio practice has also been supported by the Ucross Foundation; the Native Arts and Culture Foundation; First Peoples Fund; the Harpo Foundation; the Indian Arts Research Center; and the RAiR Foundation. Patton's work is held in collections at the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection; Tia Collection, Gochman Collection; and Denver Art Museum. She has shown in solo exhibitions at the Al Held Foundation in Boiceville (2025), and Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art in Santa Fe (2025). She’s participated in group exhibitions at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick (2025); the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks (2025); All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis (2025); the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans (2023). In 2026, Patton’s work will join a renown group of Contemporary Indigenous American Artists, from the Tia Collection, in a major exhibition titled, Hold to this Earth, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK.
Rowan Renee (b. 1985, West Palm Beach, Florida) creates site-specific installations that are the culmination of months or years of research within communities, landscapes or archives. Their work addresses legacies of violence within the family, the state and the criminal legal system, especially their impact on women, LGBTQ+ and incarcerated people. By incorporating labor-intensive processes including printmaking, darkroom photography, stone carving, weaving, and kiln-fused glass, they conceptualize craft as care-work to transform experiences we cannot put into words. Renee has presented solo exhibitions at The Green-Wood Cemetery (2023), KODA (2022), Smack Mellon (2021), FiveMyles (2021), Aperture Foundation (2017), and Pioneer Works (2015). Their projects have been influenced by community-based workshops with people affected by gender-based violence and mass incarceration. Previous partners include Recess Art, The ReEntry Theater of Harlem, and Phoenix House. They have received awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, the Jerome Hill Foundation, and the Art for Justice Fund. Their installation, No Spirit For Me (2019), was included in exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS1.
SaraNoa Mark (b. NY, NY) pursues a drawing practice that investigates traces left by time, as they exist in landscapes and in collective memory. SaraNoa's work has been supported by a Fulbright research fellowship in Turkey. SaraNoa has received grants from Artadia, the Harpo Foundation, U.S. Embassy Mission Grants Program in Turkey, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Art, John Anson Kittredge Fund, Illinois Arts Council, Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Individual Artists Program (DCASE), West Collection, Chicago Artists Coalition, and a Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Travel Scholarship. SaraNoa has been an artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Dieu Donné, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Chicago Artists Coalition, Montello Foundation, Wave Hill, Jackman Goldwasser Residency at the Hyde Park Art Center, Lois and Charles X. Carlson Painting Residency, Sedona Summer Colony, and the Bronx River Art Center. In ’26-’27 SaraNoa will be a yearlong studio resident at the Monira Foundation. SaraNoa co-directed the 4th Ward Project Space in Chicago from 2017-2023. Recent exhibitions of their work have taken place at the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; Daniel Faira Gallery, Toronto, CA; The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, ME; CA; Davis & Langdale, NY; Dreamsong, Minneapolis, IL; 5533, Istanbul, among others. SaraNoa was named a Newcity magazine Breakout Artist in 2021. Mark’s work has been reviewed in NPR, Hyperallergic, ARTNEWS, BOMB Magazine, ArtAsiaPacific, and more.
