Cessation

Opening on Thursday, September 18, 2025

September 18 - November 8, 2025

A group exhibition organized by Benny's Video, hosted by Parent Company

Becca Albee, Zaid Arshad, Cooper Campbell, Bruce Cratsley, Joey Gonnella, Ben K. Voss, Luca Klauba, Coco Klockner, Emily Leach, Dave McKenzie, Alli Melanson, David Nelson, Brianna Perry, sgp, Andréa Spartà, Gwenn Thomas, Midge Wattles, William Wiebe

 — Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings

Benny's Video is a nomadic curatorial project for freaks and lovers, currently hosted in a studio sublet in Bushwick, New York. The current exhibition, Pass the Aux, including works by Zaid Arshad, Matt Keegan, and Dena Yago, is on view through October 5, 2025. Benny’s Video is organized and programmed by Craig Jun Li.


Becca Albee (b. Portland, ME) is an artist based in New York City. Albee’s work has been presented in exhibitions at institutions including MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, MA), Portland Museum of Art (Portland, ME), and Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin). Fellowships and residencies include IASPIS (Stockholm), Emily Harvey Foundation Venice), MacDowell (Peterborough, NH), Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY), and LMCC (New York, NY). 

Zaid Arshad is an artist, writer, and curator living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Recent and upcoming exhibitions and projects include Parent Company (New York, NY) (2025), Benny’s Video (Brooklyn, NY) (2025), Turquoise (Brooklyn, NY) (2025), and Kunsthalle Der Licht (New York, NY) (2024).

Cooper Campbell is from Multnomah County, OR. He lives in Queens, NY.

Bruce Cratsley was born in 1944. A consummate New Yorker and participant in that city's art scene throughout the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. Cratsley held several positions as a curator and in galleries before dedicating himself entirely to photography. In the early 1970s, he befriended Peter Hujar (1937-1987), who encouraged him to pursue photography, and in 1972, he studied with Lisette Model (1906-1983) at the New School for Social Research. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in photography, 1989-1990. Cratsley's work is in numerous private and institutional collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. 

For more than two decades, Cratsley has produced a personal and highly poetic body of work with the dominant theme being the mysteries of light and shadow. Cratsley's images of inanimate objects, urban street scenes, and portraits of his friends and lovers possess a metaphysical peculiarity. Whether it be his exuberant pictures of Paris or New York, or light falling onto and through a window, we are often reminded of Eugène Atget, André Kertész, or Cratsley's mentor and friend, Lisette Model. But Cratsley's personal aesthetic is moored to contemporary concerns, issues of the spirit, and mortality. Struck by AIDs, Cratsley's work gained greater immediacy. His intimate approach to the portrait reminds us again of life's ultimate potential and fragility. He passed away in 1998 due to complications from AIDS.

Joey Gonnella (b. Boston, MA, 1997) is a New York City-based artist whose practice centers around works on paper and paintings that reveal a personal relationship to the history of images. Gonnella uses a personal archive of found imagery and art historical references to create research-based works that create a constellation of relationships among one another. Connecting disparate elements of the past with the present is a recurring theme throughout. Gonnella received a BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts in 2020 and his MFA from Hunter College in 2024. He has exhibited work in group exhibitions in New York City at Charles Moffett Gallery, New Collector’s Gallery, Rain Rain Gallery, Susan Eley Fine Art, and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. Gonnella is also an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts. 

Luca Klauba (b. 2001) is an artist and educator working within photographic practices as a knotting between writer and reader.

Coco Klockner (b. 1991, USA) is an artist and writer living and working in New York. She is the author of the speculative novella K-Y (Genderfail Press, 2019). Her essays have appeared in Texte Zur Kunst, Spike Art Magazine, Disclaimer/Liquid Architecture, and The Whitney Review. Klockner has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York; Bad Water, Knoxville, TN; stop-gap projects, Columbia, MO; lower_cavity, Holyoke, MA; and her work has been included in group exhibitions at Centre des arts actuels SKOL, Montreal, QC, CA; White Columns, New York; Lubov, New York; Guadalajara 90210, CDMX, MX; Bass & Reiner, San Francisco, CA; MoMA PS1, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; Stove Works, Chattanooga, TN; and Musik Installationen Nürnberg, DE. She is the Director of the project space hatred 2 in Brooklyn. Her forthcoming exhibition at SculptureCenter in Long Island City opens in October 2025.

