Johanna Hedva's 'Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy' at CARA Built to Expire by December

Johanna Hedva's exhibition Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) is designed around its own ending. The opening work, "The Clock Is Always Wrong (Other Mouth)" (2023–ongoing), hangs a glass vial from the ceiling by hooks and chains, releasing a thick, ink-black liquid that drips into the carpeted gallery floor; the sculpture holds enough of the substance to last until December, and its emptiness will mark the show's close. Hedva, a Korean-American artist, writer, and composer, works across mediums, and the exhibition presents six works. Their writing includes prose, poems, and essays such as "Sick Woman Theory" (2016), which treats illness and death as subjects of inquiry rather than despair. In the second-floor main gallery, "I'm Not Punished by What You Like to Be Punished by" (2026) stretches light-tan jersey over charred wood and pools it on the floor, its edge trimmed with Indian temple hair — hair cut during Hindu rituals and frequently sold in tracks to Western buyers to support temple upkeep. That same hair appears in "I'll Take More" (2026), draped over a wood frame, where a preserved luna moth hangs from a piano string protruding from the panel. The review judges the six works as engaging with surrender to the cosmos but not persuasive enough to follow Hedva into the void.