Mirrored in Time
Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Naomi Lisiki, Will Maxen, Daniel Neumann
November 11 – December 13, 2026
Opening Reception | Wednesday, November 11, 6 – 8pm
SPATIAL 024 :: Gelsey Bell, Kayla Cashetta, and Netta Weiser | Saturday
November 21, 2026, 7:30pm
International Contemporary Ensemble Performs Wadada Leo Smith | Saturday, November 14, 7:30pm
Artist Talk and Listening Session | Saturday, December 5, 4pm
Fridman Gallery is honored to present Mirrored in Time, an exhibition examining relationships between external physical environments and internal mind-spaces.
Foresight, the ability to recognize that events happen on a timeline, enabled us to dominate other species as predators. Yet, we are not well equipped to tell geological time – our foresight has not extended to appreciate distant origins or long-term futures. And, as we gradually ceased to fear our surroundings, we seem to have lost appreciation of the present moment. Spatial sound – the practice of attentive listening in an acoustical space – can center us in the present and help us look more attentively as well.
The featured artists use deep time as a medium in their practices. This exhibition is a space for contemplative listening and looking, a mirror to our inner world, as individuals and as a species.
Daniel Neumann’s 8-channel sound installation tunes sustained drones to subjective resonances (felt vibration) and the acoustic space of the gallery. The tones are carefully calibrated to produce beating, interference patterns, and microtonal shimmering in the air.
Naomi Lisiki’s paintings are at once representational and abstract; the viewers are looking simultaneously at the edge of a lush rainforest, their distant memory of it, and their emotions experienced then and now. Time appears as waves, rather than points on a line.
Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka employs traditional Japanese papermaking and printing techniques to record shifting natural environments and our place within them. The works reflect water, as frozen and moving, presenting an opportunity to relate to geological time.
Will Maxen’s figures submerge in metaphorical landscapes, as if the psyche is connecting versions of itself. Paint itself becomes the unifying medium of personal histories, a harmonic table of frequencies which had fragmented over time.
Upcoming performances presented by New Ear Inc.
International Contemporary Ensemble Performs Wadada Leo Smith
November 14, 2026 • 7:30pm
SPATIAL 024 :: Gelsey Bell, Kayla Cashetta, and Netta Weiser
November 21, 2026 • 7:30pm
About the Artists:
Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka brings together traditional techniques of papermaking, natural dye, linocut, gyotaku (printing with inked fish), and washi (handmade Japanese paper). She engages with endangered processes that both require and contribute to a balanced ecosystem. Her work addresses climate change and mental health, informed by a decade of community engagement in Nunavut, Canada and living with bipolar disorder.
Hatanaka is participating in the 61st La Biennale di Venezia. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Biennial of Art, and Ino Cho Paper Museum (Japan).
Recent acquisitions include National Gallery Singapore, The British Museum, Dallas Art Museum, Museum of Arts and Design (New York), National Gallery of Canada, and Wellin Museum (New York). Hatanaka was a 2025 artist-in-residence at Black Rock Senegal.
Naomi Lisiki is a visual artist living and working in Brooklyn. Originally born and raised in the French West Indies, she grew up surrounded by the vibrant sea. Working within abstraction, she channels her emotions to explore ideas around womanhood, spirituality and philosophy. In this way, she is able to express her “internal landscapes”, charting a personal mythology that reclaims and reimagines her life as a woman from the Caribbean diaspora. Her paintings, washed in colored hues that echo cyanotypes and alternative printing processes, bloom with delicate forms, suggesting shapes of nature engulfed in light. Each painting is a trace, each color a residue of a lived experience, visual memories that invite the viewer to wander through a landscape of emotion.
Lisiki received her BFA from The Cooper Union and her MFA from the Yale School of Art.
Will Maxen is a New Haven-based painter whose practice moves between figuration and landscape, drawing on personal and historical archives. Through layered imagery and shifting degrees of visibility, body and terrain merge, raising questions about how inherited and lived histories shape who we are and where we belong. Incorporating collection, documentation, and reclamation, the canvas turns into a site of intersection, where memory, place, and selfhood meet.
Maxen received his MFA from UC Davis. In 2023, he was an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Project and the New Jewish Culture Fellowship. Currently, he is a Fellow at NXTHVN Chorot 08 (2026-27). His work is held in the collections of the Shrem Museum of Art and the Art Galleries at Black Studies, University of Texas.
Daniel Neumann is a Brooklyn-based sound artist, organizer and professional audio engineer. He holds a master’s degree in media art from the Academy of Visual Art Leipzig, Germany and also studied electronic music composition under Emanuele Casale in Catania, Italy. A main focus of Neumann, throughout all three of his different occupations, is how sound interacts with space and how spaces can be shaped by sound.