Rachael Catharine Anderson / Annabel Daou / Selena Kimball

flicker / reform / dissolve

June 6 – July 11, 2025

Ulterior Gallery and signs and symbols are pleased to present flicker / reform / dissolve, a group exhibition bringing together works by Annabel Daou, Selena Kimball, and Rachael Catharine Anderson. Opening on June 6, 2025, at Ulterior Gallery at 424 Broadway, #601 in New York. The opening reception will take place on Friday, June 6, from 6 to 8pm.

Spanning cut paper, painting, and collage, the exhibition brings together three artists whose practices engage the language of fracture—whether political, material, or perceptual—and examine what persists in the aftermath.

Annabel Daou's intricate works probe the tensions between permanence and impermanence, belonging and dislocation. Produced through a labor-intensive process of cutting away negative spaces, words and images appear caught in delicate nets of microfiber paper, held momentarily, like fragments of thought or memory suspended in air. For Daou, the act of cutting is both a gesture of revelation and concealment, uncovering what lies beneath while simultaneously withholding it. The recurring motif of thistles, which are native to her homeland of Lebanon, have appeared in her work over the years during times of personal difficulty or collective struggle.  Here, their spiky needles pierce through the hand-cut lattices, evoking resilience and vulnerability. Through it all, language quietly asserts itself, puncturing the surface to declare: this side of history.

Selena Kimball’s archival collages disrupt fixed narratives by recombining historical debris into speculative, open-ended tableaux. While Daou’s practice reflects temporal fragility, Kimball’s ongoing series Atlas of Air (2020–present) explores what can be lost in the ever-shifting rhythm of daily life. The works are composed of skies clipped from the front pages of The New York Times—images stripped of headlines, captions, or any trace of the catastrophic events unfolding beneath them. Published daily, these emotionally charged photographs have fleeting lifespans, quickly submerged by the tide of news cycles. Yet the sky endures—a neutral, connective space linking event and viewer, reality and perception. By excising these skies from their original contexts and extending their temporal resonance, Kimball invites us to consider what is preserved, what is forgotten, and how meaning is shaped in what we see every day.

In contrast with the lengthy and long-drawn-out reflective processes of Daou and Kimball, Rachael Catharine Anderson's paintings trace the geometry of forms as she paints her subjects in situ.  Each canvas is both a record and a spatial meditation made with perception, memory, and time. For this exhibition, the artist created three new paintings — a selection of plein air studies of narcotic, psychoactive, and poisonous plants as well as nude studies informed by emotional affects of jouissance, hysteria, and melancholy in reaction to environmental stimuli.

The dialogue created between the three artists explores the intimate and political architectures of memory, language, and form. Though distinct in practice, each artist shares an interest in fragmentation—of narrative, material, and experience—and in reassembling what has been dismembered or obscured. Together, Daou, Kimball, and Anderson create a conversation around what endures and how? Where do we find coherence—in form, in memory, in trace—inviting viewers to consider how we shape and are shaped by the stories we inherit and the structures we build. These artists offer no fixed answers, but instead open a space where meaning might flicker, reform, or dissolve.

Rachael Catharine Anderson is a 2022 MFA graduate from the Painting and Printmaking program in the Yale School of Art. She makes thematic oil paintings that relate emotional affect to environmental stimuli. Made intuitively and by direct observation of things in space, the paintings blur distinctions between thinking and feeling. Anderson’s care-full approach revels in enchantment and nuance, uncertainty, wonder, and worldly fascination. In the fall of 2023, Anderson had her first solo exhibition at signs and symbols, followed by part two of this exhibition in the spring of 2024. Her work has been shown in Italy, Canada, and the United States, including at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York. Her paintings are included in major private collections in the US and Europe. She currently lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2024, signs and symbols published the artist's first monograph featuring essays by Barry Schwabsky and Dr. Kathy Battista.

Annabel Daou's work takes form in paper-based constructions, sound, performance, and video. Daou suspends, carves out, or records the language of daily life: from the ordinary or mundane to the intimately personal and urgently political. In her performance work she explores questions of trust, intimacy, cross-cultural exchange, and the operations of power. Her work frequently evokes moments of rupture and chaos but with the tenuous possibility for repair. Daou was born and raised in Beirut and lives in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include War Games at Galerie Tanja Wagner, DECLARATION at Ulrich Museum of Art, and Global Spotlight: Annabel Daou at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington. Recent residencies include the Pollock-Krasner award at ISCP in New York and Haus Des Papiers in Berlin. A monograph of her work was published by Distanz Publishing Berlin in 2025.

Selena Kimball is a visual artist whose work transforms historical materials—books, newspapers, photographic archives—into deeply personal reconfigurations that question the authority of these materials to define our knowledge of landscape, territory, and place. Kimball is driven by an intimate understanding of how mediated representation often fails to capture lived reality. Her process deliberately disrupts the established visual record, honoring instead the body's complex and often unshareable way of knowing and remembering. Recent exhibitions include the Katonah Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, and the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Bucharest. Her most recent solo exhibition at Ulterior Gallery was captured in BOMB Magazine by Anton Ginzberg. Kimball has been awarded numerous grants, and this year, she has been named a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and 2025 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives Research Fellow. Kimball splits her time between Maine, where she was born and raised, and Brooklyn, New York where she lives and works.