Absorption

Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to present Absorption, an exhibition by Nivia Hernandez, Daniel Anthony Vasquez, and Kristen Jensen, organized by Mónica Palma.

I soaked in water the sea sponge I picked from the shore. I left it on the side of the sink waiting for the water to evaporate. I believe that water comes from the Catskill Mountains; my sea sponge comes from the Mexican Pacific Ocean. I was giving fresh water to a sponge that spent its life submerged in salt water. Nivia told me that the sponges in her work speak to the effort to assimilate that all immigrants face: the never-ending filtration of words, affects, and bureaucratic forms. Like sea sponges, we hold phonemes in our skeletal fibers, ingredients, and dances; and when we arrive in the US, we expel some and sip on what remains of the others. In our Latino communities, the quotidian sea sponge washes dishes, cleans wounds, and bathes babies. The estropajos and loofas integrate particles of skin tissue; they might be the eyes that look at us in her piece Con cada ojo (With each eye), a gaze that reminds me of the fierce look in the Zapatista women.

In a small town in Mexico, devotees of the Juquila Virgin ask for favors and miracles by gathering clay from the surrounding areas of the Virgin’s altar and making figures that represent their wishes. Daniel Anthony’s clay is unfired; at every step, the pieces leave dust and silica traces; the shoes and the vase come microscopically undone. He pours water into the vase, knowing it will be absorbed into the clay's molecular structure; visibly, the clay's coloration will change to a darker tone, a camino de piedra, a rural road, at the precise moment the rain arrives. They come apart, but they reaffirm themselves in their vulnerability. The outside of Daniel Anthony's pieces is the inside; the facade is the organ, the sculptures exist with the tripa de fuera, the guts exposed. The purpose of the pilgrimage is to come closer to the wound and do it by hand.

Years ago, I visited Kristen's studio; on the floor, a series of clay basins were resting on handmade pillows; the pieces were tenderly held by soft bodies made of recycled towels, imbuing them with a heavy, sweet, anthropomorphic feeling. Those sculptures remain—along with a newer series of veil-drawings and rubbings—like chroniclers, narrating an experience of touch and time. The rubbings happily fail to reveal loyal 2D copies of the originals; they get lost in the forest, connecting with the J train Jamaica-bound at the Fulton station. Because they wander, they become maps of their own journey—containers, veils, blueprints that don’t obey scale. I see these walls of drawings as the scales and skin, a blown-up microscopic vision of the sea sponge and the clay, a veil that reveals as much as it hides.

I was thinking that all these pieces lack reflective surfaces, which means they are not screens; all is porous and brittle here. They would gladly host spider webs, fingerprints, and dust.

Nivia Hernandez (b. 1990, Guatemala City, Guatemala) is a Brooklyn raised and based artist working in sculpture, photography and installation. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from School of Visual Arts and a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from CUNY CSI in New York. Group exhibitions include SVA’s All Staff Art Show, Gramercy Gallery, New York (2026), The Nurturer & The Hunter in a Room of One’s Own, Public Library Creative Arts Center, Jersey City (2026), Material Memory, Future Fair, New York (2025), Telas de Solidaridad/Threads of Solidarity: Connections to Guatemala, Gallery Bergen, Paramus, NJ (2025-2026), Fragments of Being, Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York (2025), Wondering Paths, SVA Chelsea Gallery, New York (2025), And So I Told Him, ‘Come here and live with your grandma’, migratory patterns, SVA Curatorial Gallery, New York (2025); Office Space, SVA Chelsea Gallery, New York (2024); Tributaries, Photoville Public Art, Dumbo, New York (2023), Community, Smoke Vale Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (2020).

Daniel Anthony Vasquez (b. Cantón Higueras, El Salvador) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, printmaking, and unfired clay sculpture. He holds an MFA from Hunter College (2025). He has participated in artist residencies at the NARS Foundation (2022) and the Lower East Side Printshop (2013), and was awarded a Fellowship at The Gowanus Studio Space in Brooklyn (2014) and a ArtNoir Jar of Love Grant (2022). Selected exhibition venues include: 205 Hudson Gallery, New York, NY; Essex Flowers, New York, NY; NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; The Lower East Side Printshop, New York, NY (Featured in Language Forged out of Place, In and Out of Context, and Treasure Island) Flux Factory, Governors Island, NY; International Print Center New York, NY. Vasquez currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Kristen Jensen is a Brooklyn based artist that works across sculpture, drawing, and performance. She received her MFA in combined media from Hunter College, New York, NY and her BFA in printmaking from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. Recent shows include those at Geary and Stand4, and she has received fellowships through the Jerome Foundation and Lighthouse Works and has been awarded residencies at Shandaken Projects at Storm King, Abrons Arts Center, and Haystack.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid’s programs are made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. We are also supported by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.