New York, NY — Powder, on view from June 12 through August 1, 2026 at Slip House gallery in the East Village, transforms the gallery's three-floor 19th-century carriage house into an environment where contemporary artworks, beauty culture, archival materials, scent, and retail display coexist, examining how aesthetics circulate through contemporary life.

Rather than treating beauty as an industry or aesthetic category, Powder approaches it as a cultural system through which images, objects, and identities acquire meaning and value. The exhibition considers how surfaces are constructed, preserved, reproduced, and desired, collapsing distinctions between artwork and artifact, commodity and keepsake, archive and aspiration.

Across media, the works on view take up these ideas through distinct aesthetic forms of image-making. Machine-generated imagery blurs distinctions between the biological and synthetic through shimmering algorithmic forms (Yi); staged personas, appropriated imagery, and digitally mediated identities expose beauty as a system of projection, fantasy, and self-construction (Sherman, Yukiko); while paintings examine how adornment and the body become sites of intimacy, fantasy, and psychological projection (Weyant, Whitehead). Elsewhere, historical forms are recast through translucent resin and synthetic skins, exploring how memory survives through copies, interfaces, and acts of translation (Sun), while found garments, printed textiles, and industrial materials are transformed into sculptural forms that recall storefront awnings and the visual language of retail display, revealing the overlooked aesthetics of everyday commerce (Carideo). Atria's None the Wiser reflects on corporeality within contemporary industrial manufacturing, using machinery grease to extrude the form of an automotive component into a new flesh-like body that suggests the latent vitality embedded within mechanical labor.

Presented alongside the artworks are contemporary beauty brands, rare vintage cosmetics, international pharmacy goods, archival materials, and an original scent commission. Rather than functioning as exhibition ephemera, these objects extend the exhibition's inquiry into aesthetics as material culture, foregrounding the systems of display, ritual, and consumption through which ordinary objects become sites of attachment.

For all press and preview inquiries, please contact info@slip-house.com.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the participating artists for their generosity and collaboration; the participating brands Anna Sui, AUNU, ecdysis, Fara Homidi, Kindred Black, Kraum, OEM, and Vintner’s Daughter; our collaborators and consignors 47 Canal, Gia Kuan, Cell, Chiaki Nomura, Chadha Ranch, Tela, Nicole Ziegler, and IFF; John Durovsik, Blake Hill, David Cañedo Rivas, Françoise Tyree, Thea Yuxin Lin, Yanming Xiao, and Yen Ho for their support and generosity.