Remains to be seen

Opening reception: Saturday, June 14, 6-8PM

Smack Mellon presents Remains to be seen, the 2025 Emerging Artist Summer Group Exhibition, guest curated by Pallavi Surana, featuring artists: Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Yusuf Demirors, S. Emsaki, Sujin Lim, Jessica Maffia, Lucas Odahara, Yunfei Ren, Julia Standovar and Merry Sun.

Remains to be seen brings together nine artists whose practices probe the afterlives of waste in relation to memory, ecology, consumerism, and identity. Through sound, sculpture, video, and ritual, the artists ask how we might engage waste not only as residue, but as witness. The exhibition unfolds across three thematic zones—absurdity and system failure, material and ecological memory, and ritual materiality—guiding visitors through overlapping constellations of rupture, residue, and renewal.

Trash is an omnipresent fixture of contemporary life, generated by systems of overproduction, accelerated consumption, and planned obsolescence. It is the byproduct of both capitalist desire and infrastructure—material evidence of dreams of the good life as they are pursued and discarded. As the world faces renewed trade wars and nationalist efforts to reindustrialize, Remains to be seen turns to the margins: to what we throw away, overlook, or forget. The exhibition asks: what stories and systems emerge from that which has been cast off?

Beyond the material, the artists also grapple with a more intimate form of abandonment: the fragmentation and reassembly of the self. In their works, remnants, ruins, and salvaged materials become stand-ins for psychological states—fractured identities, lost memories, and unresolved histories. By gathering what has been discarded and transforming it into new forms, the artists propose the possibility of healing composite selves: not by erasing the fractures, but by acknowledging and reconfiguring them. Waste then also becomes a metaphor for the psychic debris we carry as evidence of survival, transformation, and the ongoing negotiation of identity in the world.

Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Merry Sun, and Lucas Odahara’s works fall in the zone of absurdity and system failure where machines sing, language fails, and garbage performs. Within post-industrial landscapes and ecological memory, Sujin Lin, Yusuf Demirrors, and Jessica Maffia’s works ground identity in a place that is marked by loss, change, and decay. Finally, concerning ritual materiality, artists S. Emsaki, Yunfei Ren and Julia Standovar’s works transform refuse into relics, engaging directly with waste and value.The resultant works transport the viewer, offering portals—not of escape, but of imagination. Some works mine familial and migratory memory; others confront ecological collapse or critique capitalist excess. Their gestures are playful, mournful, and speculative. Together, they challenge linear narratives of progress and decay, proposing alternate modes of value, care, and connection.