Jason Dodge with Yvo Cho, Keta Gavasheli, Megan Plunkett, Merry Alpern, Felice Tosalli curated by Luca Lo Pinto - Until April 25, 2026
- Feb 25
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 11
Barbati Gallery is pleased to present, from March 7 to April 25, 2026, a group exhibition curated by Luca Lo Pinto featuring Jason Dodge alongside Yvo Cho, Keta Gavasheli, Megan Plunkett, Merry Alpern, and Felice Tosalli. The exhibition unfolds as a constellation of reflections and materials, exploring the boundaries between presence, perception, and the silent dialogue between things.
The exhibition unfolds like an arrangement of things and thoughts with Jason Dodge at its center not as a singular authorial voice, but as a presence that enables others practices to appear (Merry Alpern, Yvo Cho, Keta Gavvasheli, Megan Plunkett, Felice Tosalli). The works occupy the gallery space according to different temporalities: at times in isolation, at times in relation, appearing briefly or lingering long enough to recalibrate the rhythm of the space.
The show is not conceived as a conceptual proposition or a thesis to be demonstrated. Instead, it develops from shared affinities, parallel intuitions, and a sensitivity that moves across distinct practices. The works engage one another without explanation, forming a conversation made of gestures, materials, and decisions rather than words. Meaning arises through proximity rather than prescription. Attention is favored over interpretation, presence over statement. Viewers are invited to stay with what unfolds when works come into contact - when they align, pause, or quietly diverge.
At the center of this constellation, Jason Dodge’s practice establishes the conditions for such encounters. Through subtle gestures, restraint and an avoidance of fixed subjects, his work—often composed of traces and objects drawn from everyday life foregrounds the viewer’s agency in the production of meaning. The traces and objects drawn from everyday life he gathers resist narrative closure, instead proposing perception itself as an active and generative force. Around this sensibility, other practices find both tension and resonance.
Merry Alpern’s photographs introduce an acute awareness of the ethics and the complicity embedded in the process of looking. By positioning the camera at the threshold between public and private space, her images unsettle the stability of observation and implicate the viewer in acts of surveillance and desire. Yvo Cho’s practice interrogates the status of images and circulation of images, questioning their reliability as they move across different platforms and contexts. Working fluidly between photography, sculpture, painting, architecture, and design, he frequently incorporates the act of documentation into the work itself.
Keta Gavasheli engages sound, poetry, and performance through collage-like strategies that evoke the fragmented textures of memory and interior space. Cassette tapes function as both medium and archive—material repositories of spoken text that render language distant, partially obscured, and preserved in another form. Megan Plunkett’s image-based installations examine the material conditions and visual economies that shape photographic reality. Through seriality, spatial displacement, and the incorporation of props or found objects, she cultivates estrangement within familiar scenes. Felice Tosalli’s animal sculptures, though rooted in an earlier historical moment, contribute a distinct material and imaginative register. Carved and often polychromed in wood, his works combine technical precision with a refined, fairy-tale sensibility.
Placed after the exhibition’s initial proposition, these practices do not illustrate or confirm its premises; rather, they unfold as parallel articulations of a shared attentiveness. Together, they shape a space in which meaning emerges slowly through adjacency, contrast, and the quiet persistence of things.
BARBATI GALLERY
Palazzo Lezze
Campo Santo Stefano, 2949
30124 Venezia, Italy