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That tension between projection and physical presence runs throughout Nature. Images suggest possibility while objects anchor the work in lived experience. Together they build a psychological terrain where biography and cultural memory overlap.
At the center of the exhibition is an extension of Hoecker’s Heritage series, a body of wall sculptures that translate the rituals and punishments of masculinity into a visual system. The works often incorporate automotive parts, a coded language inherited from the artist’s relationship with his father. Hoecker recalls buying a Mazda Miata as a young adult despite his father’s derision of the model as a “hairdresser car.” The disagreement was never spoken directly as a conversation about sexuality. Instead it existed in the symbolic territory of cars, performance, and mechanical identity.
In Heritage I (2020), Hoecker mounted the interior door panel of that car against a field constructed from an inverted German wool blanket stretched across a reversed steel frame. The result resembles a painting but its materials refuse the conventions of painting entirely. A functional piece of machinery becomes a relic transformed through staging and display.
The blankets that appear throughout the Heritage works carry layered significance. Born to a German father and Cuban mother, Hoecker treats fabric as a ground for identity, a literal surface upon which inheritance is projected. Hard industrial objects are softened by textile backdrops, creating a push and pull between emotional exposure and structural rigor.
Many of the objects in Nature come directly from the artist’s past. An American Standard urinal identical to those in his Catholic school recalls a site where he experienced bullying and humiliation as a child. Nearby, a rusted surfboard from his youth evokes a painful memory of exclusion from peers when he was eleven. Even the wheels of his father’s British racing car, a Triumph TR6, appear repurposed as sculptural components.
These fragments accumulate into something closer to a shrine than a traditional sculpture. Yet Hoecker avoids presenting autobiography in a straightforward way. Instead he folds personal memory into a broader cultural framework that includes references to artists and writers such as Joseph Beuys, Jean Genet, Robert Rauschenberg, and Henry Rollins. In several works, photographic monographs including Teenage Lust by Larry Clark and Beautiful Men by Crawford Barton are sealed inside custom plexiglass enclosures, functioning simultaneously as influence, artifact, and object.
Humor also plays an important role in Hoecker’s work, often arriving through blunt linguistic gestures. One sculpture pairs a salvaged urinal with an engraved bowling ball whose typography reads “standard weapon.” The phrase transforms an everyday fixture into a joke about masculine bravado and vulnerability.
“Your cock is a standard weapon,” Hoecker says. “I like boyish humor. It is part of how I deal with everything.”
Elsewhere in the exhibition, a quieter body of works titled Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior introduces a new direction in Hoecker’s practice. Made from weathered tarpaulin surfaces covered in lichen, the pieces map organic growth onto the four year arc of high school. The artist’s hand is present in the cropping and stretching of the material, but the imagery itself is shaped by time and environment.
“My hand is in the framing,” Hoecker explains. “But the composition was made by nature.”
If the Heritage works examine the pressure of inherited identity, the tarp series proposes another model, a self that forms gradually through exposure and accumulation rather than conflict alone.
Across Nature, Hoecker’s sculptures behave like emotional machines built from steel, fabric, memory, and humor. The materials may come from ordinary life, but once assembled they carry the charged logic of personal mythology. What begins as a collection of fragments ultimately becomes something larger, a portrait of masculinity dismantled and rebuilt on the artist’s own terms.
(images below from opening night at Sebastian Gladstone Gallery, 36 White Street New York, NY 10013)
Ritual Rotation is an extension of my painting practice - a collaboration with dancer Mackenzie Palmer, designer Kari Fry, and a score by JiJi Sounds. Each element of the series is rooted in the body: its repetition, its endurance, and its capacity to hold tension through rotation. The moving body functions as both subject and surface. The work centers on a dancer engaged in continuous rotation, undulation, and extension. As she spins, she moves in and out of light, producing a shifting economy of visibility: revelation, disappearance, fracture. She wears a chrome, healing-properties top by SUBSURFACE. The garment operates not as a costume but as a reflective apparatus - an armor. Light strikes its surface and disperses, destabilizing the figure and dissolving the body into its surroundings. The surface becomes painterly: unstable, resistant to fixed form. At its core, the work meditates on womanhood as a continual negotiation between exposure and protection. Lately, I have been grappling with the overwhelming pull to dissociate from my own body. Abuse mirrors policy. Control mirrors governance. Nothing feels resolved - no justice, no repair - only exposure followed by exhaustion. I don’t believe in the system; perhaps I never did. But I did not imagine a world so openly cruel, so unmasked in its indifference. The body has become a political battleground. The world exerts pressure - pulling, fragmenting, demanding coherence - yet the body persists through motion. Movement becomes a survival strategy, a method of maintaining wholeness within instability. The score, composed by JIJI Sounds, is built from recordings of my own breath. Breath becomes measure and tempo, echoing its central role in both choreography and painting - the dancer’s internal metronome, the invisible force behind the gestural mark. What begins as private becomes shared: an intimate physiological rhythm made audible, wavering, exposed. The project exists as performance, fashion, and visual art, engaging questions of embodiment, duration, and visibility. It proposes the body not simply as an image, but as a site of negotiation - between light and dark, control and surrender, self and world. Now more than ever, chasing the light feels almost impossible - yet imperative. This piece inhabits that tension: the body as a battleground, and also as a place of innate knowing and strength.
Sister Dreamer is built on a street that Lauren Halsey knows fully and fondly, having rode her bike around it extensively in her childhood. The project is a mosaic of all of Halsey’s core values and beliefs in one. It hinges on the idea that in order to take strides toward an ecology and culture that is sustainable, we must first create a culture that celebrates and appreciates art in relation to the natural world. Her most recent project does exactly that, with a focus on the community aspect of the space she inhabits. She is detailing a history, furthering social understanding, and ultimately grounding the work in the city’s unique language and innate poetics.
Celebrating black culture was also a major point for Halsey, who believes firmly in the power of Afro-disaporic mythologies and the power of funk culture. In her work at large, Halsey chooses vehemently to portray the vast expressiveness of life for black people in Los Angeles and in America. Halsey recounts, “Throughout my life, many buildings were burned down, abandoned, left empty. Yet what always stood out to me were the people who informally activated these open spaces: selling Christmas trees, running ad-hoc barbecue pop-ups, holding church services, or using it as an ephemeral space to sell hundreds of mix CDs. The community understood that these empty lots could be used for different functions and needs.”
The sculpture park is a beauty that is both timeless and representative of the space she currently knows and loves. At the mouth of the installation, guests are greeted with eight sculptures of sphinxes and eight harthotic columns. There is a courtyard abundant with fruit trees, vegetables, and plants, six water features, concrete panel architecture, and more. Opening on March 14th, the space will have programs for film screenings, health and wellness events, jazz nights, sports events, talks and lectures, tutoring, programs for local youth, etc. It is a place representative of growth and the art of nurturing a village.
