surplus
Vox Populi New Member Show 2025
Friday, September 5, 2025 – Sunday, October 12, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, September 5, 2025 | 6-10pm | Free-To-Attend
Closing Reception: Friday, Octber 3, 2025 | 6-9pm | Free-To-Attend
Presented in Galleries 2 and 3
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
“surplus” welcomes the eight newest members of Vox Populi: catia colagioia, China Rain, Ella Konefal, Eva Wu, Kat Nzingha, Liam Paris, Logan Cryer and Ollie Goss. The octet creates art with accumulated materials, whether they be paperwork, dreams, memories, fears or junk. The resulting hoards are presented with impending empathy. Viewers are asked to consider what is the stuff that we are really made of and what can be done with all the rest.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
catia colagioia
catia colagioia is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and researcher from South Philadelphia with a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in fine art. She has been recognized locally for her interdisciplinary and community-oriented work. catia's process is rooted in her traversal of Philadelphia, in her collection and resurrection of found objects, in the investigation of the objects' memories, and in the systems that deemed those objects obsolete, useless, trash.
There is a shifty logic applied to the objects she uses through her attempts to construct something physically unfamiliar yet already existent within her psyche. While her work possesses an uncanny, angelic quality, it also embodies the systems she references, and their by-products, their shoddy barriers, and their hypocriticalities. She applies care and repair as methodologies, tending closely to the desires of the objects she uses. There is a desire to carry the objects past their status as waste, and into a new territory, where they may allow their properties and histories to communicate in service of something larger.
China Rain
China Rain is a writer and multidisciplinary artist trying to synthesize a map of unreality and reality. Pulling from psychology textbooks, gameshow rhetoric, grief ritual, and rush hour traffic, their work explores grief, alienation, and humor.
Ella Konefal
Ella Konefal (she/her) is an artist across forms whose work engages death and collectivism. She lives and loves in Philadelphia. Lately you can find her tangled up with the Community Boathouse at Bartram’s Garden, People’s Music Supply, thinkingDance, Studio 34 Arts, PhillyCAM, and Abolition School. Ella graduated with honors in Fine Arts, Comparative Literature, and History from the University of Pennsylvania; she’s been learning as much as she can ever since.
Eva Wu
Eva Wu is an interdisciplinary artist working across animation, installation, social practice, and new media. An optimistic visionary and an avid dreamer, Eva’s work conjures portals to utopias rich with seduction, delight, and color. Her work disrupts traditions in form and content, blurs the boundaries between public and private, and generates bold remedies of what could be. Eva is from Northern New Mexico and has lived in Philadelphia for over a decade. She has been awarded fellowships from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, Leeway Foundation, Elsewhere Museum, and Center For Emerging Visual Artists. Eva is co-founder of Hot Bits Film Fest, with whom she collaborates to produce sex-positive art and film experiences centering QTIBIPoC self determined desire, joy, and pleasure.
Kat Nzingha
Kat Nzingha is the brainchild of Philadelphia-based experimentalist Kator Moore. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Kat Nzingha is a multidisciplinary artist exploring abstruse textures through sound, performance, technology, and sculpture. Their work references the experience of the transitioning body, showing the importance of reformation and becoming. Bridging physical and digital realms, their cryptic sounds extend from sculptural objects. Using constituent forms, industrial materials, and digital hardware, Kat Nzingha expresses the trans experience as a feeling of change. Their work sparks discussions that raise new and urgent questions about change, identity, and the body.
After releasing an EP, Angeltribe on London label TT in 2020, and Vorphic Skin on Toothgrinder Press in 2023, Kat Nzingha released the album Grind on AngeltribeXTL. Shortly after, they released RIM under the artist name BRYYA on the label formfourm, which features heavy, focused sound design techniques. Kat Nzingha has performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Philadelphia and was selected for Cathode Ray Tapestries: Sound Museum Video Synthesis Residency in 2023.
Liam Paris
Liam Paris is the Prettiest comic in Philadelphia, a title bestowed on him by himself. Jersey native and Philadelphia transplant, He’s been here since 2018 writing, directing, producing, and performing in a variety of comedy pieces. Humor allows him to explore existential questions and deeply felt emotions—particularly grief—by creating a space where audiences can engage with weighty topics in a way that is participatory rather than didactic.
He Currently Hosts “Long Shot” a monthly experimental comedy showcase with Lea Devon Sorrentino.
Logan Cryer
Logan Cryer is a curator, writer and mysterious friend 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. They are the Co-curator of Icebox Project Space and the creator of Orange Crate Magazine, a quarterly music publication. In addition to art and culture work, Logan works as a tax preparer with the group, Philly Tax Prep for artists, who provides accessible tax prep and consultations to artists and independent contractors. They like to rewatch documentaries.
Ollie Goss
Ollie Goss is an artist, puppeteer, and performance-maker whose work blends sculptural installations, animated objects, re-tooled electronics and live performance. They attempt to achieve this through a prefigurative politic, hoping to align the means and the ends within their work. In 2016, they received the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship which took them to seven countries to research puppetry and collaborative performance making. Their work has been shown in places like Icebox Project Space, Temple Contemporary, the Wassaic Project, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Dixon Place and La Mama. They regularly hold performance events throughout Philadelphia and in collaboration with Hannah Tardie annually curate work for the exhibition portion of Electronics Faire.
Ollie holds an MFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and Architecture where they currently teach.
