📣 Join us today at Future Fair (@futurefairs ) for our debut presentation at the fair, featuring new works by artists Daniel Kukla (@danielkukla ) and Catherine Webb (@catherine.webb.studio ).
At the fair, Kukla’s practice examines the boundaries between natural history, ecology, and systems of classification. This presentation centers on butterfly specimens that Kukla raised from egg, their wings incised with delicate ornamental patterns that place them in an uneasy space between scientific artifact and decorative object. Through these subtle interventions, Kukla draws attention to the human impulse to collect, preserve, and impose order onto the natural world, while heightening the fragility already inherent within the specimens themselves.
📍 Future Fair, Booth U9
🗓️ May 13–16, 2026
Image: Damask 1, 2025, etched assorted butterflies, entomology pins, glass, copper, paper, ink, silicone,
12 x 12 x 2 inches
#DanielKukla #FutureFair #TheEmptyCircle
Soft Tissue, 2025.
marbled hog intestines, batting, string, and meat hooks. Soft Tissue draws on the language of preservation. Its materials are sausage casings, used to contain and extend the life of what would otherwise spoil. The sculpture has a bodily presence: raw, exposed, and held in suspension.
Its unsettling physicality echoes the exhibition’s focus on systems of display, the aesthetics of containment, and the illusion of permanence. Soft Tissue is seductive and abject, and refuses easy classification, lingering in the space between artifact and organism. It resists taxonomy by refusing to settle into a single, readable form.
Damask 2, 2025. The butterflies in Thanatosis (Playing Dead) @theemptycircle are cut and etched with Victorian damask patterns—motifs once ubiquitous in 19th-century wallpaper. These hybrid forms, part specimen and part ornament, evoke the aesthetics of natural history collections while unsettling their taxonomic authority. In dialogue with the moiré photogram sculptures, which reference the visual instability of pinned specimens, the butterflies suggest a state of perpetual transformation. *only invasive and farmed butterflies were used
Moiré 2, red blue, 2025. This unprocessed photogram was folded, burned, marbled and pieced with found gorgonian (black coral). The colors will shift with time and the gorgonian will heave and contract with humidity. The sculpture is a site of confrontation and continual change. Nothing is fixed. It’s currently on view @theemptycircle until May 31st.
It’s been a delight welcoming Daniel Kukla @danielkukla to Centrum this month! Learn more about Daniel below.
Daniel Kukla is a visual artist working in photography, video and installation based in NYC. Kukla’s research-based practice utilizes the photographic medium in experimental ways to interrogate themes of impermanence, beauty and fragility, as well as frontiers that arise in the fields of art and ecology. By exploring ecological, historical and social processes that shape a place or idea, Kukla generates work that speaks to new ways of seeing where everything is intertwined and codependent.
#artistresidency #writingresidency #centrumfoundation
We are pleased to announce our next exhibition, Thanatosis (Playing Dead) featuring the work of Daniel Kukla. Join us for the opening reception April 26th 2-4pm.
SAVE THE DATE! April 26 2-4pm I’ll be opening my new solo exhibition Thanatosis (Playing Dead) w/ @theemptycircle curated by @mattnasser . The show will feature new sculptural, photographic and other visual explorations. Show runs April 26 - May 31. More info to come. Hope to see you there!!!
