Dreamlives of Debris

curated by Pallavi Surana

 

A.J. Cincotta-Eichenfield, Anamaya Farthing-Kohl, Rohan V. Khanna

 

August 1st – August 30th, 2025

 

GHOSTMACHINE Gallery presents Dreamlives of Debris, a summer exhibition guest curated by Pallavi Surana featuring artists Anamaya Farthing-Kohl, A.J. Cincotta-Eichenfield and Rohan V. Khanna. Debris is the afterimage of rupture—war, displacement, environmental collapse— uprooted from its origins and gathered in unintended places, stripped of context and function. In this exhibition, however, such fragments—rubble, gravel, volcanic rock, dirt—are reimagined: as vessels for memory and speculative meaning-making. Through acts of listening, layering, and reassembly, the artists reckon with materials unmoored in time, and retether these displaced objects with a sense of place.  

In Listening Sole, Anamaya Farthing-Kohl transforms a severed piece of sidewalk into a listening device. Suspended beneath a long copper pole, the interactive listening device hums with wind, evoking oceanic movement and opening up a space of resonance between built environment and elemental force. Nearby, divination cards invite reflection: Who owns the land beneath our feet? What is the sidewalk’s place in deep time? If it is modernity’s skin, what are the consequences of its scarring? Anamaya’s work draws us into layered temporal registers—urban planning, colonial expansion, geological formation—and proposes that even the most ordinary surfaces carry the imprints of contested place-making.

A.J. Cincotta-Eichenfield’s Memory / Stone consists of photopolymer etchings, photographic prints and sonic outputs that begin with a volcanic rock, carried home by his grandmother from their ancestral island of Stromboli in Italy. Though he’s never been there, the rock—long kept in a jar on his grandmother’s windowsill—held the weight of imagined return and forced familiarity. It stood as both relic and rupture: a proxy for a place he never knew, and a symbol of time suspended between generations. Through scanning, digital rendering, image layering, and sonic probing, AJ disorients the rock’s visual identity, mirroring the fracturing of belonging across distance and diasporic inheritance. His process, that builds out from the rock and screenshots of youtube videos of the active volcano, is attuned to distortion and noise, reframing the rock as an object of temporal drift—a fragment caught between memory, media, and myth.

In Vermin’s Treasure, Rohan V. Khanna approaches debris as both ruin and resource. Inside dirt-filled pedestals, visible only through peepholes, are micro-landscapes assembled from grapevines, cigarette butts, and discarded curios. Dirt, here, is the infrastructure, creating speculative habitats that act as zones of feral intimacy and minor histories, suggesting a poetics of survival shaped by what slips through systems of value.

In a larger sense, the exhibition traces an arc through debris: beginning with Farthing-Kohl’s engagement with the infrastructural and ecological wreckage left in the wake of industrialization, and extending into AJ and Rohan’s more personal, speculative reworkings of displacement and inherited dislocation. Although debris begins as aftermath, it does not end there. In these works, fragments are made malleable—capable of evoking alternate pasts and imagined returns. The artists in Dreamlives of Debris render debris as porous and sentient—capable of carrying memory and inciting reflection. 

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Link to web: https://ghostmachinegallery.com/projects/dreamlives-of-debris-curated-by-pallavi-surana/