Hard Play
Opening: June 4, 6–8pm
Performance: 7pm
This exhibition brings together sculptural practices that treat the object as a site of psychological and social projection rather than stable function. Toys, therapeutic devices, domestic tools, industrial fragments are displaced from utility and reconfigured as unstable protagonists—forms that hover between the familiar and the estranged.
Across these works, sculpture operates through anthropomorphic suggestion rather than representation. Play appears here less as leisure than as a system of repetition and discipline: learning through touch, memory through gesture, resilience through rehearsal. Care is approached with similar complexity—not as sentiment, but as labor, repair, and the management of fragility. The domestic becomes a political space, where design, gender, and bodily experience are continuously organized and contested.
These artists refuse the autonomy of the sculptural object. Their forms lean, sag, depend, and threaten collapse. They remain deliberately unresolved—part machine, part organism, part stage prop—insisting that vulnerability is not a weakness of form, but its condition. In this space, sculpture does not describe the body; it performs its instability.
Yixuan Wu received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2022 and holds a dual-major BFA in Photography and Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design. Wu has exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally, with recent presentations at the Chinese American Arts Council, SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, Field Projects, NARS Foundation, Half Gallery, and the Lenfest Center for the Arts. She has participated in major residency programs including MacDowell, Triangle Arts Association, High Desert Test Sites, Vermont Studio Center, NARS Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Hyoju Cheon (b. 1994, Seoul, South Korea) received her BFA in Western Painting from Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul and her MFA from Columbia University. Cheon has exhibited internationally in Seoul and New York, with presentations at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, Abrons Arts Center, Half Gallery, Chashama, and various independent spaces and project venues.
Amanda Atria (b. 1995, Santiago, Chile) is a sculptor living and working between New Haven, Connecticut and Santiago, Chile. She completed her MFA in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art and holds a BFA from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She was awarded First Prize in Sculpture at the Young Art Prize in Santiago in 2022 and has received major distinctions including the 2025 Fondart Nacional Chile Crea Fellowship, the John A. Carrafiell Scholarship, and the Alice Kimball English Travelling Fellowship from the Yale School of Art. Her recent residencies include the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Virginia and Residencia Oficinas Meteoro in Santiago.