Imagine a line, fine and slender. At any given moment it pauses, held in the same state as at the beginning. Interrupted. Always interrupted. Not because it has reached its end, but because no one could carry it there.
Now imagine a circle. Circles are more perfect, less tragic. Circles are the work of humans, complete before death, and not even God could finish them better. Straight, fragile, freestanding lines are like thoughts; circles are their resolution.
On Friday, August 29th, I was invited by curator Seoyoung Kim to see Circle Things, the new Site installation, an exhibition that brought together five artists exploring how circularity shapes perception, memory, relationships, and space.
Site, a nomadic curatorial initiative in NYC devoted to experimental community-driven projects, transformed its compact East Village white cube space into a chamber of loops and returns. Each encounter unfolded as a new frame of attention, a new way of “getting it wrong.”
Curiously enough, or perhaps serendipitously, a week before the exhibition, I began noticing recurring symbols, mainly the circle. A complete shape. A portal. A disc. Perhaps I was already thinking in loops: visibility and secrecy, rhythm and interruption, memory and reconfiguration. Reality itself became the serpent biting its tail.
The exhibition gathered sculpture, installation, performance, sound, and digital interventions orbiting around surveillance, intimacy, and misreading. But more than hovering concepts, it embodied circularity itself.
Friday evening was luminous, with light pouring through the leaves and scattering iridescent colors on the pavement and architecture of the East Village. The exhibition could be glimpsed from the street. When I first arrived, the space felt like a crystal box, a transparent vessel housing enigmas of invention and veiled significance.
The first thing I noticed upon entering was a cat. Her name was Monkee, asleep by one of the installations: Evelyne LeBlanc-Roberge's Impossible Index of Clouds. She is an interdisciplinary artist from Canada working at the intersections of photography, installation, moving image, and digital media. She often explores how digital infrastructures, images, and architectures shape perception and collective experience.
The work was tactile shown on Friday was interactive, alive. “Well, everything is interactive,” Evelyne told me later outside, Modelo in hand, transfixed by the rotation of a circle before a projector. Its shadows cycled like a lunar eclipse, visible from both inside and out. Screenshots, digital landscapes, and documents sprawled across the walls, turning the gallery into a radiant passage. Less an object than a gateway, it quivered between ether and white walls, where private imaginings touched collective wonder. I felt it, and I believe Monkee did too, thus her tranquil sleep.
Nearby, iris wu’s, an interdisciplinary artist whose practice weaves together performance, installation, and time-based media, installation unfolded around the act of waiting, staging the metaphysical question mark that disorients viewers into confronting the now. It was earthy as well, buzzing with the irritating presence of mosquitoes, delaying rest like anxiety itself. The work spoke to surveillance, the restless anticipation of being watched.
Oddly enough, I had just written a poem about an anxious mosquito, and read it at my last poetry reading. I told wu that such synchronicities are not accidents but secret rhymes in the fabric of existence. “Not to get schizophrenic,” I joked, as we discussed how the world conspires in poetry. Reality is porous, the unconscious spills into the street.
Sam Christian’s melancholic theater introduced a fragile, speculative tone to the show: a floating balloon like an eyeball, an unplugged fan, and a bag of shredded paper. His interest lay in cycles of secrecy, destruction, spectacle, and narrative. Speaking with him, I learned he wanted to create platforms for ordinary objects we overlook. Pointing to the shredded paper, he asked: What can come out of this?
I told him it reminded me of childhood, stealing beers, riding bikes, stumbling into an abandoned, burned house where mountains of shredded paper covered the floor. My friends and I would dive into it, fight among the ashes. Sharing this memory, I realized Christian’s balloon and paper remnants were two sides of a coin: what is inflated into visibility, and what is reduced to fragments.
Madeleine Young, whose practice moves between architecture and poetics, presented a sculptural viewfinder that restricted and guided sight. To look through it, one had to reposition their body, becoming aware of perspective itself. She admired Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, and the influence was clear: cylinders aligned with solstices, turning desert into celestial instruments. Like Holt, Young collapsed the cosmic into the intimate, transforming looking into ritual. Her viewfinder acted as a miniature sun tunnel inside the gallery, making each viewer complicit in framing perception.
By now, the gallery was crowded. The sun had set. Only a few Modelos remained. Monkee was still asleep.
Then I encountered Ty Pawlowski’s work: rhythmic, colorful, pulsing like music. Colors slipped into one another, patterns repeated until they warped, inducing trance and disorientation. In Circle Things, Pawlowski’s work became the heartbeat of the exhibition. Where Christian inflated spectacle, Wu destabilized time, Leblanc-Roberge expanded the digital, and Young reframed vision, Pawlowski gave recurrence its pulse, reminding us that life itself is structured by cycles.
Looking back, the gallery itself became a circle: returns, remainders, resonances. When I spoke with Seoyoung Kim, she emphasized creating a space not just for viewing, but for entering into the works. Our conversation echoed the show’s theme: the circle as interaction, a sacred loop that draws the viewer into perception itself.
In this sense, Circle Things resists closure. It offers the circle not as confinement, but as opening, a way of keeping things in motion. The works didn’t resolve; they lingered and reverberated, reminding us that collective experience is always unfinished, like a line, always intersecting with the memories, rhythms, and infrastructures that shape it.
The space became a portal, a place to circle back again and again to looking, feeling, and being seen. In other words, circling back to the act of being human.
