Repeat

Tony Bluestone

Earthen Clay

Haleigh Collins

RJ Messineo

Curated by Nadir Souirgi

1. Space Petrel presents its second show, Repeat, curated by Nadir Souirgi and presenting work by Tony Bluestone, Earthen Clay, Haleigh Collins, and RJ Messineo. Repeat lasts three weeks, from October 25 through November 8.

2. Between 223 E. 25th St.’s historical use as a firehouse and a religious gathering place, it was rented as a photography studio. When the property changed ownership, the brass poles of the firehouse were noted as missing, but the holes remained between each of the three floors. The tables and chairs served a theatre group, opera company, and Yo La Tengo. Repeat builds on this moment of indexicality between functions. Each work serves as an entrance to the next.

3. In Tony Bluestone’s work, the image is pared down, covered, and masked, expressing a being beneath a surface. These smaller canvases are then nested within larger fields—expansive surfaces that hold and contextualize the image, allowing it to take on new meanings and circulate more broadly. Across the work, images recur from canvas to canvas, whether through direct pictorial repetition or echoed shapes that mirror a central form. Repetition, however, is not endless—it halts at the edges of the frame. Repeat to echo.

4. Clay’s work folds, unfolds, and carves out its own pathways. Built around a set of prescribed armatures that dictate form—but only to a point—his process balances structure with improvisation. Through ritualistic repetition and a reverence for what precedes each gesture, he accumulates layers of expression, gesture by gesture. The result is a crescendo—a kind of visual choir—where excess, or a deliberate too-muchness, erupts across the surface.

5. Haleigh Collins' marks frame a face. Glasses cascade and are poured into. Repeat to accumulate meaning.

6. Messineo builds through gesture, allowing expressive marks to become conduits of energy rather than static symbols or stand-ins for fixed meaning. There is a deliberate avoidance of over-articulation—as if naming or defining too precisely would foreclose the work’s potential. Messineo seems acutely aware of the limits of formal accumulation, working instead to shake forms loose, allowing them to transform, alchemize, and open up new relationships and ways of understanding.

7. Repetition rhymes, proposing a new function with the same structure. This is a mode of speaking.