Pasts and Futures: Memory, Tradition, and The Art of Reimagining
June 6 - June 28, 2025
Beatrix Villiers · Shareef Sarhan · Ashley Rapp
Andrea Carola Robles Morales · Kyra Joy
Manuel Hernandez · Noah Boulton · Em Bennett · Ray Atlas
Opening Reception: Friday, June 6, 6-8pm
368 Broadway, Suite 409, New York, NY
By RSVP Only: info@elzakayal.com
About
Elza Kayal Gallery is proud to present “Pasts and Futures,” a contemporary group exhibition featuring the works of nine emerging artists from both local and international contexts. The exhibition interrogates the cyclical relationship between past, present, and future through the lens of memory, cultural inheritance, and speculative imagination. “Pasts and Futures” is curated by Ray Atlas, a student of Visual Arts and Anthropology at Barnard College of Columbia University.
“Pasts and Futures: Memory, Tradition, and the Art of Reimagining” presents a diverse set of practices grounded in a dialogue with historical narratives and traditions not as static conventions, but as frameworks for growth, healing, introspection, and connection. The featured artists, including Andrea Carola Robles Morales, Ashley Rapp, Beatrix Villiers, Em Bennett, Kyra Joy, Manuel Hernandez, Noah Boulton, Ray Atlas, and Shareef Sarhan, reinterpret art forms and intergenerational narratives through a contemporary lens, inviting audiences to imagine futures grounded in remembrance and cultural resilience. Together, their artworks ask: How do the legacies we inherit inform the societies we shape? How can revisiting traditions be an act of subversion or healing? And in a world grappling with ecological, political, and social uncertainty, how might memory itself serve as a guide for collective imagining?
By positioning these works, alongside others, within both historical and futuristic contexts, the exhibition will explore how art becomes a vessel for ethical reflection, cultural preservation, radical reinvention, and future-world building.
Artists
In “Bobinsana Bobinsana”, Kyra Joy visualizes a process of psychic rebirth and reconnection with her Indigenous heritage through holistic plant medicine and a profound relationship with the natural world. Ray Atlas’s “humanitarian portraiture” responds to ancestral memory and religious social ethics, highlighting remembrance and projecting frameworks for a more understanding future. Collaging sounds from her grandmother's backyards in Mayagüez and Bayamón, Puerto Rico, Andrea C. Robles melds craft, performance, and digital media to explore Taíno spirituality and tradition as a living, shape-shifting force. Manuel Hernandez merges written and oral histories, broadening narratives of contemporary Native American people within Latin America. Shareef Sarhan’s paintings of his hometown skyline express hope for futurity, as they reckon with histories of endurance and current destruction. Examining intergenerational relationships through memory and its signifiers, Ashley Rapp focuses on the intimacy of the ordinary, in revisitation, reverence, and meditation upon the legacies she has inherited. Em Bennett’s oil paintings disrupt and interrogate her traditionalist upbringing, embracing maximalism and color to explore themes of identity, environment, and perception. In her visualizations of chronic pain, Beatrix Villiers challenges fetishization and erasure of women's health issues, embodying futurity in conceptual, electrifying reverie. Noah Boulton’s work questions and responds to legacies of abstraction and investigations of mark-making, a practice which in itself he describes as inherent to human experience.