formerly known as Rubber Factory, island is a contemporary art gallery located on the Bowery
Now time out of joint
Adriana Furlong
October 29, 2026 - December 20, 2026
island is pleased to announce Adriana Furlong’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Building on her previous work, Furlong maintains her interest in the memory of built environments and how history reproduces itself.
In Angel of History, Furlong references Walter Benjamin’s notion of progress as a backward-facing propulsion into the future where an angel perceives a single continuous catastrophe. At the human scale this continuum becomes illegible. The surface of Adriana’s work replicates this tension, oscillating in and out of focus as a result of her recurrent translations in the studio. Furlong has photographed monuments and then imported her photos into Blender, where she chops and screws the images before recombining them into stacked slabs reaching six feet in length. Furlong subsequently 3D-prints the slabs and paints them, creating a disorienting effect where the pieces come in and out of focus, revealing their analog and digital mediation at the same time pixelated rasters on a plane and painted shapes. The PLA plastic jutting from the wall becomes an accelerated canvas, moving decisively from image to object, allowing the artist’s gestures to register as immediate, layered, and painterly.
In the second room, the linearity of the friezes gives way to a recursive structure, embodied in a wallpaper roller made of wood and iron from the early 1900s installed within a console built of aluminum and acrylic. Once used to decorate domestic interiors with repeating ornamental patterns, the roller testifies to a past when adornment was carried out through inexpensive, repeatable procedures. Furlong repurposes this instrument of aspirational domesticity as, instead, the conductor of a musical composition, attaching it to a slow-moving motor that presses the pattern of the wallpaper against sixteen switches that control the performance, one where four voices slip in and out of synchrony and harmony. The roller continues its measured rotation, carrying each sequence back towards its point of departure. Repetition here has a material duration.
In the main gallery, linear repetition accumulates figures, while sonic arrangement in the other room produces an entropic musical arrangement. One reproduces an image of movement while remaining captive to its established form, while the other discovers within repetition the possibility of variation. Across both rooms, Furlong treats reproduction as a process of historical drift. The exhibition’s materials—digitally directed plastic, domestic ornament, and mechanically generated sound—register different claims to duration, from the permanence of the civic monument to the seemingly trivial recurrence of a decorative pattern. None, however, remains outside time; even the most durable form depends on how we come to see it again.
Text by Nora Furlong
Adriana Furlong (b. 1998, Oakland, CA) investigates the allegorical translation of labor into urban space, using symbols and forms to reflect on the contemporary experience of work, exhaustion, and desire. Working across computational modeling, 3D printing, and painting, Adriana develops a process-driven approach that merges architectural motifs with intuitive gestures. Using Blender, a 3D modeling software, she builds, prints, and reshuffles her imagery, molding them into concrete to reinterpret architectural motifs and the histories of labor. These works act as bodily proxies, reflecting both physical and emotional states—fragmented forms suggesting speculative possibilities for symbols of labor and urbanization as reflections of the contemporary human condition.
Adriana received a BFA from the Parsons School of Design in 2022 and participated in the 2023–2024 Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York. She is currently an MFA candidate at the Yale School of Art (Class of 2028). Her debut solo exhibition, Hundreds Do Things, was held at Island Gallery in 2023. Reviews of her work have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Whitehot Magazine, Impulse Magazine, The Coastal Post, Musée Magazine, and Teeth Magazine. Adriana lives and works in New York.
Checklist here
In Angel of History, Furlong references Walter Benjamin’s notion of progress as a backward-facing propulsion into the future where an angel perceives a single continuous catastrophe. At the human scale this continuum becomes illegible. The surface of Adriana’s work replicates this tension, oscillating in and out of focus as a result of her recurrent translations in the studio. Furlong has photographed monuments and then imported her photos into Blender, where she chops and screws the images before recombining them into stacked slabs reaching six feet in length. Furlong subsequently 3D-prints the slabs and paints them, creating a disorienting effect where the pieces come in and out of focus, revealing their analog and digital mediation at the same time pixelated rasters on a plane and painted shapes. The PLA plastic jutting from the wall becomes an accelerated canvas, moving decisively from image to object, allowing the artist’s gestures to register as immediate, layered, and painterly.
In the second room, the linearity of the friezes gives way to a recursive structure, embodied in a wallpaper roller made of wood and iron from the early 1900s installed within a console built of aluminum and acrylic. Once used to decorate domestic interiors with repeating ornamental patterns, the roller testifies to a past when adornment was carried out through inexpensive, repeatable procedures. Furlong repurposes this instrument of aspirational domesticity as, instead, the conductor of a musical composition, attaching it to a slow-moving motor that presses the pattern of the wallpaper against sixteen switches that control the performance, one where four voices slip in and out of synchrony and harmony. The roller continues its measured rotation, carrying each sequence back towards its point of departure. Repetition here has a material duration.
In the main gallery, linear repetition accumulates figures, while sonic arrangement in the other room produces an entropic musical arrangement. One reproduces an image of movement while remaining captive to its established form, while the other discovers within repetition the possibility of variation. Across both rooms, Furlong treats reproduction as a process of historical drift. The exhibition’s materials—digitally directed plastic, domestic ornament, and mechanically generated sound—register different claims to duration, from the permanence of the civic monument to the seemingly trivial recurrence of a decorative pattern. None, however, remains outside time; even the most durable form depends on how we come to see it again.
Text by Nora Furlong
Adriana Furlong (b. 1998, Oakland, CA) investigates the allegorical translation of labor into urban space, using symbols and forms to reflect on the contemporary experience of work, exhaustion, and desire. Working across computational modeling, 3D printing, and painting, Adriana develops a process-driven approach that merges architectural motifs with intuitive gestures. Using Blender, a 3D modeling software, she builds, prints, and reshuffles her imagery, molding them into concrete to reinterpret architectural motifs and the histories of labor. These works act as bodily proxies, reflecting both physical and emotional states—fragmented forms suggesting speculative possibilities for symbols of labor and urbanization as reflections of the contemporary human condition.
Adriana received a BFA from the Parsons School of Design in 2022 and participated in the 2023–2024 Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York. She is currently an MFA candidate at the Yale School of Art (Class of 2028). Her debut solo exhibition, Hundreds Do Things, was held at Island Gallery in 2023. Reviews of her work have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Whitehot Magazine, Impulse Magazine, The Coastal Post, Musée Magazine, and Teeth Magazine. Adriana lives and works in New York.
Checklist here