Gern en Regalia is delighted to present Companion, a group exhibition curated by Alex Ito featuring works by Mary Helena Clark, Aya Fujioka, Jin Mei, Gordon Parks, and Quay Quinn Wolf.
In Companion, the artists attend to the nearly imperceptible threads that bind us to the material world- where narratives splinter, difference binds, and memory incubates through cycles of forgetting and reemergence. Meaning does not arrive fully formed or with the intention of complete understanding. It withholds and accumulates relationally.
Across the exhibition, materials and methodologies range from found objects and repetitive gestures to publication and unstaged photography, resisting the spectacle of rendering a world
into seamless representation. Rather than fabricating a world into being, these approaches embody the amorphous mechanics of experience, where meaning accrues slowly, relationally, and without guarantee. These practices ask for modes of attention grounded in proximity and companionship with an outer world.
As technology increasingly anticipates language and shapes behavior before individuals can consciously articulate themselves, the space for indeterminacy narrows. The everyday risks becoming overdetermined, pre-scripted, and frictionless.
To engage these works is to rehearse openness for ambiguity; to encounter artworks as undefined invitations rather than recommendation engines. In doing so, Companion gestures toward a world expanded not through clarity, but through intimacy, pause, and the generative potential of not yet knowing.
Mary Helena Clark
Mary Helena Clark (born 1983, USA) lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally, including presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Sundance Film Festival, Park City; Swedish Film Institute, Stockholm; The Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Yerba Buena Center; San Francisco; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and at the New York, London, Rotterdam and Toronto International Film Festivals.
Aya Fujioka
Aya Fujioka (b. 1972, Hiroshima, Japan) studied photography at the College of Art, Nihon University. From 2007 to 2013, Fujioka lived in New York with support from the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan. Her photobook of her hometown Hiroshima, Here Goes River (Akaaka, 2017) earned multiple major awards, including the Kimura Ihei Award. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa and the Irie Taikichi Memorial Museum of Photography in Nara. Her publications include Comment te dire adieu (Ricochet) and I Don’t Sleep Public (Akaaka). Fujioka’s work is held in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She lives and works in Kyoto, Japan.
Jin Mei
Jin Mei was born in Shanxi in 1961 and attended the School of Art at Shanxi University in 1982. After graduation, she worked as an art editor for a magazine. In 1993, she opened her own business, Jin Mei Flower Shop, through which she supported the artistic practice of her family. Jin Mei picked up a paintbrush again at the age of fifty. The book of her drawings, titled晋美: jm was published by her daughter Chang Yuchen in 2024 under the imprint How Many Books. The same year she had her first solo exhibition at Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong, and launched a fashion collaboration with Home Society, Shanghai. In 2025, Jin Mei participated in a residency at Anaya, Jinshanling.
Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks (b. 1912, Fort Scott, KS; d. 2006, New York, NY) was a photographer, filmmaker, writer, and composer who lived and worked primarily in New York City. Parks’ work explored the social realities of American life, with a particular focus on race, poverty, and justice. His photographs were widely published in Life magazine, where he was the magazine’s first Black staff photographer. Parks also directed the films The Learning Tree (1969) and Shaft (1971). Parks’ work has been exhibited internationally, including exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago. Parks’ photographs have been widely reproduced and discussed in publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, and TIME. The work presented in this exhibition is being presented with the permission of The Gordon Parks Foundation.
Quay Quinn Wolf
Quay Quinn Wolf (b. 1989, New York, NY) is a sculptor living and working in New York City. Wolf’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Recent solo shows include 002 Salon 75, Copenhagen, Denmark (2025), Repair Jack Barrett, New York,(2022) and Rest Prairie, Chicago (2022). Recent group exhibitions include, Cafe Wednesday Van Abbehuis, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2025), There is a guy standing in front of a fan reminiscing about the past, Linienstraße, Düsseldorf, Germany(2025), Correspondences, Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA (2025), Ideal Shapes of Disappearing, Silke Linder, New York, NY (2023), Sneckdown, EACC, Castellón, Spain (2023), Inauguration, Lo Brutto Stahl, Paris, France (2023), Helmut Lang seen by Antwaun Sargent : YO WOƆ, Hannah Traore, New York, NY (2023), In Practice: You may go, but this will bring you back, Sculpture Center, New York, NY (2021). His work has been reviewed in publications including Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, ARTnews, Artsy and i-D.
