SUMMER 2026
HALF-WINGED
Matthew Ritchie + Shara Nova
May 16 – August 15, 2026
RECEPTION: Saturday, May 16, 5-8pm
Presented as an immersive, durational, environmental sonic and visual installation, Half Winged combines live performances by local singers, pre-recorded and live instruments, and a feature length AI-generated ‘movie’. This ambitious yet accessible work is anchored in song, addressing pressing contemporary issues of choice, faith, personal agency, and the impact of technology.
AI is a new form that reopens old questions, not only allowing us to envision multiple futures, but also to rediscover and reimagine lost histories, blending ‘what-might-have-beens’ with myths. In ‘Half Winged’, longtime collaborators composer Shara Nova and visual artist Matthew Ritchie propose a bold, contemporary musical and visual interpretation of creation myths from the Babylonian ‘Enuma Elish’ to ‘Paradise Lost’ and Hollywood movies. The work portrays prismatic AI interpretations of characters like the Weaver (Eve) and the Gardener (Adam) in sung dialogues with figures that could be rival angels or dueling AI programs: the Generator symbolizing choice and the Discriminator embodying control. Drawing from diverse musical traditions, new songs emerge, reflecting these themes.
About Matthew Ritchie
Matthew Ritchie’s environmental installations of paintings, wall drawings, light boxes, games, sculpture, films and performance works are a continuous investigation of the idea of embodied information, explored through a shared universe of interconnected stories and images that draw from art, architecture, science, fiction, history and the dynamics of culture, all unified by a unique, shared visual language.
In 2001, Time magazine listed Ritchie as one of 100 innovators for the new millennium, for exploring “the unthinkable or the not-yet-thought.” His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and museums worldwide including the Whitney Biennial, the Sydney Biennial, the Sao Paulo Bienal, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Seville Biennale and the Havana Biennale. Solo exhibitions include; Dallas Museum of Art, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Mass MoCA, Moody Center for the Arts, Portikus, St Louis Museum of Art and ZKM, His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright Knox Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and numerous other institutions worldwide.
Ritchie was born in 1964 in London, graduated from Camberwell College of Art (BFA) in 1986 and emigrated to the United States in 1987. He is currently a Mentor Professor in the Graduate Visual Arts Program at Columbia University, New York and the Dasha Zhukova Distinguished visiting Artist in Residence at MIT. Awards include the Baloise Art Prize, a National Association of Art Critics award, an ID design award, the Federal Art In Architecture National Honor Award and an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts.
About Shara Nova
Shara Nova is a composer, vocalist, and interdisciplinary artist whose work moves fluidly between indie rock, contemporary classical music, opera, and large-scale participatory performance. She has released six albums under the moniker My Brightest Diamond and has built an expansive career writing for professional ensembles, community choirs, and orchestras while maintaining an active international performing life.
Her choral and vocal compositions have been performed by The Crossing, Conspirare, Cantus Domus, Roomful of Teeth, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Detroit Opera’s Touring Company, and numerous university and community choirs. Nova has composed orchestral and chamber works for yMusic, Brooklyn Rider, Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, and the BBC Concert Orchestra, among others.
Her honors include fellowships and awards from Kresge Arts, Carolina Performing Arts Creative Futures, Knight Foundation, United States Artists, New Music USA, and Opera America. Recordings featuring her work with Conspirare and The Crossing received multiple Grammy nominations in 2023.
Adam Shirley + Alberte Tranberg brings together recent works by Alberte Tranberg and Adam Shirley, two artists whose practices engage deeply with metal as a site of labor, time, and material decision-making. Shown within the context of SNAG and hosted by Wasserman Projects, the exhibition connects individual studio practices to broader conversations about making, effort, and value in contemporary metal and jewelry. Rather than approaching metal as a neutral medium, both artists foreground labor as an active and visible component of the work. Processes such as cutting, bending, joining, and repeating are not hidden but allowed to remain present, shaping both form and meaning. In this sense, labor is not only a means to an end, but a way of thinking through material.
Presented together, the works create a dialogue around different approaches to metalwork—ranging from precision and control to repetition, accumulation, and wear. The exhibition proposes labor as a shared ground, while allowing distinct positions to emerge through material choices, scale, and process.
Adam Shirley + Alberte Tranberg is on view from May 16 – June 13, 2026
About Adam Shirley
Adam Shirley’s works arise from an investigation into the relationships between two and three dimensional objects, material and scale. Shirley explores form and volume in model-sized flat pieces that leave the interpretation of scale and function open to the viewer.
Working primarily with steel, a material typically associated with utility and function, Shirley creates objects that exist in a state “somewhere between a thought or idea and the process of transformation into physical form.” The results are works that engage the viewer into exploring the potentials of each object or form, not so much to arrive at a a definition of what they are, but simply to enjoy the journey of envisioning what they could be.
Adam Shirley received his BFA in 1993 from the College for Creative Studies (CCS), in Detroit, Michigan, and a Master of Fine Arts in Metalsmithing Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 2010. Shirley has recently received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award.
About Alberte Tranberg
Alberte Tranberg (b. 1990, Copenhagen) is an artist and metal fabricator who earned her MFA in Metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art, in 2018. She is a 2016 Fulbright recipient and was a Penland Winter resident 2025.
Tranberg engages the performative nature of interior objects through subtle architectural interventions. Her approach to making is a responsive dialogue between material and tool, whilst shaping gestures of familiar forms to emotive narratives.
She has exhibited at Devening Projects (Chicago, IL), Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (Buffalo, NY), Ornamentum Gallery (Hudson, NY), Materia Gallery (Detroit, MI), BULK Space (Detroit, MI), and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), and has designed an award-winning series of handles for Reform Kitchens. Her work has been presented at the 5th edition of the Venice Design Biennial and featured in Special Exhibitions at Season Contemporary Fair (Detroit, 2025). In collaboration with Iris Eichenberg as BERG+BERG, Tranberg has presented work with Ornamentum at Salon Art + Design (New York, NY) and Design Miami (2021).