If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden’s dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ross Gay
David Castillo announced Jillian Mayer: Placeholder Future, Adler Guerrier: Small Oscillations Among Everyday Forms. September 3 – October 1, 2026.
David Castillo presents Adler Guerrier: Small Oscillations Among Everyday Forms, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
A weedy bundle of leaves and burrs emerges from the shadows, picked out by sunlight in stark chiaroscuro—the name of Guerrier’s photograph “Untitled (What must be valued–spaces where … thought, sunshine, flowers, intangibles, necessities, time, freedom … are held.) ii”, 2026, reveals the magnitude of the small, the seemingly inconsequential, the objects on the periphery. Guerrier is a flâneur, observing on long walks through Miami the edges of the landscape, particularly domestic spaces: backyards, front yards, wild plants growing atop stucco and spiritual offerings left at the foot of a tree. “At this scale of observation, one can parse the many hierarchies from the flow of social life, that may allow reflection and evaluation of these abstractions that form and shape the possibility of living meaningfully,” Guerrier writes, the abstractions being the stuff of life, which demand we make meaning of them: the structures imposed upon us, the languages we speak, the spaces we construct and then lovingly tend to.
For Small Oscillations Among Everyday Forms, photographs of flora (including the aforementioned “Untitled”), both made in Miami backyards, are transformed into paper collages dotted with rectangular swatches in grey, white, black, and an earthy olive. Guerrier’s collages are often like palimpsests or diagrams, containing a photograph flanked by spheres and patches of color drawn from the original image. Here, the wildflowers are also transferred onto paper, rendered in graphite, acrylic, and gouache, sunset-pink and green, their colors renewed. Flowers made into photos, made into paintings, repeated, repeated again: these are the small oscillations of the exhibition’s title. Guerrier turns the world’s edges into its center, refocusing the eye toward the periphery; the significance of the everyday is newly profound. A small flower tells the story of the home it grows alongside, its neighborhood, the community’s demographics, the soil that holds its root. It reveals the people who’ve stepped on it, noticed it, loved it.
Adler Guerrier is a Haitian-born artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores place, identity, urban space, politics, and the poetics of everyday geography. Working across photography, drawing, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and installation, Guerrier examines the social and psychological dimensions of landscape through assemblage, walking, recurring forms, and the recomposition of text and image. His work often engages diaspora, migration, architecture, and the built environment, using photographs, prints, sculptural interventions, and collaged works on paper to consider how race, class, and culture are embedded in cities and in the ways people move through them. Miami is a central site in his practice, functioning both as a lived geography and as a broader framework for thinking about belonging, urban change, and memory. His work has been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Pérez Art Museum Miami; the California African American Museum; the Whitney Biennial, and David Castillo, among other venues. His work is held in collections including Pérez Art Museum Miami, ICA Miami, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Walker Art Center
Nersessian on Ode to Psyche:
“It suggests that the only kind of world in which real love is possible is a world in which people are liberated by their own fragility, where they can approach the condition of trees, flowers, stars, and sounds and abandon the lamentable fantasy of leaving their mark on the world or each other.”
Exhibition Statement
Modern society suffers from a temporal crisis, not a shortage of time, but a slip in our hold of its fragrance, texture, and meaning. Today’s accelerated, atomized time, structured by productivity, efficiency, and constant stimulation has deemphasized temporal duration and depth. Yet the essence of the human condition lies in the slowness of the mundane, the everyday, the gradual changes, and in being almost there. Our lives consist of experiencing a series of “on the ways,” and impending anticipated arrivals. Prim and mottled forms arranged to this end, a solo exhibition of new works on paper by Adler Guerrier, contemplates textures, spatial structures, and temporalities within the notion of “pending.” The word derives from the French preposition pendant (“during”), tracing back to the Latin pendere, meaning “to hang” or “to suspend.”
Pending, for Guerrier, is a mode of being with its own interiority, its own spatial and temporal elasticity, articulated as a survival strategy of the not-yet nor fully liberated, deployed for its generative and freeing potentiality. Through drawing, photography, collage, and mixed media, Guerrier explores how this temporality, as it emerged within compositions and arrangements, might offer a kind of spatial strata, one where everyday survival is posited as life long goal and the easy reach for forms of goodness.
