Your Sun Forever. Elise Warfield, Shaan Parikh

I used to spend hours, uninterrupted, in my studio. These stretches, contemplating my work, felt imperative to making my paintings, which were filled with calm, quiet introspection. Then, everything changed, and I had five or ten minutes to paint at a time. Anytime I started to get lost in making, concentration was shattered, first by a baby’s cry and, later by the chubby fingers of a toddler’s hand reaching into my palette. It wasn’t working. With astronomical childcare costs, working from home or leaving the workforce entirely has become more and more common for women. I was left with the question: how do I make it work? My solution was a collaborative studio where my child and I would work together, spending hours at a time in matching coveralls, lessons on color mixing and smeared in oil paint. Several works consider how the act of utterance—the primitive response to external shifts—can reveal or erode meaning. Maggie Cunai Fan reenacts a childhood memory of falling off a bike with her lens. By framing the wounded legs, the bicycle and bloody remnants on the ground with the phrase “IT HURTS”, she reflects on how pain can paradoxically hide the cause of inflictions, and how language loses meaning through repetition. In a similar thread, Linda Dong brings together AI-generated faces and elements of her own body in a sequence of portrait images, unfolding as a slideshow. Through ingenious humor, the video meditates on naming as a symbolic act. Choreographing voices, breaths, rhythms, and perception, Jasphy Zheng collaborates with eight participants during improvisational workshops, asking each to simultaneously play their own sounds and respond to others. When I brought my newborn home in 2021, I found myself spending hours studying features that somehow felt simultaneously so familiar and so new. As he grew, every change and new personality trait brought that same combination of familiarity and the unanticipated. When I invited my child into my studio practice, I was welcoming the unexpected into my work. However, much of the imagery centers around things that are common in our daily lives: plants from our garden, my child’s toys, trees from our favorite neighborhood park, and revisitations of paintings I made before my child was even an idea that hang on the walls of our home today. The resulting paintings are full of movement, simple but busy, playful, unexpected yet familiar, very much reflecting life with a young child. Elise Warfield Elise Warfield is a painter. She holds a B.F.A. from Penn State University and an M.F.A. from School of Visual Arts, Shaan is a 5-year-old boy. Tutu Gallery is a DIY art space located in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, founded in July 2019 by Tutu (cat). Her assistants include April Z for Curation & Public Relations, Julia Sung for Outreach & Communications, and Tif Wong for Advising & Programming. Tutu shows art slightly “off the wall”, in the space, and with interesting people. As of 2026, the gallery has presented 46 exhibitions across the New York metropolitan area, mostly first solo or two-person shows of international emerging artists. The shows and artists here are featured in i-D, ArtReview, Harper’s BAZAAR China, LIFE Magazine China, Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, New York Review of Architecture, and many more.

What to expect:
Painting