What Remains

Transformer is honored to present What Remains, the second presentation of a two-part exhibition by DC based artist Noël Kassewitz. Beginning with Lost in the Flood at Transformer's Siren Arts program space in Asbury Park, NJ, the first exhibition anchored Kassewitz's kinetic A(c)qua Alta series to the tide changes of the Jersey Shore and the history of Asbury Park. With her exhibition What Remains at Transformer, Kassewitz continues tracking the ebb and flow of tidal forces, with a focus on DMV area terrain shifts, from coastal memory to national identity.

Drawing upon her ocean-based upbringing and background in art conservation, Noël Kassewitz creates works that feel at once like wistful shrines and research laboratories, adapting materials into resilient forms for uncertain futures. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, she erodes the boundaries between disciplines to examine both the endurance and fragility of cultural memory in the face of rising environmental, social, and political pressures.

What Remains brings this practice to Transformer in America's 250th year — a moment of commemoration that arrives amid profound uncertainty about what, exactly, is being celebrated. American identity, like the self, is an assemblage: borrowed symbols, inherited myths, accumulated gestures toward meaning. Kassewitz looks closely at what holds that assemblage together, and what is quietly giving way.

Kassewitz’s A(c)qua Alta series continues here, with paintings tethered to live NOAA tidal data, rising and falling in real time with nearby water levels. Moving in opposition to one another, it is unclear which will be fated to survive, and which will be lost to the rising waters — waters still rising while attention turns elsewhere. Alongside them, new works move further into the terrain of deconstruction and preservation: of idealized selves, of national symbols, of the stories a culture tells about its own permanence. Collectively they ask: when the icons fall and the norms erode, what remains?

“What Remains, and its companion exhibition Lost in the Flood in NJ, are two timely exhibitions exploring topics of vital importance at local, national and international levels. Transformer is proud to provide two distinct yet connected platforms for Noël’s thoughtful ideas and comprehensive artwork. Whether within the Atlantic Ocean or the Potomac River, tides are a stunning example of the power of gravity. With deeper understanding of their formation, we can better appreciate the waters around us.” – Victoria Reis, Founder; Executive & Artistic Director, Transformer.

ABOUT THE ARTIST/

A multi-time grant winning artist with works held in several public collections, Noël Kassewitz (b. Miami, Florida) has presented artist talks at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and National Gallery of Art. In 2024, she was named an inaugural Environmental Justice Fellow with Social Arts & Culture in partnership with the Aspen Institute. Kassewitz has also been an artist-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center on Governors Island, at Vermont Studio Center as a VSC/Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellow, and in Carrara, Italy with marble master sculptor Boutros Romhein. Center on Governors Island, at Vermont Studio Center as a VSC/Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellow, and in Carrara, Italy with marble master sculptor Boutros Romhein.