*In New York:

Hannah Motzel Brown + Jonathan Herrera Soto The Light Comes in the Shape of the Voice.
Open hours every Friday/Saturday/Sunday from 1-6pm. 39 Henry St, NY, NY 10002.

HAIR+NAILS is pleased to announce The Light Comes in the Shape of the Voice, a two-person show of drawings by Hannah Motzel Brown and Jonathan Herrera Soto opening Thursday, March 5, 2026, at HAIR+NAILS NYC at 39 Henry St. This is the first time these two artists have exhibited together. Both artistsshare deep ties with the HAIR+NAILS community in Minneapolis.

This suite of new drawings by Hannah Motzel Brown was built over a year of the artist’s rigorous practice in her home studio in Los Angeles. Working with mechanical pencil on paper, her rendering process holds space to filter, soften, distort, and reflect on her inner world and its external manifestations. Expressive flowers, ripe glistening fruit, poetic shadows, and dense patterns are all symbolic imagery used for analyzing the complexity of identity, the feminine, a deeply personal narrative. Proportion and scale are crudely depicted while texture and detail are approached with precision. A quiet tension between fantasy and realism; a museum of moments that the breeze passes through, where the flowers are always in bloom.

Jonathan Herrera Soto shares an iteration of his Deterritorialization Studies that depict storms within the folds of the composition plane. His drawings are complicated by marks made when folding the drawing into a paper airplane, creating contour lines when he unfolds that appear to render the initial scaffolding for a single-point perspective drawing; the vanishing point always placed square in the center of the composition. Herrera Soto reflects: “The location where we first learn how to draw from the single point perspective is one of the initial sites where we acquire the tools to render an image convincing. A procedure we learn and then deploy to convince others of something real — a visual system that invests in remembering and obeying certain rules in compositional space. Within the genocide of early America, Spaniards created maps to render legible their dominion, to visually authenticate an outline of their possessions in the New World. Indigenous peoples also make maps of the world. The differences in perspective meant maps were made rooted in vastly incompatible understandings of space, culture, community, and reality. Visual space literally looks different depending on whether you live in a place, or attempt to convince others you own it.

 

*In Minneapolis:

HAIR+NAILS is pleased to present CHRIS LARSON Sculpture 2025-2026, a solo show by Twin Cities-based artist Chris Larson, opening Thursday, February 26, 2026, at HAIR+NAILS Minneapolis. This is the artist’s first solo show with HAIR+NAILS. Larson’s iconic video work “Heavy Rotation” anchored the group show “ROTATE” at HAIR+NAILS’ NYC gallery this past fall.

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, February 26, 2026. 7:00 -10:00pm
OPEN GALLERY HOURS: walk-ins welcome: Thursdays/Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays 1:00-5:00 starting February 27 through April 5, 2026. Also, appointments can be scheduled via hairandnailsart@gmail.com.

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 a 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. exhibition, Chris Larson: Function is Redundant, at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, OH. In 2018, Larson presented a comprehensive 10 year survey 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.

http://www.chrislarsonstudio.com