To Be Seen By Heavy Eyes
Organized by Karryl Eugene
Tyler Cala Williams, Allen-Golder Carpenter, Karryl Eugene, Kai Jenrette, Gala Prudent
June 6 - June 21, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, June 6, 6-8pm
Silke Lindner is pleased to announce To Be Seen By Heavy Eyes, a group exhibition featuring works by Tyler Cala Williams, Allen-Golder Carpenter, Karryl Eugene, Kai Jenrette, and Gala Prudent. Dwelling within the shadow of Black Existentialist thought, the exhibition contemplates the tensions of being and the psychic lingering of visibility. Here, “shadow” is not moral lack, but a metaphysical companion: echo, residue, spectral trace. Spanning sculpture, painting, and digital media, the artists traverse the fragile terrain of the self—gesturing toward interior struggle, singularity, and philosophical refusal. What emerges are practices that privilege opacity over transparency, estrangement over identification, fragmentation over fixity. To Be Seen By Heavy Eyes centers the idiosyncratic and unrepeatable edges of Black subjectivity—both as lived condition and conceptual field.
Tyler Cala Williams works through photography, digital manipulation, and painting to examine the authority of images and the processes by which they become legible as truth. His layered practice draws on thinkers such as Fred Moten, Hito Steyerl, and Wu Tsang, fusing found and generated imagery with digital retouching and oil painting. Williams’ recent surreal self-portraits explore the porous boundary between digital and physical selves, foregrounding mistranslation, authorship, and aesthetic inheritance within Black subjectivity.
Allen-Golder Carpenter is a gender non-conforming interdisciplinary artist, designer, poet, and author whose work investigates identity, control, and cultural semiotics. Across sculpture and found media, Carpenter examines the spatial and psychic dimensions of the Black body, particularly through the interwoven logics of hip hop, the judicial system, and personal memory. In their ongoing series Ghetto Body Surrogates, fragmented sculptural forms resist containment, proposing identity as always provisional and in motion—haunted by both surveillance and desire.
Karryl Eugene engages collage, painting, sound, and assemblage to explore Black masculinity through digital aesthetics. Drawing from personal experience, internet culture, and archetypes, Eugene constructs layered portraits of an evolving Black male psyche. His works stage an inquiry into desire, vulnerability, and the internal landscapes of identity—where inherited scripts and individual introspection co-exist in tension. In Aggressively Passive and Admirable or Ridiculousness?, Eugene confronts the optics of assimilation and fragility through the lens of fictional characters, gaming, and spiritual iconography.
Kai Jenrette creates graphite drawings that navigate the space between figuration and refusal. Each figure adheres to shared parameters while evading repetition, exploring the intersections of personality, identity, and objects. His work prompts reflection on how we construct identities, revealing the parallels between self-making and object-making, ultimately striving for authenticity within its medium. In this exhibition, Jenrette’s drawings perform a quiet choreography of constraint—figures trying, and often failing, to appear “correct” under the weight of their surroundings.
Gala Prudent works across photography, sculpture, and critical writing to proposed refreshed methods of relation between subjecthood and objecthood. Informed by Black feminist theory and posthumanist poetics, her materials and forms suggest that objectification can be recast as relational and ethical, constructing architectures of memory and kinship. - Text by Afi Venessa Appiah Tyler Cala Williams lives and works between New York, NY, Savannah, GA, and New Jersey. Williams graduated in 2020 from Parsons, The New School, where they received a BFA in Photography.
Allen-Golder Carpenter (b. 1999) lives and works in Washington DC. Their work has been exhibited at Dropcity Center For Architecture and Design, Milan (2025); 032c Gallery, Berlin (2025); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2024); Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (2024); No Gallery, New York (2024, solo); HOUSE, Berlin (2023); Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna (2023, solo); Housing Gallery, New York (2023); von ammon, Washington D.C. (2022, solo) amongst others.
Karryl Eugene (b. 1998) lives and works in New York, NY. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, in 2020. He has exhibited in the United States and abroad, including David Zwirner, New York (2024); Current Space, Baltimore (2021); the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore (2020); ONART Gallery, Florence (2019); and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (2018), amongst others.
Kai Jenrette (b. 2001) lives and works in New York, NY. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art. He has exhibited at LVL3, Chicago; April April, Pittsburg; White Columns, New York; Cooper Union, New York; and My Perfect Environment, Chicago. He recently completed a residency at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and published I’M PERFECT LIFE’S PERFECT I LOVE BEING ME with Du-Good Press, Brooklyn. Other past publications include KENNY + PENNY, recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art Library.
Gala Prudent (b. 1999) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY She received her BA in Modern Culture and Media and Visual Art from Brown University after an extended period of study at The Cooper Union. Her work has been featured in exhibitions across the US, UK, and Italy, and she has been an artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2024) and Numeroventi (2023), among other programs.