Zhi Wei Hiu, Bradley Marshall, Hanna Umin

Zhi Wei Hiu

Bradley Marshall

Montana Simone

Hanna Umin

You jump in the pool and it’s too deep. Your swim coach lets you loose to thrash around for a minute before taking you back in their arms. Swimming doesn’t come naturally. At first, one learns to kick just below the surface to build thrust. Then come the arms, and the particular contortions required to develop speed or lift. Finally, one learns to breathe in sequence, pacing their intake to complement their stroke. These disparate parts connect in one fluid moment when the swimmer feels the water channel perfectly from fingertips to toes and attempts to copy that flow in perpetuity.

The theme of “Swim Lessons” is drawn from a passage of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. In visual art, as in swimming, learning occurs through repeated encounters, until the unknown becomes familiar—understanding cannot be gleaned from the imitation of a model. Similar to the first time one mounts a paddleboard in a lap pool, it is only through a repeated reckoning with the water that one really learns how to carry oneself and swim. We do not learn through the instruction of the teacher, but through an encounter with the waves.

Zhi Wei Hiu, Bradley Marshall, Montana Simone, and Hanna Umin approach their artistic influences as apprentices, channeling each lesson learned into sculptures and installations. In creating this new work, they build active relationships with the rhythms, tensions, and resistances of materials and concepts engaged. By repeating movements and observations in extended loops, they delve deeply into the internal logic of each medium, finding and bending their limits through returning confrontations.

To follow Deleuze’s example, the artists decline the simplistic mandate to “do as I say,” traditionally offered in basic instruction. Instead, they embrace the ethos of “do with me,” repeatedly courting the difference of the object they first picked up from the new, unique form they reiterate upon. This process invites chance, unfamiliarity, and promise into their pieces, diving into encounters like a student jumping into a pool before a lesson.

—Theo Belci and Dasha Aksenova

Zhi Wei Hiu is an artist based in New York. She treats analog photography as a vocabulary of events, techniques, chemical processes and industrially produced materials, dissecting and reconstituting its elements into a sculptural dialect. Her sculptures mirror the entanglement of language, image, gesture, object and place in the constitution of memory.

Bradley Marshall lives and works in Queens, NY. He received his MFA from East Tennessee State University in 2018 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. His work has been supported by The Working Artist Fund and Makerspace NYC.

Hanna Umin, an artist based in NYC, navigates desire, labor, and denial: she desires, she labors, she is denied. She was recently included in a group show at Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, a duo booth with Xxijra Hii at NADA NY, and in a group show Correspondences at François Ghebaly. Umin has had solo exhibitions at mcg21xoxo in Matsudo, Japan; at Love in Manhattan; and at Mole End, in Queens. She has participated in multiple projects with Underground Flower, No Moon, and Gern en Regalia.

Montana Simone is a French-American artist born in San Francisco, CA, who lives and works in New York. She received a BSFS in Culture and Politics from Georgetown University in 2010 and is currently an MFA candidate in Sculpture at Yale University (expected 2027).