HAIR+NAILS is pleased to announce ROTATE, a group show opening at our NYC gallery at 39 Henry St. on Wednesday, September 3, 2025. This show launches the gallery’s second year of programming in the New York location and the 10th season of programming at the HAIR+NAILS mothership gallery in Minneapolis. Exhibiting artists include Cameron Patricia Downey, Chris Larson, Dahn Gim, Rachel Youn, Ryan Fontaine.
ROTATE at HAIR+NAILS opens with Heavy Rotation, a video by Chris Larson that was last seen in NYC at the Whitney Biennial. Heavy Rotation deals with a theme that has recurred frequently through the history of art: the artist at work in the studio. Here, though, the studio is not simply the location of the artwork’s genesis; the artist uses the artwork itself to dissect the space—and ultimately destroy the site—of its own production. In the video, Larson uses a turntable apparatus to inscribe circles onto paper, eventually perforating it. He continues the action until he breaks through the floor, creating a disorienting passage into unexpected new spaces.
Cameron Patricia Downey contributes NowandLater I, a spinning chandelier fashioned from pork rinds, icee pop, pickle, hot cheetos, hugs, and epoxy. This stunning sculpture is from their “Super Deluxe” body of work in which Downey “circles and jaunts around codes of luxury, pleasure, service and gameplay by a jostling of material, personal recollection, flavor and motion itself.” Ryan Fontaine and Rachel Youn recently shared space in an expansive installation of kinetic sculptures that at turns enhanced and replaced dancers in the 2024-5 show “Jealousy/Sway”. In ROTATE, Youn’s sculptures are excerpts of that set as well as their breakout show “Gather” at St. Louis’s Great Rivers Biennial. The only non-kinetic work of the show, Dahn Gim’s Strata: 2016-2020, appears as an elegant, slender column. It was created by the artist rolling, compressing, heating, curing, turning and sanding layers of paper from her visa application…reams of pages of proofs of “extraordinary ability” so she can live here as an artist in the US.

ARTIST BIOS:
Cameron Patricia Downey (b.1998, N. Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an anti-disciplinary artist whose work oscillates between sculpture, photography, film, body, curation and otherwise. Peering into the private lives of objects, seeing instruction in the incidental, the precarious and the misremembered, Downey’s work strives to archive, unfurl, make-altar-of and lend fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation.
Downey’s work has been exhibited by HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis and New York; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; Engage Projects, Chicago; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; T293 Gallery, Rome; Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; James Fuentes, New York; Strada Gallery, New York. They were the 2023 recipient of the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation’s MN Art Prize and are a recent artist in residence with the Walker Art Center’s Moving Image department, The Yale Peabody Museum, Juxtaposition Arts, Loghaven Artist Residency and Second Shift Studio Space of Saint Paul. Downey graduated from Columbia University in 2021 with a double concentration in visual art and environmental science and is currently a second-year MFA candidate in sculpture at the Yale School of Art. Cameron Patricia Downey has exhibited frequently with HAIR+NAILS since 2019 including Downey’s solo show “Lord Split Me Open” (2023).
http://www.cameronpdowney.com Instagram: @cameronpatricia_

 

Chris Larson is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Saint Paul, Minnesota and is represented by ENGAGE Projects in Chicago, IL. He earned his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Sculpture from Yale University in 1991. Over the course of his career, Larson has received numerous prestigious awards, including the New Work Project Grant from The Harpo Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Bush Artist Fellowship, the McKnight Artist Fellowship, and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Minnesota.
Larson’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at prominent institutions such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN; the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY; and The View Contemporary Art Space in Switzerland. His art has also been presented at major biennials, including the 2nd Biennial del Fin del Mundo in Ushuaia, Argentina; the 4th Bienal de Montevideo in Montevideo, Uruguay; the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York City; and the 11th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In 2018, Larson presented a comprehensive solo exhibition, Chris Larson: Ten Years, at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, OH. In addition to his gallery and museum exhibitions, Larson’s film work has garnered international recognition, with screenings at several film festivals, including the World Premiere of Stillness of Labor at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), the Tabor International Film Festival in Croatia, the DTLA Film Festival in Los Angeles, CA, and the Mediterranean Film Festival Cannes-Milan-Athens, among others. Larson’s work is represented in the permanent collections of several prestigious institutions, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, and the Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, among others. In 2019, he co-founded Second Shift Studio Space in St. Paul, MN, a nonprofit residency program and gallery dedicated to serving artists/makers/thinkers whose gender identity has historically marginalized them.
This is Chris Larson’s first exhibition with HAIR+NAILS.
http://www.chrislarsonstudio.com

