Review: Opening Moves Group Exhibition at Roundcube
- Aug 29
- 4 min read
Checkmate Deferred
Kun Kyung Sok
Brooklyn, NY
2025-08-24
Titles matter. They can weigh heavily on a show, demanding too much from its contents, or serve as subtle keys that open interpretive possibilities. Opening Moves, curated by Albert Abdul-Barr Wang and Julie Jang at Roundcube Contemporary, does the latter. The title invokes both Marcel Duchamp’s pastime and chess strategy, where even the smallest first gestures determine the unfolding of the entire game. Applied to an exhibition, the concept resonates: what we encounter are not finished arguments but beginnings—gestures that suggest, provoke, and point toward directions not yet known.
With seventeen artists across multiple generations and practices, Opening Moves might have collapsed into mere accumulation. Yet the chessboard metaphor repositions density as strength. Instead of demanding a single theme, the show becomes a strategic array, multiple options branching outward, inviting viewers to imagine how each first move might develop. The result values speculation and projection over resolution.
Ross Edward Doyle’s Long Division and Fresh Hell (2024) embody this ethos of restless beginnings. Built through layers of ultrachrome ink, silkscreen, acrylic, and flashe, they crowd language fragments—“Wrong enemy,” “Every day is a Fresh Start”—that hover at the edge of legibility before dissolving into painterly chaos. Doyle’s paintings feel like gambits: calculated yet destabilizing openings that fracture clarity. Refusing singular statements, they embrace noise and contradiction as strategies to keep the field open.
Matthew DeStefano sharpens the stakes, framing openings as culturally and politically charged. In Catch and Release #2 (2025), a trout floats within a patterned backdrop, encased in a toy-like studded frame. What might be a modest gesture of capture and release becomes an allegory for extraction, display, and control. In Cultural Decoy #1 (American Airlines / Never Forget / Hanging Emergency) (2022), a monumental airplane alluding to American Airlines Flight 11 from the September 11, 2001 hijacking incident dominates the gallery wall, immobilized mid-flight. The opening move here is declarative, confronting viewers with the entanglement of trauma, branding, and spectacle in American life. If Doyle destabilizes through excess, DeStefano shows that neutrality is impossible—every move already bears consequence.
If Doyle and DeStefano treat beginnings as multiplicity or confrontation, Reuben Merringer insists on repetition. His They Were Excluded Again (2025), a dense surface of modeling paste, iron oxides, filings, and mica, is less about opening than obstruction. The title underscores the exclusion which is enacted “again.” Its suffocating opacity suggests a defensive structure foreclosing possibilities before they unfold. In chess terms, Merringer offers a forced line of play, a trap repeated endlessly, reminding us that not all openings liberate—some reveal the persistence of systemic barriers.
John Dewey’s Permaculture (2024), a painted globe, extends the exhibition’s exploration of openings into ecological and planetary registers. By transforming a found object into a rotating field of painterly gestures, Dewey reframes the opening move not on the chessboard but across the globe itself—an allegory of how artistic processes intersect with environmental concerns and collective futures.
Jessica Goehring’s Descending Yolo Forms (2024) offers an opening built on flux and suspension. Organza hovers loosely above a sublimated print, trembling with the slightest air currents. As light shifts and the viewer moves, greens, violets, and yellows pulse, dissolve, and recombine. This instability prevents the work from ever settling into a fixed image. Instead of declaring itself, the piece delays resolution, holding multiple trajectories in suspension. Goehring’s opening is not assertion but shimmering hesitation—a strategy of keeping the board perpetually in play.
The exhibition also gains depth through Korean artists whose works add another register. Sia Sangbok’s acrylic on hanji unfolds like cosmic light, turning the opening into radiance and expansion. Jong Rim Song’s glass-beaded panels refract texts and colors, emphasizing chance and memory; his openings multiply trajectories rather than narrowing them. Jina Kwon’s patterned abstractions, disciplined yet playful, echo codified chess openings: rule-bound yet endlessly variable. Photographer Chunbum Park, meanwhile, captures the fleeting presence of New York street life, extending the exhibition’s sense of opening gestures into the urban everyday. Together, these works demonstrate that openings can emerge through resonance, repetition, and intuition as well as confrontation or obstruction.
Other participating artists include Allison Field Bell, Evan Hume, Callianne Jones, Mark Andrew, Sangman Park, Sarah Fuhrman, Dasha Bazanova, and Sabrina Puppin.
Taken together, these contributions sharpen the curatorial conceit. Opening Moves succeeds not with a tidy thesis but by presenting a field of gestures—strategic, hesitant, obstructed, or diffuse—that model the unruly condition of contemporary art. Like chess, where the opening both reveals and conceals strategy, these works remind us that beginnings matter not because they predetermine the end, but because they generate possibilities, risks, and unforeseen turns.
By foregrounding beginnings rather than conclusions, Opening Moves underscores a crucial point: the vitality of contemporary practice lies not in resolution but in openness, in the willingness to remain unsettled. Even the smallest gesture—a fragment of text, a fish in suspension, a wavering veil of organza, or a globe turned into painted terrain— can alter the horizon of play. In art as in chess, the first move is never just the beginning but already the shaping of what is to come.
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