From June 18 through July 3, 2026, Gallery 198, located at 198 24th Street in Brooklyn, presented MEMENTOS OF A LIVING PRACTICE, alongside Betsy Damon’s exhibition WATER, AGENT OF LIFE. Together, the two exhibitions brought our distinct practices into an ecological dialogue through art.
My exhibition, MEMENTOS OF A LIVING PRACTICE, brought together paintings, photographs, films, drawings, field notebooks & texts emerging from two ongoing projects: Karstic-Actions & Bird-State.
These works begin in direct experience: returning to a place, observing closely, moving through a landscape, encountering birds, responding physically to materials, weather, sound & the presence of the other-than-human world. The works presented at Gallery 198 are mementos in the active sense of the word—traces, reports & transformations of lived encounters.
The exhibition opened on June 18 with a live Karstic-Action accompanied by percussionist Ben Chadabe.
Artist Statement
Opening Karstic-Action: Flow
Betsy offered the word Flow as the prompt for the performance, drawing from her decades-long engagement with water as a life-giving force & an agent of ecological and social change.
Working with water, raw pigments, egg yolks, pastel, movement & embodied attention, I responded to the space, Betsy’s prompt & Ben’s live percussion. The action unfolded balance, rhythm, sound & material shaped the painting as it happened.
Karstic-Actions are an open-ended series of live action paintings I began in 2011. My body becomes an instrument within the work, often painting in headstand or through movements that shift ordinary visual orientation. Each action develops through the immediate conditions of the place, the materials, the collaborators & the moment.
Flow — Live Karstic-Action with Nicole Peyrafitte, prompted by Betsy Damon, with Ben Chadabe on percussion. Gallery 198, June 18, 2026.
The Eutrophic Paintings
Their title refers to condition of aquatic body environments—saturated/depleted with nutrients, organic matter & intense biological activity. The paintings developed through my repeated visits to the tidal wetlands of Plumb Beach, where water, vegetation, birds, mud, debris & seasonal change continually reshape the landscape.
The downstairs gallery included six Eutrophic paintings made from papers carrying the traces of Karstic-Action performances created with Pierre Joris in Luxembourg in 2021.
The papers were originally placed beneath the actions to receive pigment, water, footprints, gestures, spills & the residue of the performances. I brought them back to Brooklyn, where they remained in my studio before being reworked & transformed into autonomous paintings.
FREEE & Overstory
FREEE was created in solidarity with the women of Iran. The Karstic-Action was accompanied by a text I wrote loosely based on a Hymn to Inanna, with music by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte.
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During the action, sheets of paper were deliberately placed across the floor. They protected the surface while also acting as active receivers of pigment, water, bodily movement & the physical energy of the performance.
One of these floor grounds later became OVERSTORY. I returned to the residual paper, working into what the action had deposited there. The traces of the live event became the ground for another stage of the work.
Vote 2024
The exhibition also included four VOTE paintings created for Action VOTE in 2024. These works bring together Karstic-Actions & Bird-State: the word VOTE is painted through direct, gestural action, while each bird emerges from sustained observation & encounter. The series includes a Great Blue Heron, Great Egret, American Kestrel & Yellow-crowned Night Heron.
Bird-State
The upstairs gallery presented works from Bird-State, my ongoing practice of repeated encounters with birds, place & the other-than-human world.
Bird-State begins with going to see birds. I return to particular locations through changing seasons, often traveling by foot, bicycle or kayak. I observe, photograph, film, draw, write & listen. What is absorbed through these encounters moves across photographs, films, paintings, drawings, notebooks & texts.
The installation brought together several bodies of work connected to birds encountered along the Brooklyn shoreline & during travels to Japan & Iceland.
Cranes
The crane installation included paintings, photographs & field notebooks developed through encounters with Red-crowned Cranes in Hokkaido, Japan.
The photographs register precise moments of behavior, movement & relation. The paintings carry the color, rhythm, temperature & physical intensity of being present with the cranes in the winter landscape. The notebooks hold another register of the encounter: observations, drawings, notes, questions & immediate responses made in the field.
Purple Sandpipers — Amor de Lonh
The Purple Sandpiper installation included photographs, painting & the film Amor de Lonh: Calidris maritima, where on the upstairs gallery
I encountered these birds repeatedly along the Brooklyn shoreline. Their presence requires close attention: small bodies moving across rocks, surf, wind & changing light, often at the edge of visibility.
The title Amor de Lonh—“love from afar”—holds a relation sustained through distance. The work follows an intimacy built through repeated return, attention & the continued otherness of the birds.
Fulmars
The fulmar works emerged from observations made in Iceland. Photographs & a field notebook brought together the birds’ physical presence, movement, habitat & the notes made during those encounters.
The notebook is not preparatory material for a finished work. It is part of the work itself: a space where perception continues through drawing, language, memory & bodily experience.
Leporellos
Public Programs
The exhibition extended through a series of performances, films & conversations.
On June 20, Betsy Damon & Lauren Bon of Metabolic Studio participated in a Collective Action Conversation addressing water, ecological systems, artistic practice & the possibilities of community action.
On June 26, Betsy & I presented short films during Living Practices, followed by a conversation moderated by Alex Jones.
On June 30, I presented Bird-State: A Performative Reading, bringing together my texts, images & voice with poems by Pierre Joris. The reading allowed the visual installation to move into language, sound & live presence.
Across these different events, the gallery became a space for paintings, films, photographs, conversations, performance, ecological thought & embodied experience to meet.