NADA Miami 2025

Cheremoya’s presentation for NADA Miami 2025 draws its conceptual and atmospheric voltage from Anna Kavan’s 1967 novel Ice—a feminist landmark that deliquesces geopolitical, environmental, and narratological precarity into a single hallucinatory continuum. Ursula Bradley’s restive renderings of consumer space, Madeleine Ray Hines’s hyper-articulated commodity surfaces, and Kento Saisho’s numinous spatial architectures collectively delineate a terrain far closer to Kavan’s cold-war climatologies than to Miami’s entrenched tropes/tropics of heterotopic escape.

‍Ursula Bradley (b. 1997, Auckland; lives and works in London) presents two oil paintings that read as afterimages of surveillance and state enclosure. Her icy palette and tight forecropping recall the urban nocturnes of Utrillo as if refracted through Archigram’s retro-futurist dystopias. Bradley’s newest paintings operate through a dialectic of exposure and occlusion, effecting an incisive meditation on how contemporary urban space interpellates forms of control. In these newest works, the artist foregrounds sites wherein the distributive asymmetries of capital confluate, distilling Kavan’s phenomenology of dissociation whose protagonists appear stranded at the edge of a consumerist tundra.

‍Madeleine Ray Hines (b. 1988, Chicago; lives and works in New York) scales a single hyper-detailed image across the booth’s central wall: the magnified tread of a pair of high heels sourced from a luxury resale platform. Merging acute observational rigor with an indexical and quasi-expressionist gesturalism, the icy precision of Hines’ painting coalesces a meditation on shifting economies of touch; resale markets and the aesthetics of wear; art and fetish; the glassy surfaces of the screen, the vitrine, and the human intimacies they displace—a chilling imprint and corollary to the pursuit of desire in Kavan’s advisory narrativity.

‍Kento Saisho (b. 1993, Salinas; lives and works in Los Angeles) anchors the booth with two steel sculptures sited on a low plinth. Connoting bells, crucibles, and post-Minimalist anti-form, Saisho’s welded configurations—agglutinating bearings, flanged protrusions, and torqued armatures—extend the procedural logics of Eva Hesse while resonating with the ontological inquiries of Nobuo Sekine and Lee Ufan. His position within a Chinese-Japanese-American diasporic formation subtly recalibrates these references: the works’ hybrid materiality and ritual inflections echo lineages of craft, metallurgy, and devotional objecthood that traverse East Asian and American industrial histories alike. The ensuing forms suggest a Kavanian architecture of suspended ritual, recalling Matta-Clark’s incised voids as well as scorched dark age reliquaries.