Emily Leach (b. 1990) is an artist living and working in Massachusetts. She graduated with a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2019. Her sculptural practice reconstructs absence as an active, tangible space, investigating how the past persists in the present. Leach is the assistant director of GEEX, an artist-run online educational platform for glass artists.

Dave McKenzie was born in 1977 in Kingston, Jamaica, and lives and works in New York. In 2000, he earned a BFA in printmaking from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. McKenzie’s recent solo exhibitions include And sometimes y, at Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; AEIOU, Barbara Wien Berlin, Berlin, Germany; The Story I Tell Myself, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Speeches, Speeches, Speeches, Galerie Barbara Wien; An Intermission, University Art Museum, State University of New York, Albany; Where the Good Lord Split You, Vielmetter Los Angeles; Dave McKenzie, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado; Screen Doors on Submarines, REDCAT, Los Angeles; and Momentum 8: Dave McKenzie, ICA Boston.

Alli Melanson lives and works in Montréal. She holds an MFA from Concordia University (Montréal) and a BFA from OCAD University (Toronto). Recent solo projects include Oxford Berlin (Berlin), city (Glasgow), Bonny Poon/Conditions (Toronto), and 100 Bell Towers ( Montréal). She has participated in group exhibitions at Weatherproof (Chicago), Cherry Hill (Cologne), Chris Andrews (Montréal), and Franz Kaka (Toronto). 

David Nelson (1960-2013) was an interdisciplinary artist who worked across photography, drawing, sculpture, and painting. Rigorous and precise, Nelson engaged process, time, chance, and a finely tuned attention to the natural world. Nelson’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Petersburg Gallery, Debs & Co., and Barbara Gladstone in NYC, at Tracy Williams in Paris, as well as many group exhibitions, which include Artists Space, The Drawing Center, Boston Center for the Arts, and the Academy of Arts and Letters. A posthumous survey exhibition at 80WSE Gallery was curated by Jonathan Berger and Nancy Brooks Brody in 2015, with an accompanying catalogue. Originally from California, Nelson moved to NYC and began making art in the mid-1970s. By the 1980s, he had a studio on East 14th Street and became friends with the artists Robert Bordo, Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Tony Feher, Zoe Leonard, Angela Muriel, Nicolas Rule, Rafael Sanchez, and Carrie Yamaoka. This peer group’s formative years coincided with the onset of the AIDS crisis, which deepened their camaraderie, with many of them becoming involved with ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985, Nelson met the artist David Knudsvig, who remained his life partner until Knudsvig’s death from AIDS in 1993.

Brianna Perry is an artist-cum-writer concerned with painterly indulgence, defined as the gratification through color, decoration, and embellishment. She employs painterly techniques in her low-tech collaged paintings, confessional writing and criticism, and videos. Her pictorial works, clothing, writing, and video cull from the unexpected encounters of bleach, cartoon characters, craft foam, coins, fashion labels, misheard song lyrics, popular music, pre-owned textiles, search engine imagery, sequins, and slang, figured as markmaking devices, color, and aleatory non-sequiturs. Brianna has exhibited locally and internationally, most recently at Hatred 2(Brooklyn, NY), Hardboiled (Chicago, IL), and Gallery Cate (Melbourne, AU). Brianna's first book of confessional writing and cultural criticism, The Précieuse (80 pages / b& w, laser print, perfect bound / ed. of 50), is sold out at Hunter Francis (Braddock, PA). Select Xerox pages are viewable on the publisher's website.

sgp is an anti-disciplinary artist who works with containers and a strict ecology of found materials— including semiotic, financial, and medical systems— towards both real and poetic collapse. She has operated and performed in many spaces, including MoMA PS1, Bortolami, Manhattan Mini Storage, Hauser & Wirth, Amant, and the Holland Tunnel Ventilation System at Pier 25. Her practice has also appeared internationally in spaces across Bulgaria, Mexico, and Germany. Her work has been featured in Riot of Perfume, WSJ, and e-flux, among others. Currently, she is also the Fairs & Editions Associate at Printed Matter. 

