“We’re a Mystery Which Will Never Happen Again”

Continuing through August 22, 2026

“We’re a Mystery Which Will Never Happen Again” takes its title from one of e.e. cummings short, intimate poems that begins, “now all the fingers of this tree (darling) have / hands, and all the hands have people,” and culminates with the line, “and now you are and i am now and we’re / a mystery which will never happen again.” The poem addresses a specific “you,” insisting that this person, this shared present tense, cannot be recreated. At its heart, it is a love poem, but it is also a meditation on time, on the impossibility of repetition, on the singularity of every encounter.

Curator Mayumi Hamanaka pairs Cummings’s words with the Japanese concept of ichi-go ichi-e, the tea ceremony principle often translated as “one time, one meeting.” The phrase reminds us that every encounter is unique and unrepeatable. Even if the same people gather tomorrow in the same room, the moment itself will already have vanished. Hamanaka suggests that artworks, though materially enduring, begin with moments of attention, memory, and intuition that cannot be recreated.

The featured artists, Woody De Othello, Jane Hambleton, David Huffman, Lucy Puls, Meghan Shimek, and Maryam Yousif, do not appear to be working from a shared aesthetic. Their materials range from graphite and gesso to ceramic, resin, wool, and printmaking. Yet, seen together, their works keep returning to the same question the exhibition poses: what does it mean to fix an unrepeatable moment in a durable material? What is gained by preserving it, and what inevitably slips away?

Jane Hambleton’s work comes closest to embodying the exhibition’s theme. Her wall of small works on paper and panel, “first robin, little weed, my sky, elev. 7200 ft,” reads like a field journal of things noticed once and then rendered from memory once back in the studio. Installed together in a loose constellation — some framed, some raw panel, a small ceramic bird tucked among them — the works read less as individual images than as a single, accumulating notation. The palette stays close to bone, rust, and faded green, as if color itself were something recalled rather than observed. These materials behave more like weather than paint, staining and eroding rather than sitting on the surface. Beside them send the letter, write it down and turn the act of recording itself into the subject. The urge to catch an instant before it disappears becomes its own quiet drama. There is something devotional about Hambleton’s practice. Rather than monumentalizing experience, she gives sustained attention to the overlooked and the ordinary.

Maryam Yousif approaches the same question through ceramics. Her sculptures, including two works titled “Brief Moment,” capture fleeting animal gestures such as a swan assuming a threat pose, or a bird caught in mid-turn. Ceramics are both fragile and enduring. They can shatter in an instant, yet they survive as some of humanity’s oldest artifacts. Yousif uses that contradiction to preserve moments that would otherwise disappear. Her “Nineveh Fashions Palm Tree” pieces and the “Nasha” works stretch the sense of time in the exhibition, linking fleeting experience with ancient mythologies. Glazed in pale blush and dusty blue, her perched birds and stylized palm trees recall both Assyrian relief carvings and folk toys, a collision of registers that keeps the work from settling into either reverence or whimsy. At the center of the installation, a ceramic face — part portrait, part totem — presides over the birds like a household deity.

Lucy Puls’s “Delapsus” sculptures offer a more enigmatic meditation on memory and transformation. Constructed from found domestic objects and photographs translated into pigment ink on paper, the works weave together discarded materials with images of everyday encounters: a deer crossing a neighborhood median, weathered curtains, a window, a bedside table, along with feathers, insects, and acrylic jewels. Rather than documenting these fragments, Puls repurposes them into dreamlike assemblages where the ordinary becomes uncanny. Found objects that formerly told their own anonymous histories are given new emotional weight, while photographs preserve moments already slipping into memory. The sculptures hover between relic and reverie, suggesting that meaning lies less in the objects themselves than in the relationships they form. If Hambleton quietly records moments before they disappear, Puls gathers fragments of lived experience and transforms them into entirely new narratives.

David Huffman’s work offers something of a rebuttal. Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, appears as an image of cyclical time, a counterpoint to a show built around the unrepeatable. His basketball prints, “Basketball Pyramid” and “Hoop Dreams,” do something similar on a more personal register. In the former, balls of every color are stacked into the shape of the title and depicted in stark contrast against a pale sky like a fixed ruin. A single athletic gesture is enlarged, patterned, and mythologized until it reads as monument rather than instant, bringing together sport, Black American history, and cosmology in a single image. 

Woody De Othello’s color-saturated prints complicate another familiar genre, the still life. But “Bright Spots,” and “Steppin Through the Night” are anything but still. Vases, flowers, and furniture dissolve into bold, Matisse-like fields of color that vibrate rather than rest. In “Isn’t this still life,” a vase and scattered blossoms fracture into overlapping planes of red, gold, and black, closer to a jazz improvisation than a tabletop arrangement. Even the titles work against the genre’s promise of stillness, suggesting motion and light rather than silence and containment. They remind us that “still life” has always been a curious name for a genre that has never truly managed to stop time.

Meghan Shimek’s wool sculptures, “Chair,” “Expansions,” and “Mokey,” are among the exhibition’s most visually aggressive works. Dense, tactile, and furred, they resist interpretation from across the room even as they attract the eye. “Expansions” spans the gallery like a woolen wave, its fringed underside shifting from cream to moss to dusky rose. It’s an abstraction of landscape rendered soft enough to touch, just begging for a physical encounter. Their emphasis is not memory but presence. While much of the exhibition reflects on what has passed, Shimek’s sculptures insist on the experience of seeing.

That may be the exhibition’s quietest insight. Almost without exception, these are permanent objects preoccupied with impermanence — fired, cast, printed, woven, or resin-sealed attempts to hold onto something that by definition cannot be held. Yet none of the artists propose that permanence is possible. Instead, they ask us to pay closer attention to fragile, ordinary moments that become meaningful precisely because they will soon disappear.

“We’re a Mystery Which Will Never Happen Again” becomes an embodiment of its own premise. Like the poem from which it borrows its title, the exhibition serves as a reminder that art cannot suspend time any more than life can. It can, however, teach us to more fully inhabit the present and to recognize that every act of seeing is singular and unrepeatable.