Kate Rusek and Tess Jenkins: Felix Art Fair 2026 - Room 1104

DON’T LOOK Projects is pleased to introduce a duo presentation featuring the work of Kate Rusek and Tess Jenkins in Room 1104.

In a focused dialogue, this duo presentation brings together the materially driven practices of the two artists whose work engages strategies of repair, accumulation, and embodied memory.

Rusek’s sculptures often repurpose cast-off materials, like aluminium window shades or fertility treatment paraphernalia, and transforms them with porcelain to produce richly detailed assemblages that blur the line between the organic and the constructed; while Jenkins’ recent paintings interrogate surface and depth through slow, additive processes that foreground persistence and intuition, pushing, almost grinding, materials like sand and glitter through their physical essence, stressing their materiality. 

Though working in distinct mediums, both artists assert a counter-narrative to speed, disposability, and erasure. Their shared commitment to labor-intensive methodologies and marginal materials offers a quietly radical proposition: that care, slowness, and sensitivity to form can serve as potent modes of resistance and renewal at late-stage capitalism. 

Their presentation reveals resonant formal echoes and conceptual intersections that speak to the broader urgencies of material ethics and emotional resilience in the contemporary moment. At Felix, the installation will draw on the hotel environment to create intimate vignettes that underscore the dissonance between public and private life.  

About the Artists

Kate Rusek is a New York-based sculptor and textile artist. Her work transmutes wasting and waste matter into abundant, maximalist, composite forms and dynamic biophilic textures that interrogate assigned value, material narrative, and a rigid binary of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’.

Rusek received a B.F.As from The University of Miami and an M.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design. She has exhibited at SPRING/BREAK, Socrates Sculpture Park, Governors Island Art Fair, Gallery of Visual Arts at The University of Montana, and numerous galleries. Additionally, Kate Rusek is a Daytime Emmy winner for her work on Sesame Street. 

Tess Jenkins (b. 1986 Albany, NY) received a Fine Arts Diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is interested in how personal experiences and generational histories are programmed into our bodies, and how those imprints affect our emotional, social and spiritual lives. Using an intuitive approach and heavily layered process, she uses painting as a tool of investigation to better understand our infinitely complicated, multi-layered bodysytems, how we relate to them, and how they affect our senses of self. 

She has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows, with recent venues including Satchel Projects, The Pit, and CompoundYV. Tess Jenkins lives and works in the Mojave Desert.

Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel
7000 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90028

VIP PREVIEW
Wednesday, February 25: 11:00am – 8:00pm

GENERAL ADMISSION

Thursday, February 26: 11:00am – 7:00pm

Friday, February 27: 11:00am – 7:00pm
Saturday, February 28: 11:00am – 7:00pm
Sunday, March 1: 11:00am – 5:00pm

Come find us at Room 1104