Lost/Found

Galleria Poggiali is pleased to present in its Milan premises, in Foro Bonaparte 52, Lost/Found, a group exhibition curated by Archiebald Raphulu (b. 1996, Johannesburg, South Africa) featuring new works by Kim Dacres (b. 1986; Bronx, NY), Melissa Joseph (B. 1980; Saint Mary, PA), John Rivas (b. 1997; Newark, NJ), Kayode Ojo (b. 1990; Cookeville, TN), and Nate Lewis (b. Beaver Falls, PA; 1985) the show highlights creative reuse in their respective practices. Whether locally sourced, familiar, or counterfeit objects the exhibition brings together materials found in each of their communities and everyday environment to question what we’re surrounding ourselves with in today’s world/society.
Lonely people see double-entendres everywhere.
Renata Adler, Speedboat (1976)
Perhaps it goes without saying that the specter of loss figures heavily in the arts. In The Law of Large Numbers (Johnson, 2021), curator Ellen Grieg quotes Ethiopian-American visual artist Julie Mehretu: “THE ABSENCE BECOMES THE THING.” Across time and genre, elegy appears in many ways indivisible from the act of bearing witness in art––the project of the artist, even at its most splintered, points perennially toward something of an absence and its reconciliation. This is, of course, by no accident. Freudian psychoanalysis figures the conscious and subconscious experiences of loss as definitive components of developmental psychology, and in daily life the gestures of losing and finding underscore countless personal histories–– matters of love, kinship, community, story-telling, and above all, self.
For Galeria Poggiali’s newest summer exhibition entitled Lost/Found, South African curator Archiebald Raphulu shines light on this ubiquitous feeling of “being lost.” Against the background of an overwhelming cultural materialism, as well as the rapid evolution of technology and social media, Lost/Found explores the tenuous relationship between contemporary alienations and the innate, human yearning for belonging. The exhibition highlights five visual artists working across a breadth of media. Between them, the intricate manipulation of materials—both familiar and found—become recurring touchstones for the show’s core transfigurations: absence and presence, displacement and redemption, grief and reconciliation.
Installed along the far wall of the exhibition, Melissa Joseph’s Julie in the Wagoneer (2021) and Julie in the Olafur E Room (2022) stem from the artist’s ongoing series of fiber-based portraits. Through needle felting technique, Joseph guides diaphanous volumes of colored woolen fiber into discrete images that retain much of the material’s original ambiguity. Conceived in conversation with more classical modes of portraiture, Joseph’s material approach emphasizes intersections of gender and labor, and within the context of the exhibition offers poignant metaphors about the negotiation and reclamation of space. Meanwhile, New York
based artist Nate Lewis presents examples of his signature “paper sculpture” forms. Trained originally as a nurse, Lewis approaches form and texture in a decidedly corporeal fashion, piecing together visual vocabularies as disparate as frottage and musical notation to create ambiguated, interlocking layers of figuration. Two new works, Distilled in Movement (2023) and Distilled Scores (2023), depict a pair of related scenes: two figures wrestle, or perhaps embrace, in abstracted planes of texture and color that simultaneously enmesh and delineate the combatants from their environment and from each other.
Elsewhere, artists Kim Dacres and Keyode Ojo approach material provenance as a key site of formal and narrative experimentation. The phrase “found object” takes on evocative new meanings within the exhibition’s purview, suggesting a wealth of symbolic ground with which to interpret issues of narration, artifact, and environment. In Dacre’s Coco Hanifa (2023) and Lola Yuri (2023), the artist reclaims rubber tires from bikes and automobiles, creating silhouetted ‘busts’ through a variety of interlay and braiding techniques. The many elements at play in these works––race, representation, and the reappropriation of canonical genres in sculpture––intersect in tender odes to community and memorialization. For Ojo, provenance becomes a
partly sociological aspect: the high-heeled boots and liquor bottles in his newest untitled works draw on an array of seemingly abandoned, oftentimes counterfeit objects that telegraph the rifts between individual aspiration and societal valuation.
Among the works that comprise Lost/Found, perhaps none are more sobering than John Rivas’s paintings Guerrera (2023) and Viejo, lo logre (2023). Rivas’ practice in mixed media has long focused on the artist’s Salvadoran heritage, uniting conventional painting materials with childhood objects, found frames, photographic references, and items like fabric and dried beans. In his newest works, Rivas deals candidly and ineluctably with grief. Guerrera depicts a young militant clad in a black hoodie and sashes of glinting ammunition, while Viejo, lo logre shows a figure dressed in a cap and commencement robes, holding a framed photograph above a tombstone. The epitaph, rendered in acrylic and embroidered yarn, reads, “Edison R. Calva, 1968-2019.” Together, Rivas’s works encompass many of the most salient poles of feeling and human experience charted in the exhibition: the burdens of loss, and, at the same time, possibilities of introspection, growth, and liberation.
