Winter Studio Residency at Bushwick Gallery
Brooklyn, NY
February 1–28, 2026
Public Showcase: February 26, 2026
Throughout February, Bushwick Gallery has operated as an active working studio. The Winter Studio Residency centers on process, experimentation, and sustained time inside the gallery environment.
The 2026 resident artists are Tristan Oliveira, Thelma Sigurhansdottir, and Chris Golub.
Over the course of the month, each artist has used the space to challenge direction and test new approaches.
Tristan Oliveira has revisited archival material and previously unseen images, exploring new methods of printing and editing while placing older works in dialogue with the present.
Thelma Sigurhansdottir has developed a new body of paintings that marks a clear shift in her practice, embracing uncertainty and structural change.
Chris Golub’s work engages the idea that something is altered or lost in the act of making, positioning that transformation as central to the creation of meaning.
The residency culminates in a one-night public showcase on February 26 titled “We lose something everyday.” The presentation reflects a month of active inquiry, experimentation, and deliberate risk taking inside the studio.
We Lose Something Everyday
Winter Studio Residency at Bushwick Gallery
Showcase February 26
Throughout February, Bushwick Gallery transformed into a working studio, temporarily shedding the polished expectations of exhibition mode and leaning fully into experimentation. The Winter Studio Residency is intentionally non commercial. It privileges risk over resolution and inquiry over immediate outcome.
This year’s resident artists, Tristan Oliveira, Thelma Sigurhansdottir, and Chris Golub, used the month not to refine existing bodies of work, but to challenge their own trajectories. What emerged was not a unified aesthetic but a shared willingness to let something fall away.
The culminating showcase, titled “We lose something everyday”, frames the residency with philosophical clarity. The phrase suggests quiet erosion, but also growth. It gestures toward the idea that identity itself is shaped through subtraction, that becoming is inseparable from loss.
For Tristan Oliveira, the residency became an excavation of archive and memory. He returned to previously unseen images, experimenting with new printing and editing techniques while allowing older works to enter into dialogue with one another. What began as fragments of documentation evolved into a constructed personal mythology. By pulling forward images that had never been shown, Oliveira blurred the line between past and present, assembling a layered visual narrative that feels both intimate and deliberate.
Thelma Sigurhansdottir approached the month as a decisive pivot point. Presenting an entirely new body of paintings, she embraced a direction that stands in sharp contrast to her earlier work. The shift is not subtle. It is structural. Where familiarity once guided her practice, uncertainty now leads. The residency provided the space to fully commit to this transformation, allowing her to explore a visual language that feels oppositional to her previous output. The result signals not evolution alone, but rupture and renewal.
Chris Golub’s contribution anchors the exhibition in philosophical inquiry. The title itself operates as a conceptual lens through which the work can be understood. His exploration centers on the idea that art is not a resolution of loss, but a manifestation of it. The attempt to materialize an internal idea inevitably alters it. Something is always displaced in the act of making. Yet it is precisely within that displacement that art becomes new, strange, or even inscrutable. Rather than treating loss as something to overcome, Golub frames it as the engine of creation itself.
What connects these three artists is not medium or style, but temperament. Throughout the month, the residency functioned as a space of mutual risk taking. Experimentation became contagious. Fearlessness fed on proximity. The studio environment allowed each artist to witness the others in moments of vulnerability, encouraging bolder decisions and deeper commitment to uncertainty.
Winter Studio at Bushwick Gallery serves as a reminder that galleries can function as laboratories as much as stages. By shifting focus away from commercial pressure and toward process, the residency foregrounds the act of making as an event in itself.
On February 26, the studio opens into a focused showcase. The works on view are not simply finished objects. They are evidence of a month spent testing boundaries, revisiting histories, and stepping deliberately into the unknown.
“We lose something everyday” does not read as lament. It reads as acknowledgment. In losing one version of the work, or one version of ourselves, something unfamiliar has space to emerge.