 

Born in Busan, South Korea, and raised in Canada, Dahn Gim moved to Los Angeles in 2013 and is currently based in Minneapolis. Her work reflects the dual perspectives of being both an insider and an outsider, intricately woven into the tapestry of her life as a “forever foreigner,” shaped by the nomadic ebb and flow of perpetual immigrant status. Exploring the complexities of hybrid identity, Gim engages with various materials to grapple with the friction and fragmentation of assimilation and dislocation. Deeply informed by self-inquiry during times of dispersion, uncertainty, and a longing for belonging, she transmutes her ideas across multiple mediums, including video, sculpture, participatory drawings, durational performance, and installation.
After completing her MFA in Media Arts at UCLA, Gim has exhibited her work at prominent venues in Los Angeles, including the Hammer Museum, Steve Turner Gallery, AA|LA, Human Resources, Barnsdall Art Gallery, Gas Gallery, Camera Obscura Art Lab, Kala Art Institute, Brand Art Library, and Angels Gate Cultural Center. She has also shown her work internationally at venues such as Somerset House (UK), Post Territory Ujeongguk, Space One, Dongdaemun Design Plaza (South Korea), Basis (Frankfurt); Rabindranath Tagore Centre (India) and ifa-laboratory (Belgium). Additionally, she has participated in various international art festivals, including Currents New Media, the UCLA Game Art Festival, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Other Places Art Fair, Now Instant Image Hall, and the LA Art Book Fair at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, as well as Art Souterrain and Now Play This at Somerset House. Recently, Gim was awarded the 2024 McKnight Visual Artists Fellowship.
This is Dahn Gim’s third exhibition with HAIR+NAILS.
http://www.dahngim.com
Instagram: @dahngim

 

Rachel Youn (b. 1994) is an American artist working across sculpture and installation.
Solo exhibitions include G Gallery (Seoul, South Korea), Night Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY), Soy Capitán (Berlin, Germany), HAIR + Nails (Minneapolis, MN), and the Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis, MO). Their work has been exhibited internationally in Hong Kong, China, Italy, Germany, England, Sweden, and The Netherlands, amongst others.
Youn is a recipient of the Lighthouse Works Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and the 2020 Great Rivers Biennial Award. They received their BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and their MFA at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, CT. Youn’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artsy, ARTnews, Vogue, LA Review of Books, Artillery Magazine, Elephant, amongst others. In 2025, they were selected by Art in America for their New Talent issue.
This is Rachel’s seventh exhibition with HAIR+NAILS including their solo show “Underparty” (2021).
Rachel Youn: “New Talent 2025.” Art in America. Summer 2025. http://www.rachelyoun.com
Instagram: @rachelyoun

 

Ryan Fontaine (b. 1971, Austin, TX) is a self-taught artist based in Minneapolis, MN. Recent exhibitions include Nightclub Gallery (St. Paul, MN), Truman State University (Kirksville, MO) and Rochester Art Center (Rochester, MN). He has received commissions for public sculptures from Franconia Sculpture Park (Shafer, MN) and Rochester Art Center. He is a recipient of a 2023 VAF grant from Midway Contemporary Art with funding from the Warhol Foundation for ‘TEMP/reviews’, an online platform for critical writing around Twin Cities based art exhibitions. Fontaine co-founded HAIR+NAILS Contemporary Art with his partner Kristin Van Loon.
http://www.ryanfontaine.com
Instagram: @oval_headley