Kim Dacres (b. 1986; Bronx, NY) is a first-generation American sculptor of Jamaican descent, who sources tires and rubber from automobiles and bicycles to create sculptures inspired by people and ideas. The core of Dacres’s process involves collecting, wrapping, reassembling, and disassembling tires; eventually treating these materials with spray paint or enamel. Her sculptures are held together by screws and braiding techniques. In this process of material layering, the rubber is transformed into abstract shapes, evoking muscle, bone, skin, and hair. Fascinated by the complexities of varied personalities in her community, and the fragments of experience that tend to shape perception, Dacres is committed to an ongoing practice of representing everyday people of color — exploring the paradigm of entitlement to space, honorifics, and monuments.
Melissa Joseph (B. 1980; Saint Mary, PA) is a New York-based artist whose work addresses themes of memory, family history, and the politics of how we occupy spaces. She intentionally alludes to the labor of women, as well as her experiences as a first-generation American and the unique juxtapositions of diasporic life. She states, “My practice is an endless consideration of how POC and femme bodies are permitted to occupy space. I consider the work to be in conversation with painting, but they are made from textiles and other craft materials, situating them at the intersection of labor and gender. One thing that all my work shares is a sense of presence or ‘Thingness.’” Her work has been shown at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, the Delaware Contem-porary, Woodmere Art Museum, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, and featured in Artnet, Archi
tectural Digest,, ArtMaze, and Maake Magazine. She has participated in residencies at the DieuDonne Workspace Residency, Fountainhead Residency, The Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts and is currently at Museum of Art and Design residency.
Kayode Ojo (b. 1990; Cookeville, TN) is a New York-based artist who gathers readymade materials such as chandeliers, evening gowns, chains, faux crystal, sheet music stands, and acrylic beaded door curtains in his installations that reference fashion and consumer culture. The objects are often placed atop mirrored or chrome pedestals like those in luxury department store windows, with which they share the allure of aspiration. His usage of counterfeit materials that look like their authentic counterparts reflects society’s fixation on self-representation, class aspirations, and the anxieties inherent to aesthetic choices. In recent years, Ojo has had exhibitions at Martos Gallery in New York, Praz Delavallade in Los Angeles, and Balice Hertling in Paris.
John Rivas (b. 1997; Newark, NJ) is a figurative painter whose narrative is guided by stories of his ancestors. As a first-generation American, Rivas’s artwork is enriched with tales of several family members he’s met remotely or through photographs. Rivas’s paintings occupy space like sculpture juxtaposing found objects many of which are sourced from his childhood. His brush strokes, thick at times with impasto are expressive marks that add to the visual collage. The complexity of his work is made up of the true color spectrum of Latinx faces. Loaded with personal symbolism and themes that celebrate the Latinx concept of family and community, his work examines immigrant lives' socioeconomic, racial, and cultural boundaries. In his vivid multimedia portraits, Rivas crafts intricate odes to his Salvadoran family and community at large. The artist uses an array of materials including paint, felt, fabric, wood, corn, beans, and even the frames of his paintings in symbolic, narratively rich compositions. Rivas’s own cross-cultural experience infuses everything he makes; he has sourced his subjects from his mother’s photo albums and taken inspiration from family traditions. Rivas received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts before pursuing an MFA at Columbia University. He has exhibited in New York; Los Angeles; San Juan; and Newark.
Nate Lewis (b. Beaver Falls, PA; 1985) works between New York and Washington, D.C. Lewis’ current practice is focused within using paper and ink. Combining elements of drawing, photography, etching, and embroidery, his large-scale “paper sculptures” were conceived while the artist was working as a critical care nurse, Lewis treats paper like an organism, sculpting patterns and textures akin to anatomical structures and cellular tissue. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing from Virginia Commonwealth University and practiced critical-care nursing in DC-area hospitals for nine years. Lewis’ first artistic pursuit was playing the violin in 2008, followed by drawing in 2010. His work has been exhibited at the California African American Museum, New York’s 1:54 Art Fair, Spring Break Art Show, Expo Chicago, The Yale Center for British Art, 21C Museum Hotels, and the Studio Museum of Harlem. In 2019, he will show at The Yale Center for British Art, The Armory Art Fair, and The California African American Museum in Los Angeles. Past residencies include Pioneer Works and Dieu Donne. Lewis’ work is in the public collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Grinnell College Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Austin at Texas, and 21c Museum Hotels. He has lectured at Yale University as part of Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute, the Yale Center for British Art, and Paris Photo.

Archiebald Raphulu, (b. 1996, Johannesburg, South Africa) is a cultural agent and independent curator based in New York City. Raphulu is a graduate from the University of South Carolina at Upstate, and earned his BFA in Mass Communications. Having moved to the city mid-pandemic, Raphulu began his career in the contemporary art world with great ambition and a pursuit for knowledge, which continually informs much of his curatorial process. With beginnings at Ross + Kramer Gallery in Chelsea, New York, Raphulu now splits his focus between REGULARNORMAL and Francois Ghebaly at their New York locations. Raphulu has organized multiple exhibitions in New York City and advised for a variety of private collections and acquisitions.