Kate Rusek and Tess Jenkins: The Ethics of Detail: Felix Art Fair 2026 - Room 1104

DON’T LOOK Projects will introduce a duo presentation featuring the work of Kate Rusek and Tess Jenkins in "The Ethics of Detail."

 

The work of Rusek and Jenkins converges in a visceral interrogation of the waste and discard landscapes of the 21st century. Rusek’s sculptures—her most technically complex and color-saturated to date—transform cast-off materials like aluminum window shades and fertility treatment paraphernalia into porcelain-encased assemblages. These ritual objects reference microscopic organic architectures and the complexities of metabolized emotion, blurring the line between the organic and the constructed. These forms find a rhythmic counterpart in Jenkins’ recent paintings, which interrogate surface and depth through slow, additive processes. By foregrounding persistence and intuition, Jenkins pushes—and almost grinds—materials like sand and glitter through their physical essence, stressing their materiality until they transcend their decorative origins.

 

Though working in distinct mediums, both artists assert a counter-narrative to speed, disposability, and erasure. Jenkins’ additive grinding and Rusek’s maximalist ornamentation—informed by her background as a fine tailor—offer a quietly radical proposition: that care, labor-intensive detail, and an acute sensitivity to form can serve as potent modes of resistance. While Jenkins finds resilience through the physical persistence of the mark, Rusek edges beauty towards a chilling contempt for the finite resources of the planet, teasing a physical relationship to evoke a psychological response to our current high-tech, low-biodiversity landscape.

 

This presentation reveals resonant formal echoes that speak to the broader urgencies of material ethics and emotional resilience. At Felix, the installation utilizes the hotel environment to create intimate vignettes that underscore the dissonance between public and private life. Together, the artists invite a practice of intimate looking, suggesting that even within the horror of consumptive striving, the world becomes more acute the closer one looks.

 

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