Sticky Gum Flat

Hamiltonian Artists is pleased to present Sticky Gum Flat, a group exhibition featuring the work of artists Ian Ha, Jung Won Lee, Alexis Mabry, Farah Mohammad, Paz Sher, and Lulu White, curated by artist Ali Kaeini. Kaeini’s curatorial debut, as the culmination of his Hamiltonian Artists Fellowship, presents an array of paintings, sculptures, installation, and mixed media works that reflect and respond to the notion of street life.
Here, the gallery functions as a space of transition, protest, performance, and connection, each artwork drawing viewers into a passing moment in time. As scenes unfold, the tensions that define the street as a stage and repository of human events are brought to the foreground—celebration and resistance, freedom and restriction. Sticky Gum Flat is inspired by Kaeini’s childhood memories of the street as a site of possibility—removed from the order of life at home. Weaving together personal, cultural, and geographic threads, this exhibition seeks to explore the complex, layered ways in which we move through and bear witness to public commons.
White’s works echo this impulse, revealing the unnoticed elements of the urban landscape. “I think of my sculptures as doting tributes to neglected corners, unadorned municipal structures, and objects that are intended to function, not to be observed,” she says. Ha’s paintings, Freed Shadow (2025) and Husk (벗겨진 껍데기) (2025), emerge from his engagement with urban detritus—cracks in asphalt, discarded materials, and the residual traces of human presence in communal spaces. Lee’s structural sculptures interrogate the silent authority of fences, handrails, and barriers, asking, “How do we embrace vulnerabilities often deemed failures? Can we return to the agreements embedded in these taken-for-granted systems?”

Sher’s work reclaims and reconfigures objects of power—his deconstructed jacket and baton sculptures examine authority, violence, and the circulation of cynicism embedded in public spaces. Meanwhile, Mabry confronts perceptions of physical trauma through her exploration of women’s injuries in subcultural sports, challenging the association of scars with victimhood. Engaging material traces of memory and erasure, Sticky Gum Flat resides in the in-between—a space of quiet defiance, of edges reconfigured and transformed.

To further contextualize the exhibition's theme, Kaeini shares, “Street life is a line of inquiry that has shaped much of my recent work, and I am excited to explore the way other artists engage this concept. The artists represented in this exhibition come from diverse backgrounds—Karachi, Jerusalem, Seoul, New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles. I believe their wide range of perspectives and lived experiences will highlight the universal yet unique qualities of the street, and its influence across different cultures.”