Pepper's Ghost
Lower East Side Printshop is pleased to present: Pepper's Ghost.
Organized by Rosa Chang, the group show features 13 artists connected to LESP as members of the staff, interns, and monitors.
Exhibiting artists: Daisy Benardo, Amelia Juszczak, Esther Kim, Heewon Lee, Jessie Li, Farah Mohammad, Nathan Ng Catlin, Rosa Chang, Isabel Paredes, Henry Rosenberg, Ian Ruppenthal, Hanna Wuttig, and Kyung Eun You
Exhibition Dates: June 26 - July 31, 2026
Hours: Weekdays 10am - 6pm; Weekends 12 - 6pm
Opening Reception: Friday, June 26, 5 - 8pm
This inaugural exhibition gathers past and current staff of the Lower East Side Printshop, many of whom the community has primarily witnessed helping to produce the work of other artists.
Printmaking often only presents the viewer with its flat, single output. Behind it lies a highly laborious, tactile, and iterative process that demands extreme care for the physical objects in the printer’s hands. We grow attached to the tools, plates, and proofs that the public will never see. It is precisely this private intimacy that allows the printer to understand every color order, carved groove, and misetched line, deepening their personal commitment to the plate. It is also why prints are often most appreciated by other printmakers, who squint endlessly in front of a piece, trying to empathize with and decipher every layer of process behind the final proof hanging before them.
The same hidden labor sustains a printshop and its wider community. Each of the artists presented here has stayed long past work hours, in front of the press, to pursue and reflect upon the invisible roots, cultural origins, negative spaces, and processes that shaped the conditions of their own work and inquiries.
Several works take those hidden personal explorations as their very subject. Henry Rosenberg exhibits rubbings, originally used as means of proofing, as final prints, while simultaneously referencing the visual motifs and recurring political atmosphere of Félix Vallotton’s L’Âge du Papier. Farah Mohammad similarly creates rubbings of past works, allowing them to operate as both the “image and trace” and reconstructing them to “re-emerge in altered relation to a new environment."
Sometimes, invisible labor is directly located in the technicality and layers of the print. Daisy Benardo and Hanna Wuttig take on painstakingly meticulous processes in pursuit of the final output, while treating chance as an inevitable collaborator to create dissolving pixels and oscillating layers. Suyeon Rosa Chang’s colorful dreamscape similarly incorporates eight rounds of high-stakes, irreversible reduction woodcut technique. Kyung Eun You, alternatively, repurposes discarded wooden screen frames into resting figurines, extending care to overlooked craftsmanship and materials through a process originally intended as a way to redirect stress.
Others acknowledge the traditions of predecessors and cultural practices as guiding influences. Amelia Juszczak turns to inherited craft, building a tribute to her grandparents’ Polish basket-weaving that honors the skills and traditions of a community usually left unseen. Heewon Lee similarly takes inspiration from her Korean heritage to alter the viewing experience of her book with references to Zodiac Animals and Dancheong patterns.
Across the show, the natural environment also serves as a quiet but undeniable force shaping artists’ practices. Roots take on a literal, visual form: as dangling wires sprawling across abandoned industrial spaces in Jessie Li's installation, as a manifestation of revenge in Esther Kim's print, and as flashes of lightning across a serene landscape in Ian Ruppenthal's etching. In the case of Nathan Ng Catlin's close-up of a figure caught mid-motion and the chaotic, intertwined sprawl of Isabel Paredes's horse race, artists quietly build up anticipation within everyday scenes.
All across, we are invited to look closely as a printmaker does: reading into the care, the chance, and the labor that the final proof quietly conceals.
About the Organizer:
Rosa (Suyeon) Chang is an interdisciplinary artist working across Printmaking, Sculpture, and Performance, as well as the Education Coordinator at the Lower East Side Printshop. She holds a BA in Computer Science and Fine Arts from Yale University. She has held solo and group exhibitions internationally, including Songeun Art Foundation, Makerpark NYC, Hongik Arts Center, We Are the Arts Foundation, The Graduate Hotel, Montclair Art Museum, and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Her work has been featured in VICE i-D and HUG100’s Artists to Watch, and she has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Ox-bow School of Art, Makerspace NYC, Vermont Studio Center, Pocoapoco, and Trinity College.