HESTER Pit of Desire, Garden of Prosperity

NEW YORK, NY – All Street Gallery is proud to present Pit of Desire, Garden of Prosperity, an exhibition curated by Lauren Hirshfield featuring works by Devra Fox, Kat Ryals, Jackie Slanley, Rosalie G. Smith, and Lauren Walkiewicz, on view from August 7 to August 30, 2025, at All Street Gallery’s Chinatown location (119 Hester Street, New York, NY 10002). An opening reception will be held on Thursday, August 7, from 6 - 9 pm. A curator-led tour and a collaborative iteration of Hirshfield’s event series Supper Social and All Street’s All Around the Table will also occur while the exhibition is on view; details and dates for programming will be announced soon.

In times of increasing political, economic, social, and environmental upheaval, we begin to feel on the precipice of a monumental shift. We can no longer ignore the consequences of individualism and are forced to acknowledge that our world of conveniences is built upon a faulty foundation of extracted resources and structural inequity. Promises of abundance, productivity, optimization, and wealth have opened a pit of endless desire, collective yearning, and mass craving. This reality comes at the cost of community, sustainability, and regeneration, and creates a culture of consumption beyond the natural capacity for replenishment. It may feel as though we are far removed from each other, our environment, and possibilities of collectivism, but the urgency of our inherent interconnectedness cannot be ignored.

Pit of Desire, Garden of Prosperity engages in themes of ecofuturism and collectivism by offering visions of a post-anthropocentric natural order. Across the works, physical, emotional, and spiritual boundaries are blurred beyond definition. Each artist is speculating on the collectivist possibilities of how humans, plants, animals, and machines may merge in response to global upheaval. Despite humanity’s destruction, nature will find ways to flourish despite and without us. This exhibition suggests that building a prosperous future requires decentering human-only desire in favor of a nonhierarchical, hybridized ecosystem.

Devra Fox imagines new forms of interspecies connection, crafting graphite drawings that personify human emotions as phytanthrope-like, or plant-human, hybrids. Her anatomical “landscapes” emphasize the parallel cycles of growth and regeneration between ourselves and nature. Though quietly rendered in black and white, Fox’s images evoke rich topographies of body and stem sprouting, interlocking, and merging with maternal, generative power. In her fantastical realm, she presents characters full of grace, tenderness, and the growing pains of being and sharing a vessel. The scenes, in turn, display a commanding synergy that challenges anthropocentric living.

Similarly, Kat Ryals’ potted plants and bone sculptures question the motives and rituals around human beautification of and control over nature. Her uncanny constructions, strictly made with contemporary, mass produced, and/or faux materials, populate a post-human world where humanity’s disillusioned aestheticization of nature has metamorphosed into an ecosystem of its own making. Ryals’ future is one of strange flora and bizarre anatomy that may not remove humans from the world but does, with dark humor, proclaim how our desires for power over our habitats may be our ultimate downfall.

Jackie Slanley provides a new material direction, while also highlighting the resilience of plantlife. Her digitally designed elemental flora structures combine modern and extinct species into new, fantastic chimeras. The artist’s decision to render her hybrid lifeforms as laser-cut plexiglass, metal, and plastic sculptures brings into focus the paradoxical quality of these objects: contemporary technologies are reviving previously extinct plants that humans and our technological innovations had a hand in destroying. Slanley corrects and reimagines the symbiotic relationship between the natural world and the manmade world. The cold and unforgiving materials operate in surprising harmony with the delicate designs of her spliced creations. Slanley’s speculative ecofuture centers the creation of an entirely new biome where plantlife and human innovation can not only exist, but can also thrive in our absence.

Like Ryals’ recycled plant creatures, Rosalie G. Smith’s “vehicles” and “satellites” question the roles of human refuse and discarded machinery. These composite objects – part nature, part machine, part tchotchke – transmute the surviving traces of humanity. Like Fox’s emotive beings, Smith’s wall and floor sculptures take on a life of their own, calling into question what new functions our detritus and technology could perform in a post-anthropocentric world. The futuristic characters that emerge and populate their overgrown trashscape seem to collect and adorn themselves with the same trinkets and hardware that we surround ourselves with, too. Smith’s hanging “satellite” embodies the mythology of her practice as she considers its function in her world as a lifeline to those who’ve passed. Together, her objects purport the extraterrestrial, spiritual, and cosmological connections between our world and what lies beyond the anthropocene.

If Fox, Ryals, Slanley, and Smith’s works investigate an environment where humans are decentered and potentially scarce, Lauren Walkiewicz imagines how the planet would look after we are gone, and how it might evolve to protect itself against human threats before our extinction. Walkiewicz’s fantastical creations emerging from this apocalypse are new character studies merging human, plant, animal, and machine, shaped by ecological vengeance. These beautiful yet unpredictable compositions suggest an ecosystem that is neither safe nor friendly. Rather, it’s a dangerous place that gives little relief or access to humans. Who are we to judge this hostile environment that has evolved so far beyond our recognition? If we are responsible for the crisis at hand, what right do we have to its aftermath? Walkiewicz’s work posits a revolution that completely removes us from the equation.

