Non-Zero Target

BEN TONG, ALIXE TURNER & DOUGLES RIEGER

Opening: July 15th, 6-8 PM

July 15th - August 13th, 2026

Non-Zero Target brings together artists Alixe Turner, Douglas Rieger, and Ben Tong. Across their distinct practices, all three artists consider the unstable relationship between seeing and experiencing and the complexity of making work over time while navigating shifting concepts, materials, and emotions.


As Paul Valéry’s often-cited line suggests, “Nothing is deeper in man than his skin.” External appearances are not simply surfaces; they are intimately connected to our inner reality. The exhibition’s title, Non-Zero Target, points to the gaps, flaws, and adjustments that shape how we understand the world. In ophthalmology, a non-zero target refers to the intentional decision to leave a small, predictable amount of astigmatism to improve overall vision and create balance. Here, that slight imperfection becomes a way of thinking about art itself: the flaw is not a failure, but the condition that allows the world to become personal, specific, and felt.


Douglas Rieger’s sculptures are amalgamations that operate outside anthropocentric expectations. They feel close to dys/functional industrial design, as if stripped of capitalist purpose while still oozing eroticism. Ben Tong’s work presents a different kind of aberration: an optical one, rooted in an intense relationship with photography and transformed through the materiality of oil paint. The vivid magentas, cyans, and yellows recall not only the photographic logic of color, but also position painting itself as an unstable surface of perception.


Alixe Turner’s works are method paintings in the fullest sense: carefully researched ideas embodied through layered surfaces that simultaneously seduce and unsettle. Her work does not try to instruct the viewer, but instead guides us into her fears and concerns about geopolitical tensions, subject formation, and historical memory. By generating forms that obscure origin and complicate legibility, she asks us to question our own perceptions.


Together, the works create a retinal experience that sits uneasily against the sensory world, giving new meaning to Valéry’s skin-deep proposition. These are surfaces and forms that do not simply ask us to think about them, but to think with them. All three artists confront the limits of language; the clarity that a well-placed adjective can bring to a work of art is often insufficient to convey the gestures, intentions, and contradictions embedded within it. Each artist also uses unconventional materials, processes, and formulas to arrive at distinct bodies of work, making decision-making itself one of their primary mediums.



Written by Rodrigo Valenzuela