Art discourse readily addresses beauty, sublimity, truth, and the uncanny. Goodness, by contrast, has seemed too earnest, too unguarded, too simple to sustain critical attention. In this body of work, Guerrier challenges this, proposing that goodness is the very end for pending, weathering, and moving through the affirming conditions under which survival becomes livable. He distinguishes two registers. The first is expansive: goodness as totality, utopian, or paradise. The second is quotidian: as in the well-wishing of a good morning, or the mood enhancing of a shared joke, the settled calm contentment of simply being. The latter is threaded into the complexities of life, prompting us to wonder how we each inhabit and move through this temporal space.
In Untitled (This here moment propels and guides) and Untitled (California poppies, Los Angeles) i, Guerrier explores the spatial and temporal dimensions of being and pending through the subject of wildflowers. Wildflowers operate in a spatial asideness from structured and urban modernity, following their own botanical life cycles and abundant colorful forms of goodness, thriving amongst piles of trash, exhaust fumes, harsh concrete, and reduced biodiversity. Guerrier’s formal choreography of drawing, collage, and painting, as seen in Untitled (Field Guide–exposure to enchanted forms) xvii and Untitled (A will to adorn; détourné) i, intentionally calls attention to the forms’ substructures, varied mark-making, and materiality. The exposed underlayers of paper, edge lines, and splashes of paint reveal the works’ coming into being, creating and sustaining the conditions for durational observation. This emphasis on materiality underscores the works’ medium-ness. In doing so, it counters the contemporary prioritization of immediacy (without anything in between), and ultimately reasserts art’s place and power as both medium and mediation.
Prim and mottled forms arranged to this end endeavors to restore the scent and depth of time. The exhibition reminds us that human beings are often shaped less by the act of arriving than by the particular way they inhabit the interval before arrival, forged in how they travel between the ground that holds and the horizon that keeps, always, its patient distance.
re.riddle
Mehdi-Georges Lahlou
De la Conférence des Palmiers, totem dattier (From the Palm Conference: Date Palm Totem), 2024 Earthenware, stoneware, ink, wool, metal
Untitled (Maynada Mangoes), 2017
Graphite, acrylic, gesso, enamel paint, ink and xerography on paper.
“… In their extension, Adler Guerrier’s photographs, capturing the vegetation of Miami’s urban gardens, shift this idea of community toward an expanded temporality: enhanced with painted color forms named after other geographies (Gris Bamako, Rose Passada), they suggest discreet presences, like traces of souls or markers of community. In the heart of the city, the garden becomes a site of projection and patience—a space where something is cultivated beyond the human scale, a promise of continuity, perhaps a dream of Eden, in any case a form of transcendence.
Through these practices, Soul Frequencies sketches a sensitive cartography in which music acts as a principle of circulation and persists as vibration. From one gesture to another, from one image to the next, a shared space emerges where everyday life—sometimes tested—quietly opens onto elsewhere. Perhaps this is where the strength of this gathering of artists lies: in its ability to bring forth, at the very heart of the real, forms of displacement—escapes, breaths—where art, like music, reveals what is common to us and opens up the possibility of making community.”
In the novel I’m reading, a cowboy
dies, dies, of snakes in a river.
He was really a boy, a child
who cried and sang Irish lullabies.
Look at a River, Elisa, Elisa Gabbert
Bakehouse at Forty: Past, Present, Future, November 8, 2025 – April 17, 2026.
Present offers a dynamic glimpse of the creative life of Bakehouse today, foregrounding the multiplicity of voices and modes of expression by which artists both reflect and reimagine the world around us. Against the backdrop of great precarity for cultural producers everywhere, Bakehouse artists have forged their own systems of support– not only through shared resources, but through daily acts of showing up for one another. Across this space, ideas flow beyond studio walls, conversations spill into hallways, and countless gestures of kinship and collaboration become integral to the artists’ practice. Representing a microcosm within a broader cultural ecosystem, these fusions– whether intentional, intuitive, or incidental– embody the transformative possibilities of collective care and community building.
Featuring work by 28 current resident and associate artists, Present reflects the breadth of perspectives, disciplines, and identities that define Bakehouse and, by extension, Miami’s cultural landscape. Rather than advancing a singular theme, the exhibition traces various shared touchpoints, highlighting a strong sense of place rooted in the specificity of South Florida; generational connections and divergences; and an emphasis on the here and now that resonates as both timely and timeless.
