Curatorial + Exhibition Design
Bottling House at KieranTimberlake
2021-2025
As part of my role as an in-house designer for the architecture, research, and planning firm KieranTimberlake, I oversaw the management of the on-site gallery the Bottling House. Under this program, I crafted events, exhibitions, and experiences for impactful industry, community, and client engagement.
Carl Durkow, Tim Eads, & Benjamin Gillepsie
October 13, 2023 — February 22, 2024
2. The Roundness of Memory
Robin Cameron & Clement Masurier
March 8 — July 8, 2024
3. Building Ghosts
Molly Lester & Michael Bixler
November 13, 2024 — May 9, 2025
Jennifer Johnson
May 29 - August 15, 2025
5. Echoes and Remnants
Krista Svalbonas
September 4, 2025 - January 9, 2026
1.
Generally Electric: Carl Durkow, Tim Eads, & Benjamin Gillepsie
In celebration of DesignPhiladelphia 2023, GENERALLY ELECTRIC presents a group exhibition featuring an eclectic and electric collection of work by Philadelphia-based artists, designers, and makers. On view is a selection of distinctive furniture and home accessories by Carl Durkow, AI-driven fiber work by Tim Eads of Tuft the World, and bespoke, Scandinavian-inspired lighting by Benjamin Gillespie of OVUUD.
2.
The Roundness of Memory: Robin Cameron & Clément Masurier
The Roundness of Memory is an exhibition featuring the works of Robin Cameron and Clement Masurier. Valuable yet impermanent, the methods of recording and recounting memory have evolved from storytelling to virtual reality. The path of recollection and realization is a matter of assemblage; a structural process of reviewing and editing one's relationship to history, reality, and potential. In this, memory is hardly real-time or collated, but rather distorted and of a round, quantum nature.
In conversation with Stephen Kieran's Living Memorials: An Invitation for All, the concepts of preservation vs. conservation are contemplated when the criteria is more than material. What are the opportunities and obligations to continue the comprehensible conversation that began before us and continues beyond? If 'lately' is the last millennia, what is now?
3.
Building Ghosts
“Building ghosts” are the idiosyncratic remnants or imprints of demolished buildings, left behind on the sides of neighboring structures. Mostly seen in older Northeastern cities with rowhomes or party-wall adjacencies, they can reveal remarkable things, such as an old staircase going up the side of a building or plaster traces left by a set of shelves in an attic gable. As history in our changing cities is erased and remade, these ghosts can be ephemeral or enduring. They can be quickly revealed and replaced in a neighborhood seeing rapid change or unveiled and never re-covered in a neighborhood that has not seen new construction in a long time.
Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City, authored by Molly Lester and Michael Bixler and published by Temple University Press in November 2024, features more than 100 striking contemporary color photographs and a deeply researched narrative about Philadelphia's buildings, neighborhoods, and the ghosts that reveal new truths and provocations about the changing city. The text and images in this lavish volume illuminate these lost buildings and found ghosts. Building Ghosts serves as an invitation to see the city differently, with the past clinging visibly to the present.
The companion Building Ghosts exhibition interprets photography and essays from the publication with an installation incorporating 400 pounds of reclaimed material from Revolution Recovery, a construction and demolition waste recycling company in northeast Philadelphia. This single site processes more than 600 tons of building waste material per day. Access to the site was graciously made possible by RAIR, the artist in residence program whose mission is to challenge the perception of waste culture by providing a unique platform for artists at the intersection of art and industry.
4.
Sidewalk Meditations from Powelton Village
Jennifer Johnson’s Sidewalk Meditations follows a decade of site-specific installations around Philadelphia, each shaped by extensive research into the physical and cultural history of a specific place over time. In 2022, the artist arrived at a question: Why not focus on where I live, the place I know best? Starting with her own house and block, Johnson embarked on a deep dive exploring and documenting her neighborhood, a process that has become a generative and ongoing place of discovery.
At its core, Johnson's work is about human experiences in a place over time, and how their meaning shifts. She's interested in how architecture reveals lived experiences, and the feeling of discontinuity that arises between a “before” and an “after”—often a nebulous zone. For Johnson, the life cycle of a building becomes a metaphor for aging and human lifetime; there's nostalgia and longing for something lost or forgotten.
While steeped in research and in-depth knowledge of her chosen place, the artist emphasizes the importance of working in a state of “not-knowing” and exploration—always concerned with the next question, trying for something unfamiliar that doesn't make sense at first. Clay, tile, and mortar—materials used to create brick and stone buildings—lend the work a self-reflexivity, while Johnson's rich use of color infuses her arrangements with emotion. Relying on an unsteady hand to cut, paint and assemble the work, the final product displays its flaws to highlight the human touch. It is, in the artist's words, a way of “knowing a place by hand.”
5.
Echoes and Remnants: Krista Svalbonas
The 20/20 Photo Festival is proud to present our 2025 featured exhibit with Philadelphia artist Krista Svalbonas. Responding to the theme of this year's festival Structures, Svalbonas will be presenting three interwoven series in a solo show titled “Echoes and Remnants” at the Bottling House Gallery at KieranTimberlake. The series explores Baltic resistance, displacement, and cultural survival. Rooted in personal history and ancestral memory, this work reflects on the impact of Soviet occupation across generations, landscapes, and architectures. Together, these series ask how landscapes, buildings, and material traditions carry memory, identity, and resistance. They honor those who fought, fled, and endured—and invite viewers to consider what survives in the aftermath of struggle.