MOUTHFUL
A Group Exhibition
Curated by Blanche Brown
Friday, May 1, 2026 - Sunday, June 14, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, May 1, 2026
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
MOUTHFUL brings together artists working with, around, through, against, beneath, within, alongside language. Featuring over 15 artists engaging a diverse set of techniques and media, the exhibition situates key archival pieces, such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Mouth to Mouth (1975) and Janet Zweig’s Thinking Contest (1995), beside new and contemporary works. Expect flags, impossible shots, concrete slabs, worksheets, disco on repeat, and many holes.
MOUTHFUL unearths echoes, rhymes, and dissonances across the past 50 years of cultural production. How and why do artists continue to turn to language as material? How and why do writers continue to turn towards visual practices to investigate language? What sound does meaning make? What shapes do our mouths take? Curated by Vox Populi’s director, Blanche Brown, MOUTHFUL picks up these familiar questions and shakes them out: see what falls though May 1- June 14th 2026
Featuring: Robert Carey, Theresa Hak Yang Cha, China Rain Chung, Logan Cryer, Catia Colagioia, Jordan Deal, Lucia Garzon, Mona Gazala, Rachel Hsu, Tan Lin, M Slater, Lea Devon Sorrentino, Eva Wu, Connie Yu, Janet Zweig
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Robert David Carey is a writer, teacher, and organizer currently based in Philadelphia, though he has lived many places and worked many jobs.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: From the mid-1970s until her death at age 31 in 1982, Korean-born artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha created a rich body of conceptual art that explored displacement and loss. Informed by French psychoanalytic film theory, her video works use performance and text to explore interactions of language, meaning and memory. Cha's posthumously published book Dictée is an influential investigation of identity in the context of history, ethnicity and gender. Her work has been shown at Artists Space, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Bronx Museum of Art, New York, among many other venues. Earlier this year, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) hosted Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings, the first retrospective in twenty-five years dedicated to the groundbreaking work of the artist. Mouth to Mouth (1975) is on view Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. (Collection of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation. © Regents of the University of California).
China Rain Chung is a writer and multidisciplinary artist studying reality building.
Logan Cryer is an artist, writer and administrator with a penchant for local art histories. They are an alum of Moore College of Art & Design, where they acquired a BFA in Fine Arts and minored in Curatorial Studies. Logan attended Headlong Performance Institute and has orbited experimental performance spaces ever since. Logan is the Co-Curator of Icebox Project Space and a member of Vox Populi Gallery. They are the creator of Orange Crate Magazine, a quarterly music publication. They like to rewatch documentaries.
catia colagioia is an artist, researcher, and musician born, raised, and based in South Philadelphia, with a BA in Fine Art from the University of Pennsylvania. She has shown work across Philadelphia in venues such as Vox Populi Gallery, Pentimenti Gallery, Icebox Project Space, AUTOMAT, and more. She has also been recognized for her post-disciplinary, public-facing, community-oriented work. She is currently an artist member of Vox Populi Gallery & Da Vinci Art Alliance. colagioia’s process is rooted in her traversal of Philadelphia, in her collection and resurrection of found objects and memories, often likening organic forms in the cityscape to our bodies: both held tenuously, and subject to the encircling pressures of modern systems. She applies care, repair, and automatism as methodologies, instinctually relating and tending closely to the desires of the objects she uses.
Jordan Deal (they/them) works in the intersections of performance, sound, installation, film, and text where the body becomes both instrument, interruption, and subterranean conduit. Channeling what they call chaos force—a method of embodied subversion—Deal unravels the mythologies, socio-political systems, and anomalies that choreograph public and private life. Through their use of speculative philosophy, punk tonalities, myth, and process-based research, they have developed an approach that bleeds into avant-theatrical public interventions and sonic compositions. Their shapeshifting forms are intended to experiment with embodied black queer futurity–rendering the space between fugitivity, subterranean landscapes, worldbuilding, resistance, and a love poetic. Their work has been presented internationally at prominent venues such as Cafe OTO (London), Radialsystem (Berlin, CTM Festival), Judson Memorial Church (NYC), Center for Performance Research (NYC), and Vox Populi (PHL). As a 2024 MAP Fund grantee, 2023–24 Artistic Fellow at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and a 2022 research fellow at the Amant Foundation, Deal continues to experiment with black queer futurity, worldbuilding, and the unruly poetics of love & slickness.
Lucia Garzón is a Philadelphia based interdisciplinary artist working in a range of media including wood, textiles, installation, and video. Lucia graduated from Tyler School of Art in 2018 with a BFA in printmaking. Lucia has been an apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, attended Acre Residency, winner of the WIND Challenge in 2025, and will be an Artist in Residence at GoggleWorks in summer 2026.
Mona Gazala (she/her) is a Palestinian-American artist, writer, and filmmaker living in west central Ohio. She holds a master’s degree from the Ohio State University in studio arts with a specialization in city/regional planning. Her multi-disciplinary practice explores and exposes dynamics of power and systems of oppression that often manifest in the built environment. This includes what is visible as well as what has been erased in structures, neighborhoods and geographies.Gazala is the recipient of numerous grants from the Ohio Arts Council, Greater Columbus Arts Council, Franklinton Arts District, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Ohio Alliance for Arts Education, Decapital, and the Hishmeh Foundation, to undertake creative work centered on community-building, social justice, and activism.
