Coming, undone unfolds as an environment of shifting visibility—part architectural fragment, part cinematic afterimage, part memorial. Through sculpture, drawing, and suspended installation, Nicolo Gentile constructs a space where queer memory emerges as unstable, atmospheric, and continually unfolding.

Steel grates, screens, and chain curtains create passages of reflection, obstruction, and permeability. Bodies flicker into view, dissolve, and return again through layers of metal, shadow, and light. Drawing from the visual languages of gyms, nightlife, cinema, and urban space, the exhibition traces how queer life moves through coded forms of visibility—through surfaces, gestures, and temporary sites of intimacy and refuge.

While earlier works in the series drew from queer nightlife and archival ephemera, Coming, undone marks a turn toward cinema as a primary source—particularly the films of Gregg Araki and the charged atmosphere of New Queer Cinema. Fragments from The Living End appear throughout the exhibition as unstable images suspended between recognition and disappearance. Rather than direct citation, the film operates as an emotional register within the work, carrying the volatility of desire, grief, intimacy, and defiance associated with the AIDS era into the present.

Throughout the installation, industrial materials become unexpectedly vulnerable and fluid. Structures that resemble barriers instead function as porous thresholds, where collapse and fragmentation open new possibilities for connection and transformation. Viewers move through the exhibition as both observer and participant, implicated within shifting negotiations of distance, recognition, and proximity.

For Gentile, queer memory is carried less through stable archives than through atmosphere, sensation, and encounter—through what remains unresolved, partially obscured, or just beyond legibility. Coming, undone proposes these conditions not only as sites of loss, but as spaces where new forms of relation and imagination can emerge.

This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Faun, New Projects, and Ball Chain USA. Special thanks to New Projects for commissioning and supporting the development of the curtain installation, and to Faun for providing a platform for the realization of the project in Los Angeles.

Exhibition essay For You, For Us, For Now, For Then by C. (Constantine Jones).