James Perkins: Nonsites Revisited at Hannah Traore Gallery

New York-based artist James Perkins opened Nonsites Revisited at Hannah Traore Gallery on the Lower East Side on September 17, 2026. It is his second solo show with the gallery. The nonsite, a term coined by Robert Smithson in 1968, has anchored Perkins's work for about a decade, and this exhibition widens the geography well beyond the Fire Island sites that shaped his first show, BURYING PAINTING.

Each piece begins as what Perkins calls a "post-totem structure": silk stretched over a wooden frame and left outdoors for months or years. Buried, submerged or exposed in deserts, forests, mountains and on beaches, the silk takes on marks from sun, salt, wind, sand, soil, water and plants. Perkins's role is limited to placing and moving the structures. The materials would biodegrade if left alone, and he decides when to stop the process. The silk is then removed and re-stretched as a painting. He has said he would be proud to share authorship with the forces that make these marks.

The works on view were shaped on Fire Island, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Sonoran Desert, the mountains and salt flats of Utah, and the middle of the Atlantic. I'm Tied in Knots Over This and Life Line come from Nonsite: Atlantic Passage, for which silks sailed aboard skipper Conrad Colman's boat in the 2022 Route du Rhum, a 3,542-nautical-mile solo race from Saint-Malo to Guadeloupe, over 13 days. In Engulfed in Love: An Eagle's Ode to Lucio Fontana, an eagle made three splits down the center of a silk on Fire Island, an echo of Fontana's slashed canvases.

In the back room, beneath the skylight, Chord (2026) is Perkins's first indoor installation, made for this show. It lets the structures keep changing during the exhibition, bringing an outdoor process inside. A floor sculpture uses storm-fallen pine from the Hudson Valley, and the video At The Oceans Edge, I Feel Like Everyone Else (2025) follows the movement between studio and landscape. Other works include Creosote (2025), Pining for Love (2023), and Gulf Nonsite Left and Gulf Nonsite Right (both 2026).

Perkins places his work in dialogue with painting and Land Art, from Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko to Smithson, Robert Irwin and James Turrell, while grounding it in environmental responsibility. Where BURYING PAINTING called Earth the object we all share, this show treats the nonsite as a metaphor for respecting all lands, and all people, equally.