This exhibition explores the intersections of aging, loss of relevance, and the inevitability of death in a society that often views aging as a process of becoming expired. In Gen Z slang, expired refers to someone past their prime or out of touch with current trends--a playful way to describe irrelevance. Yet expired is also a clinical euphemism for death, framing this exhibition's exploration of aging as both a societal and personal journey. By critically examining how aging is treated in culture, the exhibition reveals the tension between perceptions of decline and the possibilities of transformation as individuals confront the aging process and mortality. These works collectively consider how time marks the body and the psyche, how value shifts as cultural attention moves on, and how meaning persists even as the conditions surrounding it change.

Roxanne Wolanczyk is a ceramic artist based in New York City who spent years working as a geriatric social worker, providing support for an often overlooked population. Her classical urns and vessels, adorned with text and symbols of transformation, death, and regeneration, confront existential questions of mortality. Throughout her work, the vessel serves as both metaphor and stand-in for the body--durable yet vulnerable, shaped by forces within and beyond its control, and marked by the passage of time. One piece, I have been around a long time. Can I still shape my story?, asks whether growth and self-definition remain possible as time advances, echoing the uncertainty that arises when agency feels threatened by age. Another, Time has transformed me. I am a bit more fragile now. But I am built of grit., acknowledges vulnerability while asserting endurance, pairing softness with strength in a way that mirrors the contradictory emotional terrain of aging.

Her body of work in Expired includes four ceramic pieces that each confront a facet of aging. I reflect the power that exists beyond the gaze, a mirror set within a ceramic surround, reframes how aging bodies are seen, measured, and interpreted. It asserts that everyone carries a power that lies outside the reach of the gaze, which is especially relevant as many older people describe a growing sense of invisibility. I reserve the right to age without apology articulates a refusal--an insistence on autonomy and dignity in the face of cultural pressure to remain youthful. Across all four pieces, Wolanczyk emphasizes that aging is neither a diminishment nor a disappearance, but a transition that carries stories, symbols, resilience, and unresolved questions.

Kenneth Zoran Curwood is a multimedia artist based in New York City whose practice spans sculpture, animation, and material experimentation. His work engages cycles of time, decay, and transformation through a sensibility that is at once playful and quietly philosophical. Sans Soleil, an intricately mounted found leaf on brass, foregrounds slow change and the fragility of aging materials. Marginalia, an animation drawn in the style of early 20th-century cartoons, layers symbols of death, transformation, and return into a looping sequence that approaches mortality through rhythm and surreal humor rather than solemnity. These works build a visual language of repetition and renewal that resonates with the deepening awareness of mortality that often accompanies age.

His sculpture Alexa--When are the men coming to take me from my home?--a wood and soldered-glass analog device modeled after the Amazon Echo--extends this inquiry into the realm of technology. Curwood, who is not a digital native, approaches the piece with a generational perspective that heightens its tension: technologies meant to assist can just as easily signal surveillance, loss of independence, or the threat of being removed from one's home. The unsettling humor of the title underscores this vulnerability. Zoroboroz, a kinetic sculpture composed of rainsticks arranged in the form of an ouroboros and activated by a small cassette motor, invokes the ancient symbol of cyclical dissolution and renewal. Together, these works form a meditation on time's effects and the quiet persistence of life itself.

Carol Saft is a painter based in New York City whose work turns toward the rituals of beauty culture, revealing the emotional and psychological terrain beneath them. Her portrait series Beauty Is You depicts her wife glowing under a red-light anti-aging and skin-rejuvenation mask. In these paintings, the figure appears saintlike--illuminated, haloed, and suspended between reverence and absurdity. Saft captures the strangeness of contemporary beauty rituals, where devotion to self-maintenance can feel both empowering and impossible. Her subject is masked, yet vulnerable; radiant, yet marked by the desire to resist visible aging.

Saft's work also speaks to the quiet routines that structure daily life. At-home technologies like LED masks promise transformation while reinforcing the pressures placed on individuals--particularly women--to stave off the visible markers of time. Her intimate framing shifts focus away from cultural judgment and toward the vulnerability within these rituals, underscoring the tenderness of tending to one's own face. In the context of Expired, Saft's paintings highlight the contradictions of aging: the longing for renewal, the acceptance of change, and the emotional labor involved in sustaining a sense of beauty in a culture that equates youth with value.

Expired is not only a reflection on mortality but a challenge to how society measures worth over time. Across ceramic, animation, sculpture, and painting, the artists examine how aging is shaped by visibility, autonomy, and cultural expectation. The exhibition calls on viewers to reconsider what it means to expire--whether in the context of aging, death, or dismissal--and to recognize the resilience, insight, and presence that persist beyond narrow definitions of relevance. Aging here is neither an ending nor a diminishment; it is a continuation marked by endurance, adaptation, and meaning that deepens across a lifetime.



Open Call Exhibition
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