“Bed Bath & Body Works” by Heejo Kim, Jenson Leonard, and Danni O’Brien | Closing Reception + Artist Talk

Current Space is proud to present
Bed Bath & Body Works
An exhibition of works by Heejo Kim, Jenson Leonard, and Danni O’Brien

Featuring paintings by Heejo Kim, short films by Jenson Leonard, and sculptures by Danni O’Brien, Bed Bath & Body Works explores a space where the familiar everyday is blurred and reconstructed.

Exhibition Duration: July 31 – Sept 13, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, July 31 from 7-10pm
Closing Reception & Artist Talk: Sunday, Sept 13
Gallery Hours: Saturdays from 1-5pm, during public events, or by appointment

About Heejo Kim

Heejo Kim (b. 1995, Seoul, South Korea) is a Baltimore-based painter whose work explores how existence is continually shaped through relationships. Her intentionally incomplete figures inhabit the threshold between self and other, human and nonhuman, inviting viewers to reconsider identity as relational rather than fixed.

Kim received her MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (2023) and her BFA from Hongik University (2018). She received the AHL–T&W Foundation Contemporary Visual Art Award and an Individual Grant from the Belle Foundation for Cultural Development in 2025 and was a Semifinalist for the Sondheim Art Prize the same year.

She has participated in residencies at the Wassaic Project, Vermont Studio Center, Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, and Monson Arts. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Artsy, Booooooom, and Artit Magazine, and appeared in the Netflix original series KARMA (2025).

Artist Statement:
The figures in my paintings are intentionally incomplete. Their eyes and mouths remain unseen, leaving only noses and ears visible; they seem to inhabit the threshold between self and other, human and nonhuman. Rather than existing as fixed identities, they remain open beings, continually shaped through their relationships with people, objects, places, memories, and time.

This perspective is rooted in the Buddhist concept of Dependent Arising, which understands existence not as autonomous or self-contained, but as something revealed, transformed, and sustained through interdependence. The figures, therefore, emerge not as isolated individuals but as relational beings.

Even within seemingly insignificant presences, a glass bottle, a star sticker, or a line of tiny ants, they encounter gestures of tenderness and incomplete intimacy. In my work, relationships are not defined by complete understanding or possession, but unfold through incompleteness, asymmetry, and continual transformation. They remain spaces of waiting and dwelling, where relationships are sustained not through certainty, but through an openness to what continues to emerge.

About Jenson Leonard

Jenson Leonard (b. 1990, Detroit, Michigan) is an artist working across memes and internet culture, sculpture, installation, film, and generative AI. His work explores how digital media shapes contemporary life, identity, and visual culture. He has exhibited at Pioneer Works and the Hessel Museum of Art, and has completed residencies at Obracadobra and Squeaky Wheel. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pratt Institute and teaches in the Media Study Department at University at Buffalo.

Consensus Reality Te Deum (CRT) is an ongoing cycle of short films that stages an encounter between broadcast television-era cinematic grammars and the synthetic aesthetics of contemporary image generation. Drawing on the visual languages of monster truck broadcasts, Hong Kong action cinema, music television, and early digital media, the works treat prompted images not as replacements for filmmaking but as raw material for montage, production design, and cinematic composition. The resulting films occupy an unstable space between memory and simulation, where familiar televisual forms are reconstructed through the probabilistic logic of generative models.

About Danni O’Brien

Danni O’Brien (they/ she) is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Baltimore, Maryland. Their practice spans drawing, sculpture, ceramics, and installation, and is rooted in tinkering and queerness, concocting post-human, cyborgian objects and worlds. O’Brien’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions with Stove Works, Visarts, Ortega y Gasset Projects, the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, and Tephra ICA. They have exhibited in group exhibitions with Current Space, Grizzly Grizzly, PFA Gallery, Asya Geisberg Gallery, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent honors include the 2025 Trawick Grand Prize, a nomination for the 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellowship, and being named a 2026 Sondheim Prize Finalist. O’Brien has been awarded artist residencies with Vermont Studio Center, PLOP, Art Farm, Wassaic Project, Byrdcliffe Colony, and the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency. They hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture with a minor in art history from James Madison University.

Artist Statement:
Scavenged home goods are transformed into speculative, absurd, amalgamated sculptures. I gather overconsumed and forgotten domestic ephemera from dumpsters, Craigslist, and donations, then tinker and assemble their disjointed segments into unruly, exaggerated forms. As familiar items morph, the sculptures slip into uncanny machines, bodies, architectures, and their hybrids. Imbuing them with play, irreverence, and dysfunction, they are queer in their misbehavior, nonconformity, and otherworldly affect.

I assemble discarded at-home exercise equipment and other post-consumer cast-offs into cyborgian creatures and contraptions. These rarely used, overwhelmingly plastic apparatuses are grafted with organic and natural forms. I minimally alter the surfaces of found materials, allowing their original histories to remain legible, generating uncanny encounters and provoking nostalgia. “Natural” forms emerge from cast wax replicas of faux rock yard concealers, solar-powered rock lights, and gourds. I cultivate gourds from seed, then dry, resurface, and create molds to cast replicas in recycled, redolent candle wax and reclaimed aluminum. Simultaneously phallic and breast-like, smooth and warty, these forms serve as proxies for bodies in flux and transformation.

My process cycles between deconstruction and reconstruction, mirroring queer identity formation and world-building. Through deliberately counterbalancing, pressure fitting, and cantilevering materials, works remain literally and figuratively precarious, foregrounding instability, maintenance, and vulnerability. By playfully queering and reimagining everyday materials, the resulting sculptures and installations articulate a vision for objects beyond human obsolescence, collapsing the boundaries between ancient and futuristic, synthetic and organic, familiar and alien.

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This exhibition run concurrently with Demolition by Neglect: Research and Residues A Solo Exhibition By Marian April Glebes.