P.A.D. x NADA NY Sonya Derman // Anaïs Horn
- ah0173
- May 4
- 2 min read
NADA New York
May 7–11, 2025
The Starrett-Lehigh Building
601 W 26th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
(Enter on 11th Avenue)
Wednesday, May 7, 4–7pm
Thursday, May 8, 11am–7pm
Friday, May 9, 11am–7pm
Saturday, May 10, 11am–7pm
Sunday, May 11, 11am–5pm
For NADA New York 2025, P.A.D. presents a two-person booth featuring textiles by Sonya Derman and
photographs, copper engravings, and jewelry by Anaïs Horn. Traversing practices traditionally relegated to
distinct corners of craft and fine art, these artists play with tradition and decoration as they explore cultural
tropes, ritual, and the connections between past and present.
Sonya Derman’s work is rooted in the daily practice of drawing and writing, and in the quotidien. For the work
exhibited at NADA, she integrates drawings, scanned sketches, and digital paintings into the fabric of the textiles
she produces. Derman combines original and found text into layers of associative imagery, creating a
collage-like and multilayered surface of appliqué, embroidery, found and painted fabric, and hand quilting. Using
a foundation fabric (often a digital painting or resonant fabric scrap) as source and spark, she digests and
repurposes source materials to vacillate between legibility and illegibility, and to navigate the distances between
private memory, self-talk, and public pose/performance.
Anaïs Horn’s cross-genre approach to making interweaves personal narrative, myth, and historical inquiry, while
exploring themes of female empowerment and transformation. Love, don’t ask, 2025, is a series of copper
engravings that explores interpretations of the Bluebeard fairy tale. Drawing from Gustave Doré’s illustrations for
Charles Perrault’s La Barbe bleue and Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Horn adopts Judith’s courageous gaze
as she unlocks the forbidden doors of Bluebeard’s castle, framing her exploration as a fearless act of feminine
autonomy. The title, borrowed ironically from Bartók’s libretto, underscores Judith’s imposed role of surrender,
suppressing curiosity, and resisting the urge to see. The copper engraving technique, historically tied to the
printed dissemination of fairy tales, anchors Horn’s works within a broader storytelling tradition.
Being connected through Bluebeard’s secret treasure chamber, Horn unveils her new collection of Colliers. The
unique necklaces, hand-crafted from semi-precious stones, sweetwater pearls, vintage jewelry, and recycled
sterling silver, extend Horn’s artistic practice into wearable forms. Each collier incorporates talismanic elements,
referencing Horn’s ongoing research into amulets and the "evil eye"
.
Alongside, Call A for Aphrodite features a photographic work of sparrows in flight, messengers of Aphrodite in
Greek mythology. Printed on mirrors, the work embodies the tension between mythological symbolism and
fleeting moments, navigating between revelation and concealment, while creating an active, everchanging
dialogue between her works and their environment. All of these works encapsulate a central tension in Horn’s
practice: the interplay between presence and absence, and the traces that remain of what is missing.
//
P.A.D. is an art exhibition space in historic SoHo (South of Houston) Arts District in New York City. It reflects the
bustling economy of artists making, selling and promoting their artworks on the street year-round, weather
permitting. The aim of the space is to platform small and editioned works by artists that are interested in
embracing new contexts for exhibiting.
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