Across all five artists’ works, our reality is merged with speculative fictions and mythological worldbuilding. The diverse tools, accessories, and mediums employed in this exhibition hint at the treasures and traps of a transformed world order. Rather than following a singular narrative arc, the exhibition embraces multiplicity and cyclicality – worlds of infinite confluence where human identity is no longer at the center and is, instead, closely attuned with all other living things. The distinctions between fauna, flora, machine, and byproduct have dissolved into symbiotic relationships beyond current paradigms. Pit of Desire, Garden of Prosperity sheds the illusion of human dominance and opens portals to collectivist futures built on interdependence and interconnectedness, not control.

About the Artists:

Devra Fox is a San Francisco–based visual artist whose graphite drawings explore bodily containment, emotional response, and our entanglement with the natural world. Her monochromatic works animate internal states - grief, attachment, vulnerability - through chimeric figures that blend human, plant, and animal forms. Fox’s meticulous, meditative practice draws on a desire to understand how emotions live beyond the body, manifesting in the environments and objects around us. Her drawings offer still, surreal spaces that feel both tender and uncanny, inviting viewers into a world where fantasy and anatomy converge.

Kat Ryals is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice investigates the symbolic power of objects, and how ornamentation, waste, and spectacle shape value and desire. Working across sculpture, photography, wearable art, and installation, Ryals uses recycled materials to create speculative relics of a future shaped by overconsumption. Her work draws on the visual culture of her Southern upbringing - thrift stores, Catholic iconography, and swamp landscapes - to explore the tensions between natural and artificial, trash and treasure. Her recent sculptures series imagines a surreal, post-human world where discarded materials evolve into new forms of life.

Jackie Slanley is a Brooklyn-based, first-generation Vietnamese American artist whose laser-cut plexiglass sculptures explore the intersections of botany, myth, and technology. Using archival images and digital renderings, she layers tinted transparencies into intricate biomes populated by plants, animals, and surreal landscapes. Her practice bridges sculpture with storytelling, constructing ecosystems that question the boundaries between organic and synthetic life. Through cinematic color gradients and structural precision, Slanley builds imagined worlds where nature, science, and fiction converge.

Rosalie G. Smith is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist working primarily with found materials. Her sculptures depict a post-human world shaped by technological debris and ecological collapse. Guided by sci-fi narratives and absurdist humor, she assembles speculative vehicles, gadgets, and creatures from trash - imagining lifeforms that evolve from microplastics and obsolete machines. Smith likens her artistic process to that of a crow: collecting shiny detritus left behind in urban landscapes, forming connections with anonymous humans through the waste they produce. Her work reflects on consumption, survival, and the strange intimacy between humans and the objects we discard.

Lauren Walkiewicz is a Brooklyn-based artist who creates post-apocalyptic dreamscapes where nature reclaims power after ecological collapse. Her intricately cut and painted panels depict bizarre, hybridized life forms - creatures born of both organic matter and human trash. Walkiewicz imagines a new ecosystem where survival is not human-centered, and the pleasures of the natural world are inseparable from danger. Her work challenges romanticized notions of utopia, presenting a wild, unpredictable terrain shaped by climate reckoning, evolution, and resistance.

About the Curator:

Lauren Hirshfield is an independent curator and arts producer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice centers emerging and under-represented artists on themes like speculative fiction, historical and personal mythology, and queer celebration. Her recent focus is on artworks that transmute materials and technologies and practices and topics around eco-futurism, collectivism, and social aspiration. Since 2016 she has been fortunate to present the work of over 200 artists including Ilana Harris-Babou, Asif Hoque, Amy Lincoln, Rose Nestler, and Leah Schrager. Hirshfield is the co-founder of PARADICE PALASE (2017), a curatorial program turned digital membership network for artist professional development. She also started the project @temp.img (2020) which curated and sold emerging art under $500 directly on Instagram. She has curated with galleries, platforms, and fairs across the US east coast including NADA, Future Fair, SPRING/BREAK, and 5-50 Gallery. She received a BFA in Painting and Double Minor in Art History and Arts Management from SUNY Purchase (2013) and has been a visiting critic and lecturer with numerous universities and residency programs. Her curatorial work has been featured online in Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Cool Hunting, ArtNews, and The Observer.

About All Street Gallery:
Founded in 2018, All Street Gallery is a gallery and platform for emerging and underrepresented artists whose work focuses on social engagement and community empowerment. Initially created as an artist collective and grassroots protest organization, All Street is driven by its roots in the city’s creative community. The gallery’s mission is to use art as a means of protest, resistance, and social change, highlighting voices that challenge the status quo. After opening its first location on East Third Street in the East Village, All Street expanded in 2023 with a second space at 119 Hester Street. Both locations continue to provide a platform for artists whose work addresses important social and political issues.

For press and sales inquiries, please contact:
gallery@allstnyc.com
646 335 3717

Image Credits:
Devra Fox, Bonding, 2022
Kat Ryals, Mean Green Mother II, 2023
Jackie Slanley, Flora 4, 2022
Rosalie G. Smith, Fully Automated Beach Patrol, 2024
Lauren Walkiewicz, Hortus Maris Incendii I, 2024

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