Photo Credit: Etienne Frossard

Dreamlives of Debris

curated by Pallavi Surana

A.J. Cincotta-Eichenfield, Anamaya Farthing-Kohl, Rohan V. Khanna

August 1st – August 30th, 2025

Opening Reception August 1st, 6-9pm

GHOSTMACHINE Gallery presents Dreamlives of Debris, a summer exhibition guest curated by Pallavi Surana featuring artists Anamaya Farthing-Kohl, A.J. Cincotta-Eichenfield and Rohan V. Khanna. Debris is the afterimage of rupture—war, displacement, environmental collapse— uprooted from its origins and gathered in unintended places, stripped of context and function. In this exhibition, however, such fragments—rubble, gravel, volcanic rock, dirt—are reimagined: as vessels for memory and speculative meaning-making. Through acts of listening, layering, and reassembly, the artists reckon with materials unmoored in time, and retether these displaced objects with a sense of place.  

In Listening Sole, Anamaya Farthing-Kohl transforms a severed piece of sidewalk into a listening device. Suspended beneath a long copper pole, the interactive listening device hums with wind, evoking oceanic movement and opening up a space of resonance between built environment and elemental force. Nearby, divination cards invite reflection: Who owns the land beneath our feet? What is the sidewalk’s place in deep time? If it is modernity’s skin, what are the consequences of its scarring? Anamaya’s work draws us into layered temporal registers—urban planning, colonial expansion, geological formation—and proposes that even the most ordinary surfaces carry the imprints of contested place-making.

A.J. Cincotta-Eichenfield’s Memory / Stone consists of photopolymer etchings, photographic prints and sonic outputs that begin with a volcanic rock, carried home by his grandmother from their ancestral island of Stromboli in Italy. Though he’s never been there, the rock—long kept in a jar on his grandmother’s windowsill—held the weight of imagined return and forced familiarity. It stood as both relic and rupture: a proxy for a place he never knew, and a symbol of time suspended between generations. Through scanning, digital rendering, image layering, and sonic probing, AJ disorients the rock’s visual identity, mirroring the fracturing of belonging across distance and diasporic inheritance. His process, that builds out from the rock and screenshots of youtube videos of the active volcano, is attuned to distortion and noise, reframing the rock as an object of temporal drift—a fragment caught between memory, media, and myth.

In Vermin’s Treasure, Rohan V. Khanna approaches debris as both ruin and resource. Inside dirt-filled pedestals, visible only through peepholes, are micro-landscapes assembled from grapevines, cigarette butts, and discarded curios. Dirt, here, is the infrastructure, creating speculative habitats that act as zones of feral intimacy and minor histories, suggesting a poetics of survival shaped by what slips through systems of value.

In a larger sense, the exhibition traces an arc through debris: beginning with Farthing-Kohl’s engagement with the infrastructural and ecological wreckage left in the wake of industrialization, and extending into AJ and Rohan’s more personal, speculative reworkings of displacement and inherited dislocation. Although debris begins as aftermath, it does not end there. In these works, fragments are made malleable—capable of evoking alternate pasts and imagined returns. The artists in Dreamlives of Debris render debris as porous and sentient—capable of carrying memory and inciting reflection. 

CURATOR BIO

Pallavi Surana is an arts writer and curator based in New York. She recently curated a group exhibition Remains to be seen at Smack Mellon in June 2025. She is also working on research and writing projects with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and with curator Cecilia Alemani. Previously, she has held positions at SculptureCenter and Hessel Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), Flint, and St+India Foundation in India; as well as the Cookhouse Gallery and the Camden Arts Centre in London. Her writing has appeared in publications like Eflux Criticism, ARTnews, The Art Newspaper and Ocula, among others. Pallavi has been a visiting critic at various programs and residencies around New York City such as Pioneer Works, EFA Studios and NARS foundation, School of Visual Arts (SVA) among others.

ARTIST BIOS

Anamaya Farthing-Kohl (Bolivia, 1988) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates collective authorship, embodied memory, and the geologic traces of social life. Born in Bolivia and deeply engaged with Latin America and the United States, their projects often emerge through collaboration and dialogue, taking shape as  installations, texts, and performative actions, and public interventions. 

Anamaya holds an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley (2024), a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art (2011), and received a Fulbright to study in SOMA’s educational program in Mexico City (2014). Recent solo projects include Rock Paper Scissors at The Cube Space (Berkeley), SKÄL /ɧɛːl/ for weaving at Moore Galleries (Philadelphia), and Eslabón at Refugio Para Emergencias Visuales (Mexico). Their work has been presented in museums and independent spaces across the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, including BAMPFA, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, the New School, Museo de la Ciudad and Fylkingen in Stockholm.

A core component of their practice is SKÄL /ɧɛːl/ for weaving, a long-term collaboration with artist Nathalie Wuerth, supported by the Nordic Culture Fund, RAIR, Stockholm Stads, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Anamaya engages with slow, site-specific methods of making—often building projects through relationships, workshops, and the poetic potential of shared labor.

They are the recipient of the 2024 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award from UC Berkeley, where they have taught digital media, visual thinking, and interdisciplinary approaches to new media. Their writing and projects have been published by in Ediciones Sin Resentimiento, Title Magazine, and NUVEM. Anamaya currently lives and works between Oakland, California and Mexico City. 

A.J. Cincotta-Eichenfield, LMSW, OSW-C (b. 1994, New York, NY) is a New York-based multimedia artist re-assembling digital memory from found texts, images, media objects, and family artifacts. Working against the impulse to scan, document, archive, and reproduce as facsimile, what emerges instead are unfamiliar, dreamlike amalgamations – that are often further translated, converted, combined, abstracted, excerpted, erased, lost, and/or found. Much of his recent work surrounds the textures of Stromboli, a volcanic island in Italy where his great-grandparents lived and farmed before immigrating to Brooklyn in the early 1900s.

A.J. has recently exhibited work at Culturehub (New York, NY), After/Time Gallery (Portland, OR) and Underground Art and Design (New York, NY & Online). A.J. is currently an MFA-candidate at Hunter College with a focus in Integrated Media Arts. 

A.J. received his MSW from The Columbia University School of Social Work in 2018 and his BA from Vassar College in 2016, and has worked as a graphic designer, social worker, and creative freelancer for local and national non-profits. He has written articles that explore the intersection of digital memory, social media, illness, grief and loss which have been published through Oxford University Press, Oncology Nurse Advisor, and Oncology Nursing News. As an Oncology Social Worker, A.J. received the NASW-NYC Aquamarine Award for Social Work Leadership in 2022. 

Rohan V. Khanna is of Indian origin, born in Washington D.C. and grew up in South Korea, Vietnam, and the United Arab Emirates. This fragmented upbringing opened him up to new worlds. He spent his childhood in important cultural sites, ruins, marketplaces, museums, and landscapes that he otherwise would have never seen. This led to an interest in exploration, art, and storytelling. 

He received a scholarship to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2017. He has participated in residencies at The International Center for the Arts, Italy, UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, Domaine de Boisbuchet, France, D’Clinic Studios, Hungary, The Knight Foundation Art + Research Center, Miami, and Field Projects, New York. 

In 2023 he was a participant in the Land Arts of the American West Field Program taking place across Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona. Since then he has been a resident at The Woodward Residency, NY and a finalist for the Brooklyn Poets Spring Fellowship. He has exhibited work at The Neon Heater, Ohio, Museum of Texas Tech University, Texas, D’Clinic Studios, Hungary, Open Source Gallery, New York, Condo Association, Chicago, Yards Gallery, Chicago, and XVA Gallery, United Arab Emirates.