THE ARMORY SHOW

ELISABETH PERRAULT, KRISTIAN TOUBORG, RACHEL MICA WEISS

SEPTEMBER 5—7, 2025, VIP PREVIEW SEPTEMBER 4

BOOTH 137, NEW YORK, NY

For its debut in The Armory Show’s Galleries section, CARVALHO presents a three-artist dialogue between Danish painter Kristian Touborg, Montréal-based ceramic and textile artist Elisabeth Perrault, and New York sculptor and installation artist Rachel Mica Weiss. The presentation introduces Touborg on the cusp of his first New York solo exhibition, opening September 12, at CARVALHO’s Brooklyn gallery.

Working across sculpture, painting, fiber, and assemblage, these works trace cycles of growth and erosion, resilience and dissolution. Each artist addresses the thresholds between states — physical and psychological, natural and constructed — channeling the energies, vulnerabilities, and sensorial intensities that shape human experience in flux.

KRISTIAN TOUBORG

Touborg’s paintings probe impermanence and the phenomenology of the natural world, sequencing images and moments across wooden nodes, aluminum bars, and repeated lengths of polyester, where dye-sublimation printing coalesces with gestural brushwork.

In his Rippling Excieties series, the mutable skin of water becomes both optic and psyche — a trembling surface where perception falters and the self loosens at its edges. The title echoes a lived instability: the wavering current between euphoria and dread, bloom and decay. Light behaves like an actor rather than an effect: it presses forward, held within matter. Beneath their liquidity runs a psychological undercurrent. These works metabolize anxious energy yet insist on resilience: light, even when strained, refuses to vanish. Hope is redefined not as transcendence but as material persistence: a seam where rupture becomes structure, a bloom at the edge of corrosion, a glow surviving its shadow.

ELISABETH PERRAULT

Perrault’s architecturally scaled installation, Ces géants qui se nourrissent de soleil (Sunflowers), suspends vast ceramic blossoms in states of slackened repose, their stems cocooned in silk and their petals frayed. While still-life traditions have long cast flowers as emblems of mortality, Perrault reorients decay from a symbol of vanitas into a generative process — a turning not toward loss but toward transformation.

The sunflowers are composed of broken pieces of ceramic sheathed in silk and mesh, sewn intricately together with colored thread. The resulting sculptures are imposing presences with detailed surfaces that draw the eye: thread is looped across nodes of ceramic with the delicacy of a spider’s web or is spiraled into tight patterns resembling lichen. Long multicolored stems coil heavily across the floor, their heft suggesting not inert matter but a corporeal presence, no less animate than the tail of an animal. More than botany, it is the human-animal that lingers in these forms: slackened necks, bowed heads, faces turned away in despondent repose. Perrault’s sunflowers resist decay as a symbol of finality, embodying instead the mutable states of decline, persistence, and strange vitality.

RACHEL MICA WEISS

Rachel Mica Weiss’s Woven Screens transpose the logic of weaving into a psychological and architectural register. Taut expanses of thread operate as apertures — thresholds that hover between opacity and permeability. Interlacing her background in psychology with textile’s historic role as divider, Weiss stages a meditation on boundaries: not as immutable structures, but as mutable conditions of fragility and resilience, exposure and concealment. Confronted head-on, the works dissolve into fields of impalpable light; viewed obliquely, their intricate geometries sharpen into view, echoing the unstable clarity of memory and perception.

In her recent compositions, luminous bands cut through the woven surface with chromatic intensity, radiating as though from within. These interruptions act simultaneously as rupture and invitation, evoking the paradox of a barrier that insists on being crossed. Weiss’s practice thus reframes fiber from an instrument of separation into a conduit for passage, transforming the frame into a site where thresholds are reimagined as porous, provisional, and alive to psychic as well as spatial experience. Her Woven Screens are less objects than states of encounter: mesmeric planes where materiality and immateriality, architecture and affect, converge in a perpetual negotiation of limit and release.