Even the Phrase Each Other
May 10 – May 31, 2025
Group exhibition featuring Cornell MFA artists: Adrian Aguilera, Elina Ansary, Andy Nicholas Li, Hyunjin Park, and Sopheak Sam

Opening Reception: May 10, 2025, 6-8pm (VIP Preview, 5-6 pm)
Performance by Andy Nicholas Li at 7pm

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, /even the phrase each other/
Doesn't make any sense.
–Jalaladdin Rumi
Interpreted by Coleman Barks, 1995

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Even the Phrase Each Other, a group exhibition in the main gallery by artists from the Cornell MFA in Creative Visual Arts program. The VIP preview is on Saturday, May 10, 5-6pm. The opening reception is open to the public from 6-8pm. There is a live performance by Andy Nicholas Li at 7pm. The exhibition is on view through Saturday, May 31, 2025.

Examining intersecting themes of death, consciousness, destruction, and desire, these five artists draw on the cultural contexts that shape them. Working across interdisciplinary boundaries, their practices span painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Adrian Aguilera, born in Monterrey, Mexico, researches the intrinsic essence that resides in objects, often through dissection or corruption of common phrases. Andy Nicholas Li, a Cantonese-Midwestern artist from Chicago, conjures contradictions of identity and intimacy to uncover the queer and sticky construction of a person. Hyunjin Park is a Korean interdisciplinary whose work examines how the affective power of non-human beings unsettles the boundary between the modern and the pre-modern. Elina Ansary combines auspicious materials with painted images to build cohesive wholes out of contradictory parts, reflecting the discomfort and wonder of her experience as a Jewish-Muslim-Afghan-American. Sopheak Sam pieces together fragmentary memories of war, tracing the afterlives and afterimages of Cambodian refugees to remap the intersection of Buddhist, queer, and diasporic subjectivities.

Even The Phrase Each Other is itself a fragmented phrase. The ‘translator,’ Coleman Barks, does not speak Farsi. This remnant of ancient poetry was translated and retranslated through a global game of telephone. In a similar way, these five artists, whose lineages spring from opposite corners of the earth, have found themselves flung together, by chance and synchronicity, at Cornell University’s MFA program. Together these five artists reach across borders, of geography and artistic discipline, to create a new collective intimacy.

Artist Bios

Adrian Aguilera was born in Mexico's industrial capital of Monterrey. Aguilera immigrated as a young adult to the U.S. where he settled in Austin, Texas in early 2010's. He received his BFA (2004) from The Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, and an MFA in Creative Visual Arts at Cornell (2025). Working with a variety of mediums that include sculpture, text-based work, print media, video, public art, and installations; he researches the intrinsic essence that resides in objects. With an interest in scientific observation, cultural history, and social issues, Aguilera's work aboard our relationship with the physical and cultural spaces in which we inhabit. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally at Artpace San Antonio, Johnson Museum, The State Silk Museum, Philbrook Museum, The Contemporary Austin, Fusebox Festival, Blanton Museum of Art, The George Washington Carver Museum, Alfred University and the Museum of Human Achievement. His work has been featured in a variety of publications, including ARTFORUM, Frieze, NYT, Vogue, and Glasstire.

Elina Ansary was born and raised in San Francisco. Working primarily in painting and sculpture, her work explores time, consciousness, and perception through the narrative lens of her hybrid heritage. Ansary earned her BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in 2013, and completed the Scenic Painting Professional Apprenticeship at the Juilliard School in 2017. Ansary was an artist-in-residence at BigCi (Australia, 2017), Chautauqua Institution (USA, 2021), La Macina di San Cresci (Italy, 2022), and RaumArs (Finland, 2023). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Holter Museum (USA, 2024) UC Berkeley’s Worth Ryder Gallery (USA, 2023), and the Rauma Art Museum (Finland, 2023). She’s based in Brooklyn, where she is the cofounder of a DIY art space called Peach Pit Gallery.

Andy Nicholas Li is an artist based in Chicago, IL and Ithaca, NY. Andy's work has appeared at Co-Prosperity, Hyde Park Art Center, ACRE Projects (Chicago), The Soil Factory (Ithaca), Midsumma Festival (Melbourne, Australia), and Granoff Center for the Creative Arts (Providence, RI), with collaborative projects at AS220 (Providence), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Singapore Art Book Fair. Andy has spent time at residencies and workshops at Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL), ACRE (Steuben, WI), Hyde Park Art Center, Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, MI), GnarWare (Chicago), and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Andy’s work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and A-B Projects (Portland, OR).

Hyunjin Park is a Korean interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in New York and Seoul, working across sculpture, installation, performance, and video. Raised in one of the world’s most fast-paced societies, she investigates how technology-driven capitalism reshapes traditions and reinforces boundaries between the old and new, human and non-human, and life and death. Park participated in residency programs at Domaine de Boisbuchet, Lessac, France (2024, sponsored by the Youngmin International Art Program), Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT (2024, fellowship), and Wassaic Project (2025), Wassaic, NY.

Sopheak Sam was born in the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in Thailand after their family fled the Khmer Rouge genocide. Sam’s work has been exhibited at Kalm Village (Chiang Mai, Thailand), FT Gallery (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), the Minnesota Museum of American Art (St. Paul, MN), Denison Museum (Granville, OH), the Grace and Clark Fyfe Gallery (Glasgow, UK), and they have collaborated on projects with Boston CyberArts and Distillery Gallery (Boston, MA). They were a 2022 Fulbright Scholar in Thailand, and have held residencies at SLOWSPACE Studio (Phnom Penh, Cambodia) and the Chautauqua School of Art (Chautauqua, NY). Sam grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, and is a naturalized American citizen of ethnic Khmer descent.