Good for Something
Corydon Cowansage
Nathaniel de Large
Kyle Clairmont Jacques
Nicholas Sullivan
Co-curated by Kyle Clairmont Jacques
May 23rd - July 5th, 2026
Opening reception May 23rd 4-7 pm
Good for Something is a four-person show at Roundabouts Now that includes wall-mounted sculptures by Kyle Clairmont Jacques, paintings by Corydon Cowansage, pedestalized sculptures by Nicholas Sullivan, and kinetic polage (polarized light collage) by Nathaniel de Large.
At the heart of Good for Something is the simple act of looking at an object and sensing its potential use, even if that use isn’t immediately obvious. The idea of affordance theory, put forth by James Gibson in the 1960s as part of ecological psychology, posited that objects and environments suggest or enable certain actions to an organism or user; for example, a chair affords sitting. The works in this show take objects found at the periphery of experience and create new things from them that are highly mediated by their transformation. What is left is a series of visual tuning forks for the viewer to experience and discover what resonances they create.
Jacques’ fabric-based sculptures allude to the collapsible architecture and lightweight material of tents and kites. They surround the show like a bulwark, suggesting wind by evoking the fragile tension of flying a kite or feeling protected by a tent. They seem at once both heavy, weighted down by their materiality, yet ready to fly off in a sudden strong gust of air.
Nicholas Sullivan’s three metal sculptures, like Jacques’ fabric structures, allude to something familiar and functional. Sullivan’s forms could be enlarged industrial machine parts or model concept designs for UAPs. They are derived from the artist’s long-standing interest in the shapes of a laid-flat nurse's kerchief and a particular sewing machine cover. They can be thought of as comprising the garment of a healer and the protective cover for the machine that could produce such a garment. This sculptural form is repeated again and again, as mass-produced garments are, each slightly different in order to reference individuality within forms.
Corydon Cowansage's large, highly pigmented paintings reflect her interest in the colorful, botanical representation of intimacy. In this new body of work, she lays down a vibrant field of disembodied lips that defy the affordance of kissability, appearing more like a pile of leaves or intestinal villi. Her work lives on the edge between figuration and abstraction and is about the act of touching, a physical feeling of the body rendered in paint to be experienced through the eyes.
The idea that vision is a medium, like the vibrations of sound, and that color and perception are both unique to each person’s viewing of an object, is key to experiencing the four sculptural light works by Nathaniel de Large. Placed in the window, they can only be viewed from outside the gallery. Each uses the mechanisms of defunct signs (imagine a light-up sign of a waterfall in which the waterfall moves), recreated to simply emit structural color. Unlike Cowansage’s use of pigment to create permanence of perception, de Large’s work changes depending on the angle from which it is viewed. His use of techniques from jewelry making, alongside his own scientific inquiries into how structural color can be created from everyday objects, brings home the fact that, when looked at in a new way, even the simplest things can become otherworldly rainbows.
Nathaniel de Large is a New York based artist whose work moves fluidly between sculpture, installation and curatorial experimentation. Across exhibitions and collaborative projects alike, his work embraces contradiction, humor and spectacle. De Large received a BA from San Diego State University and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. His work has been featured in publications such as Mousse, Art Forum, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Corydon Cowansage (b. 1985 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) lives and works in Millbrook, NY. She received an MFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and a BA in art from Vassar College in 2008. She has participated in residencies at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Yale Norfolk School of Art. Cowansage’s work has been shown internationally with recent solo and group exhibitions in Milan, the United States, Hong Kong, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Kyle Clairmont Jacques (b. 1987, Fitchburg, MA; lives and works in New York) is an artist and curator whose practice centers on space, ranging from ephemeral forces that shape decision-making to the architectural arrangement of objects assembled, dismantled, and repositioned. He co-founded and directed SIGNAL gallery in Brooklyn from 2012 to 2018, and presented his first solo exhibition with Helena Anrather in 2021.
Nicholas Sullivan (b. 1987) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Sullivan earned his M.F.A. in Sculpture from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA, and his B.F.A. in Sculpture from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA. Recent exhibitions include; Chrysler (solo), CLEARING, New York, NY; Everblue (two person), International Waters, New York, NY; Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Galeria Mascota, Mexico City, MX; Make Hay in the Sun, HG (two person), Chicago, IL; Comfort Animal (solo), A-L Gallery, Seoul SK; The World Without Us, Brennan & Griffin, New York NY; Gist & Gesture, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Foster Prize Exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA.