Current
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conjunctions
Mira Dayal
February 07, 2025 – March 16, 2025
Fuller Rosen Gallery is delighted to announce the opening of conjunctions, a solo exhibition by Mira Dayal, guest curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin. Featuring Dayal’s steel sculptures that reinterpret everyday objects tied to writing and narrative processing, conjunctions blurs the boundaries between tools, toys, and sculptures, emphasizing how objects can shift in function and meaning.
Join us for an opening reception of conjunctions at Fuller Rosen Gallery on First Friday, February 07 from 6-9 pm.
And don’t forget to celebrate with us at with us at Ulises on Saturday, March 01 at 5 pm for “Language Object Index: Artist Book Launch and Conversation” with Shannon Mattern and Mira Dayal.
Mira Dayal, Cat’s Cradle with Four Knots, 2023, steel
Mira Dayal’s “language objects” center on a lexicon of steel sculptures that allude to vernacular objects associated with writing, narrative, and textual processing. The functions of the malleable source objects—to gather, to write, to record, to make an image or story—are notably altered in their more rigid steel counterparts. Components are reattached, bent, doubled, solidified, scaled up, and reoriented. This formal play creates ambiguity, heightens emotional tension, and encourages associative readings.
Through choices of subjects and exchanges of proportions, materials, and forms of labor, Dayal draws a triangulated relationship among tools, toys, and sculptures. What are the overlapping properties of each object type? How does one shift into each other? A tool, repurposed or disassembled, can tell us something about what we were meant to make with it. Likewise, a toy taken seriously can show us what we’re invited to invent, or lead us to other games we could play.
Mira Dayal, detail of Cat’s Cradle with Four Knots, 2023, steelAmong these sculptures emerges a motif of loops tethered by conjunctions—parts that are sutured or knotted or linked together, like words strung together in a sentence. See the stapled twist of a Möbius strip or the tied string figure of the game “cat’s cradle,” two forms that inspire sculptures in this ongoing series. At first glance, such works may evoke toys more than tools or sculptures. Yet these objects not only propel important mathematical theories, but also demonstrate the poetics of material manipulation, hold abstract narrative potential, and push expectations of scale, bringing them closer to tools and sculptures.
This tool-toy-sculpture triad, and Dayal’s heightened attention to things we usually make meaning with, conjures an object-oriented ontology, in which things affect non-things in our shared world. In setting up this triad, Dayal practices a post-minimal study of phenomenology—of how people perceive and experience objects—emphasized here through the sculptures’ proportionality to the artist’s body and the labor required to produce these unwieldy, individual versions of small, ephemeral, and mass-produced objects. Building on Dayal’s prior exhibitions about the materiality of imaging technologies, language processing, machine learning, and precursors to writing, conjunctions teems with propositions for continued manipulation, embodied interaction, and webs of signification.
Mira Dayal (she/her) is an artist, writer, editor, and educator based in New York. She produces systems of sculptures that respond to a site’s architecture or history, involve subtle but laborious uses of everyday objects and materials, critically reflect on changing technologies, and expand the limits of language and image. Dayal has held solo and two-person exhibitions at Princeton University, NJ; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; Kunstverein Dresden, Germany; Gymnasium, Brooklyn; Lubov, New York; NARS Foundation, Brooklyn; and Abrons Art Center, New York.
Dayal has participated in group exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Feral File; Barnard College, New York; Miriam, Brooklyn; lower_cavity, Holyoke, MA; Parent Company, Brooklyn; Apparatus Projects, Chicago; Artspace New Haven, CT; OCHI, Los Angeles; Hesse Flatow, New York; NURTUREart, Brooklyn; and other spaces. She has participated in residencies at Ox-Bow, Art in General, and A.I.R. Gallery. Dayal recently coedited Track changes: a handbook for art criticism (Paper Monument, 2023) and co-publishes the collaborative artist book series prompt:. As an editor and writer, she has contributed over the past decade to numerous art magazines and museum exhibition catalogues. Dayal is on faculty at Barnard College, Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts, and has previously taught at Hunter College and the International Center of Photography.
Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD (she/her) is the Curator and the Director of the Collective Futures Fund at Tufts University Art Galleries. A writer, curator, art historian, and educator, her work has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Dutch Consulate of New York, Acción Cultural Española, The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, University of Pennsylvania, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and she is currently undertaking a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship for a forthcoming exhibition How do you throw a brick through a window... at Tufts University Art Galleries in collaboration with Tanya Gayer and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
McLaughlin’s scholarly and curatorial writing has been published in Art Papers, BOMB Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Contact Quarterly, Performance Research, ASAP Journal, women & performance, and te magazine, among others. Forthcoming writing from McLaughlin is featured in Prospect.6: the future is present the harbinger is home (Prospect, 2025), Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance (Bloomsbury's Methuen Drama 2025), and “On Breath,” Performance Research, Vol. 29, No. 3. (2025). She recently contributed a collaborative text with artist Mia Habib in Bare Bodies—Thresholding Life, published by De Gruyter GmbH and co-edited the multidisciplinary reader Tania El Khoury’s Live Art: Collaborative Knowledge Production (Amherst College Press 2024).