Andréa Spartà (b.1996, Chagny) lives and works in Paris. His work has been presented at institutions and venues including Kaiserwache, Freiburg (2025), Secondroom, Antwerp (2025), Rosière, Genillé (2024); Le Théâtre, Mâcon (2025); FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon (2024); FRAC Île-de-France/Le Plateau, Paris (2024); annex14, Zurich (2024); Les Limbes, Saint-Étienne (2024); Le Consortium, Dijon (2023); Fondazione Zimei, Pescara (2023); and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2023). In 2022, he was an artist-in-residence at the Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella.

Gwenn Thomas’ (b.1943) work exists in a space between sculpture, painting, photography, and architecture. Her object sculptures of awnings, windows, doorways, and rooms --exterior and interior architectural spaces -- initiate a back and forth between looking out and looking in. Her most recent series of works is part urban landscape, part abstraction, and part found object.

Recent solo shows: Art Projects International, NY; Exile Gallery, Berlin; Mélange; ung-5, Cologne; Southfirst, Brooklyn, NY; Regina Rex, NY; 57W57Arts, NY; Point of Contact Gallery, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. Recent two-person and group shows: 'DUST: The Plates of the Present', Centre Pompidou, Paris; Gwenn Thomas + Jason Murphy, Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio; Social Photography IX, Carriage Trade, NY; ‘Re-visions’, Pinakothek Der Modern, Munich, Germany. Selected collections include: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA; Graphic Arts Collection, Firestone Library, Princeton University, NJ; Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield, OH; University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, Kentucky; São Schlumberger, Paris, France; Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal; 'Plates of the Present' Collection, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France. A survey of Thomas' work was published by Charta (Milan, Italy).

Midge Wattles (b. 1990, Kalamazoo, MI) is an artist currently living in Metro Detroit, where she is an MFA candidate in ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has a BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her studio practices in both photography and ceramic sculpture are intimately intertwined. Her work explores elements of light, time, and surface as both material and subject. In 2017, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in photography based in Sicily, where the island’s ancient cultures and surreal bodily landscapes deeply influenced her way of seeing. She is represented in Italy by Francesco Pantaleone Arte Contemporanea in Palermo. Her solo exhibitions include: In the Painting Room at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passloff Foundation in New York (2021), Scirocco at the Italian Consulate in New York (2020), and Passages at Francesco Pantaleone Arte Contemporanea Gallery in Palermo (2019). Her work has been included in art fairs and group exhibitions including: If Sand Were Stone at Below Grand in New York (2025), Miart fair, Milan (2023), The Phair, Torino (2022), Focal Points: Women Advancing the Aperture, at The Delaware Contemporary Arts Museum, Wilmington (2020), Paese Mediterraneo, Il Museo Civico di Castelbuono, Palermo (2017), among others. 

Ben K. Voss (b. 1980, Sinking Spring) lives and works in New York. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include City, Long Play Contemporary, Santa Monica (2025); Springs, Sperling (Office), Munich (2024); Ripple, Rumpelstiltskin, New York (2024); Meeting, Weatherproof, Chicago (2023). Selected group exhibitions include On Blindness, Nara Roesler, New York (2025); Small Paintings and Sculptures, 57W57 Arts, New York (2025); Unreal, Tourist, White River Junction (2021); Behind the Times, Chapter 5, Alyssa Davis Gallery, Online, (2020); Two to Tango Two, Sperling, Munich (2019). Publications include IMPRINTS (2020) and IMPRINTS II (2025) with artist Midge Wattles and Chateau International, London; New American Paintings, NE Edition, 140 (2019); ArtMaze, Summer Edition 13 (2019). He is currently an MFA candidate at Hunter College in NYC and has a forthcoming two-person show at Rumpus Room in St. Louis in November. 

William Wiebe is an artist based in New York and the director of Emmelines, a gallery located at the 5th Ave & 53rd St MTA Station.