Refuse, Roadkill, and Bodily Relics Survive in “Aftermath”

“Aftermath,” on view in the gallery at Machines with Magnets in Pawtucket, showcases four young artists from RISD’s Glass, Sculpture, and Ceramics MFA programs: Nahom Ghebredngl, Carrie Kouts, Maha Mohan, and Jungeun Park. Wall text describes how the work “attends to bodies that are passed over and brushed aside, to lives that were never fully acknowledged as worthy of care.” In political, economic, and societal contexts in which bodies (human, animal, environmental) are so often rendered disposable, this exhibition extends the lifecycle of waste past assumed ends (abandonment, decay, death). The exhibition, on view through March 29 and curated by Park, offers visitors a selection of work integrating and representing waste: discarded toys, crushed insects, roadkill, viscera, garbage. These interdisciplinary artists offer more than just trash; “Aftermath” pushes the viewer past discomfort, past disgust, and presents compelling portraits post-abandon, inviting us to care for bodies made waste. Finding worth in those systematically discarded, even merely bearing witness to them, becomes a radical practice.

Nahom Ghebredngl’s Salt Flats (I spilled it all) (2026) and Steamer (A Junkyard Floats on a Yellow Line) (2025) hang in the far corner of the space. From afar, these relatively small works might recall Rothko, Twombly: modulated fields of soft color interrupted by energetic flourishes. What initially masquerade as paintings reveal themselves to be carefully constructed sculptures. Plaster and papier-mâché pigmented with coffee, crayon, and chalk are studded with hair, used chewing gum, and crushed cans. Ghebredngl transforms materials which would otherwise get swept up or vacuumed away into delicately layered archeological works embedded with detritus of life. We’re drawn into these assemblages by recognizing that which we intimately and regularly encounter in our lives. At moments, their warm, delicately textured surfaces begin to evoke skin. By reveling in that which is cast off, Ghebredngl resists the lure of the pristine, monumentalizes wasted landscapes, and underscores our connection to them.

If Ghebredngl captures wasted landscapes, Carrie Kouts adopts individuals who’ve been sacrificed within them. Two carefully articulated deer skeletons rest at the center of the gallery, a battered traffic cone alongside them. One of these figures is traditional taxidermy, all bleached bones of shining white, while the other is carefully crafted from discarded furniture, its wooden skeleton stained warm brown. These figures, collectively titled Intermedian (2025), were born at the edge of roadways, unique sites that present the artist with ample material for her taxidermy-informed practice. Kouts describes her work as a ritual of care. Through the rigorous act of processing, posing, and mounting these bodies, Kouts offers her subjects a level of respect at odds with the normalization of death and abandonment at scale. The dual figures, once deserted, rest together; one reclines on her own pelt and the other on synthetic carpeting. In contrast to countless carcasses alone on roadsides, Kouts’s figures offer companionship to each other.

In contrast, Maha Mohan and Jungeun Park shift our gaze inward, to those parts of ourselves we’re inclined to discard. On the walls, Mohan’s delicately etched prints adorn muslin. These fragmented, wrinkled, age-worn assemblages of fabric evoke medical gauze, linen-wrapped mummies, aged skin marked by flowing scars of crimson and maroon. In On the Shore (2025), twisting linework reveals jumbled limbs and torsos. Mohan’s maroon scrawl forms a symbolic language that speaks to the act of processing and translating pain. At once body and manuscript, Mohan’s work documents embodied trauma. Underneath one of these prints, a white plinth offers similarly visceral works in glass by Park. A pearlescent Placenta (2025) rests alongside two sinuous cords, Untitled (2025) and Umbilical Cord (2025). On an adjacent pillar, the bright red interior of The Fish (decidual cast) (2025) bleeds through its semitransparent sandblasted skin in the form of a uterine lining. These relics of birth and menstruation, typically disposed of through high-temperature incineration and routine disposal, are powerful symbols of our own materiality. In conversation with Park, she described how translating these forms into glass allows us to “get close to that gruesomeness” of life typically shrouded behind hospital doors and social stigma. Society may teach us to shed fragments of ourselves, but Mohan and Park submit these parts as evidence of our corporeality, as core facets of our identity. Perhaps our castoffs, those garbage parts of ourselves we’re inclined to conceal are those which best reveal our humanness.

“Aftermath” presents gore, soot, grime, abandon, and decay, and yet disgust rarely registered among those attending the show’s January opening. As music filtered in from the venue’s in-house bar, attendees (drinks in hand) crouched to admire the taxidermied doe, leaned in to inspect reliefs adorned with hair and chewing gum, and studied Park’s shimmering glass placenta. “Aftermath” implies a past trauma, and though these artists each speak to lasting damage, this work does more than that, offering narratives of survival, processing, aging, and transfiguration to those bodies denied care. By transforming castoffs, monumentalizing refuse, and honoring discards, “Aftermath” suspends viewers’ discomfort and opens the door for connection. These artists animate waste, give it a body, and endear us to it. There are fragments of ourselves reflected in this highly corporeal body of work. We are invited to see our own vulnerability, trauma, and scars reflected in the refuse on view. If we can learn to care for discards, we better care for ourselves; we better care for each other.

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“Aftermath” is on view through March 29, 2026, at Machines with Magnets, 400 Main Street, Pawtucket, RI.