Satchel Projects is pleased to present Tail of the Cosmos, an exhibition of recent works by Cadence Giersbach, on view from May 22 through June 22, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, May 22 from 6–8 PM.

Tail of the Cosmos brings together a group of interrelated sculptures, paintings, and hybrid works that reflect the artist’s deeply held feelings about nature, the universe, and our place within it. Giersbach’s recent sculptures are poetic meditations on the connection between the terrestrial and the celestial. Beginning from a personally meaningful site -- a garden the artist has been cultivating in the Western Catskills – Giersbach’s frame of reference expands outward, from the specificity of this meaningful terrain, to the ecological, the elemental, and the cosmic.

Two sculptures in the exhibition take the form of reimagined flowers. The larger of the two, Tail of the Cosmos, is a play on both verbal and visual language, as the word “cosmos” can refer both to the universe and to a genus of flower in the daisy family. The center of Giersbach’s flower is painted with small seed-stars. The stem undulates through space, changing from green to blue, and culminating in an orb-shaped form that could be a bulb or a rattle, adorned with celestial seed-stars that mirror or echo those on the front of the flower. In Giersbach’s words,

“I see the garden as a place of memory, sensation, and thought. I combine representations of living things and geological formations with symbols like spirals and stars to create work that describes aspects of the natural world and our small place in the universe through a metaphysical or fantastical lens.”

The theme of interconnectedness is also reflected in the material treatment of the works. The surfaces of Giersbach’s sculptures are rough and textured, emphasizing their handmade nature. Paint is applied to this surface terrain, the topography of the object pulling further dimension out of the pigment as it pools and thins over the varied surface. The interaction of color and material continues in a series of unstretched paintings on unprimed canvas. Here Giersbach uses a process of staining, with pigment soaking into the warp and weft of the canvas. in the artist’s words, “the image is part of, not on top of, the material.”

The terrestrial-to-celestial metaphor is also clearly present in a series of kite-shaped paintings. These works on unstretched, unprimed canvas have shapes and titles that allude to birds, a star, the sun. Giersbach’s kites hover between categories: art and craft, object and painting. They can be understood as relating to geometric abstraction, the Pattern and Decoration movement, and the history of shaped painting. Giersbach elaborates,

“I see them as metaphors for flight, the precariousness of life, and the connection between earth and sky. I incorporate references to early American quilts and abstract geometric paintings into the work. I spend a lot of time watching the birds in my garden, so they are in the kites, too.”

Cadence Giersbach lives and works in New York City and Sullivan County, NY. Her work has been featured in solo shows at Roebling Hall (Brooklyn, NY) Venetia Kapernekas Fine Arts (New York, NY) and Deitch Projects (New York, NY). Group shows include PS122 (New York, NY), White Columns (New York, NY), Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY), Museo Rufino Tamayo (Mexico City, MX), Brooklyn Museum of Art (Brooklyn, NY), Galerie Faurschou (Copenhagen, DK), Kunsthalle Nürnberg (Nürnberg, DE). She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in Painting and attended residencies at PS122 Studio Program, MacDowell, and Cité Internationale des Arts. Giersbach’s work has been commissioned by Arts for Transit, MTA (Brooklyn, NY), Percent for Art (Queens, NY); the Palladium Co. (West Palm Beach, FL) and is in the public collections of the Albright-Knox (Buffalo, NY), Harvard Business School (Boston, MA) and the RISD Museum, (Providence, RI). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, ArtNet Magazine, The Village Voice, and Art Forum, among others. Giersbach earned a BA from Vassar College, an MFA from Rutgers University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Giersbach was born in New York, NY.

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