Rachel Hsu is an interdisciplinary artist who works with visual art, language, and poetry. Inspired by absence, relational ruptures, and slippages in translation, she engages the yearning that emerges from distance and displacement to make mental exertion and emotional endurance felt within one’s body. Her work has been exhibited nationally including Philadelphia and New York, and her writing has been published in literary magazines including Honey Literary. Her public sculpture, “The Weight of Our Living,” was commissioned by the Association for Public Art and the Parkway Council as the inaugural artwork for the annual arts initiative, Art on the Parkway in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture and a BFA sculpture from Western Washington University. Originally from Seattle, WA, she is currently based in Philadelphia, PA.
Tan Lin is the author of over 13 books, including Heath Course Pak (2012), Bib. Rev. Ed., Insomnia and the Aunt (2011), 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (2010), Plagiarism/Outsource (2009), Ambience is a Novel with a Logo (2007), BlipSoak01 (2003), and Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe (2000). His work has appeared in numerous journals including Conjunctions, Artforum, Criticism, boundary2, Cabinet, the New York Times Book Review, Art in America, and Purple. His video, theatrical, and LCD work have been shown at Artists Space, the Marianne Boesky Gallery, the Yale Art Museum, Sophienholm Museum (Copenhagen), Ontological Hysterical Theatre, as part of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Soundcheck Series, and as a solo show at Treize Gallery in Paris. Lin is the recipient of a 2012 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Poetry, a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant for 2004-2005 and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant to complete a book-length study of the writings of Andy Warhol. 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking received the Association for American Studies Award for Poetry/Literature in 2010. Lin earned a PhD from Columbia University. He has taught at the University of Virginia and Cal Arts, and he currently teaches creative writing at New Jersey City University.
M Slater is a visual artist who uses sculpture, photography, and writing as means of navigating and creating portals into the murky interior of sentences and objects. Their work grows from multi-disciplinary research in architecture, language philosophy, and trans studies to wrestle with the socio-temporal dimensions of language — how we co-construct meaning over time, and move through the words that shape us. Alongside (and in communication with) their practice, M is a graphic designer and sign painter.
Lea Devon Sorrentino is a Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary artist working across performance, video, and installation. Her practice explores the contradictions of American success, ambition, and self-construction through humor and character-driven storytelling. She has presented work nationally and internationally, was named one of the Walker Art Center’s “Artists to Watch,” and has been nominated for the Pew Arts Fellowship. She holds degrees from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Eva Wu is an interdisciplinary artist working across new media, installation, and social practice. Born and raised in Northern New Mexico, Eva has lived in Philadelphia since 2010. An avid dreamer, Eva’s work conjures portals to utopias rich with seduction, delight and color. Her dreamscapes are informed by a lived experience of violence which, refracted through a prismatic optimism, is transmuted: darkness into light, oppression into liberation. Her work invites audiences to experience the tactility of desire and potentiality of freedom, whether in an opulent mirrored peep show booth or in a virtual interactive booby ball pit. Working within the long tradition of Women of Color feminists and queer transgressive artists who understand bodies as battlegrounds of state interference, Eva explores limitations of self-determination and its aesthetic, cultural, and historical implications. Her work disrupts traditions in form and content, blurs the boundaries between public and private, and generates bold remedies to uproot shame. Eva’s honors include fellowships and awards from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Independence Public Media Foundation, Leeway Foundation, Velocity Grants, Center For Emerging Visual Artists, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and Elsewhere Museum. Her work has been exhibited with solo shows at Wilma Theater (2024), Practice Gallery (2022) and 40th AIR Space (2017), in galleries throughout the United States, including Portland Institute of Contemporary Art and SOMArts, and screened throughout Europe and the Americas.
Connie Yu is a writer and artist based in Philadelphia. Their practice takes place in poetry and printmaking, cooking and strength training, and takes shape from the administrative aspects of these data — asking the limits and series of work and its measure, measure and its work. A 2025 recipient of the Leeway Transformation Award, they have shown in group exhibitions at ArtYard, William Way LGBT Community Center, Asian Arts Initiative, TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, AUTOMAT, and Vox Populi. Read their writing in the chapbook modest technologies, 1 thru 3 (Neighboring Systems, 2019), and in the online directory Conflicts of Interest (conflictsofinterest.co). Connie curates, edits, and publishes work by/for queer and trans Asian artists with their print collective FORTUNE, which they co-founded in 2019 and currently direct; and operates its small-scale risograph imprint Many Folds Press.connieyu.one
Janet Zweig is an artist who lives in Brooklyn, NY, working primarily in the public realm.Recent commissions include a departure gate to fictional locations at the Austin Airport, a piece for West Sacramento that orients the viewer to the tidal river, and a mechanical piece that tracks climate change at a library in San Diego. Earlier public works include a sentence-generating sculpture for an engineering school in Orlando, a growing sentence on a wall in downtown Columbus written by residents, a sentence-generating work in Santa Fe, NM, and a 1200 foot frieze in the Prince Street subway station in NY.Her gallery sculptures from the 1990s generate language. Mechanical parts are driven by computers and printers, combining the analog with the digital. Some of her later public works continue this generative series. Her editioned artist’s books from the 1980s prefigure her continued work with visual language and sequence. Zweig’s sculptures and books have been exhibited widely in such places as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Exit Art, PS1 Museum, the Walker Art Center, and Cooper Union. Awards include the Rome Prize Fellowship, NEA fellowships, and residencies at PS1 Museum and the MacDowell Colony. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Blanche Brown grew up in the Florida panhandle. Since 2017, she has lived, worked, and collaborated with arts and community-based organizations in Philadelphia. She’s currently proud to serve as the Executive Director of Vox Populi, a multidisciplinary visual art gallery, performance venue, and artist collective. She has two chapbooks in the world: one about oysters and one about email.
