Milcah Bassel: Imaginal Cells
By Patti Jordan, October 20, 2026
Rewilding the Grid: Spillage/Diver, mixed media on paper, 72 x 102”, 2017-2020
Milcah Bassel’s solo exhibition Imaginal Cells, curated by art historian and gallery director Midori Yoshimoto at The Visual Arts Gallery at Kean Jersey City, investigates potentiality and transformation at the intersection of geometric and bodily objects. Drawing parallels between cellular autonomy and collective interdependence, she examines how bodies, objects, and social systems are shaped through porous boundaries, reciprocal exchanges, and continual change. Recurring motifs of skins, membranes, spines, skeletons, and armatures connect material and abstract approaches, evoking the processes through which individuals and collectives are formed. Consequently, interiority and co-creation appear as central material and philosophical concerns.
Over the last decade, Bassel has developed a body of work attentive to temporal processes and the shifting relationships among embodiment, absence, and collectivity, resonating with the legacies of women artists and writers aligned with Fluxus, Post-Minimalism, and Feminist Art while extending their inquiries into the locus between lived experience and aesthetic form. The exhibition’s title, selected retrospectively, draws on Rebecca Solnit’s book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change and its meditation on transformation, uncertainty, and the dissolution of fixed identities. The caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly offers a telling metaphor: within the chrysalis, the organism undergoes a radical reorganization in which existing structures break down as a new body emerges. Imaginal cells, which contribute to the formation of the adult butterfly, model the exhibition’s focus on latent possibility and collective becoming. Molting—shedding an outer layer to accommodate growth—further reinforces the artist’s interest in permeability and unstable boundaries.
Yet transformation is neither seamless nor assured. During metamorphosis, cells encounter resistance from the caterpillar’s immune system, creating a struggle between emerging and established patterns. Bassel extends this biological tension to the socio-political realm, describing the war between the “goo” and immune cells to diagnose contemporary conditions. Across global and local, macro and micro scales, the work asks what must dissolve for something new to evolve. Paper pulp, abaca fiber, plaster, and bare clay serve as materials for these processes. Porous and capable of structural or delicate shapes, these materials blur distinctions between content and container, surface and interior, and body and architecture. Rather than treating sculpture as fixed, she constructs forms that suggest provisional states: skins that protect and permit passage, membranes that separate when facilitating exchange, and armatures that make support visible.
In Vessels for Holding Emptiness, mixed media on handmade paper and sculptural forms evoke organs, cellular membranes, and bodily orifices that facilitate communication between interior and exterior spaces. Their contours also reference airborne microorganisms suspended in liquid particles, linking microscopic life to the respiratory body, where air moves in and out of the lungs. Color intensifies associations with skin and flesh, making emptiness feel tangible rather than void. Like cells, they function as individual elements within a wider network of interchange. Their ability to hold, embrace, and connect turns containment into a reciprocal act. Constructed from eight planes, each vessel establishes repetition and differentiation, while their shared geometry supports an interdependent system. Conceived in part as a research library, the installation invites visitors to borrow a vessel for a designated period using a circulation card. This participatory gesture moves beyond static display, allowing the vessel to gather encounters and meanings beyond the gallery. Its circulation enacts the exhibition’s central proposition: an artwork can be produced through use. Vessel for Hugging Emptiness, larger and displayed separately, furthers this probe through the language of embrace and absence. Across the series, emptiness is not a deficiency or passive void, but a condition that enables breath, movement, contact, and new affinities.
A focal work, subtitled Blanket (Refuge), is the largest in the Continua series. Resembling an expansive, organic skin, it shifts between architectural structure, bodily enclosure, and communal shelter. Over three years, Bassel constructed its pyramid-like modules from pigmented cast abaca fiber, binding individual paper units into an interconnected surface. The piece evokes the shedding of an exoskeleton during growth, where a protective layer becomes obsolete yet leaves traces of the body it once supported. Its custom-built, off-kilter platform introduces instability and rejects the conventional pedestal, bringing the environment into the work’s meaning. Here, paper functions not only as a substrate but also as body, vessel, and connective tissue. Individual shapes remain distinct yet contribute to the larger formation, creating a tension between singularity and collectivity. Associations with refuge and respiration are especially resonant in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic, when the words “I can’t breathe” came to signify both bodily vulnerability and structural violence. A range of flesh tones and porous materials evoke connection without erasing difference. The blanket thus becomes a social model, offering protection while relying on the integrity of its associations. Its porousness complicates refuge, as no enclosure is fully sealed from the world around it. Several handcrafted, bone-like stools, reminiscent of vertebrae, tuck beneath the blanket and double as seating for performative participation when the blanket is worn. Their presence suggests inhabiting the sculpture, turning spectatorship into a bodily encounter with its underlying framework.
Installation view of: Continua Pelt 2 (bell), Vessel for Hugging Emptiness, Spillage/Diver
The Continua series advances concepts of continuity as artifacts that accumulate over time and retain traces of their making. Constructed from like materials, the wall sculpture Continua Pelt 2 (bell) draws on bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom to consider embodiment and the transmission of knowledge through a lineage of female experience. From there, interiority becomes both a psychological condition and a source of material knowledge; the potential wearable suggests that making can inhabit, articulate, and share lived experience. Louise Bourgeois’ influence is palpable in Continua: Pelt 3 (Louise); the pelt oscillates between comfort and unease. Like Bourgeois, Bassel resists a single interpretation but one informed by anxiety, memory, and psychoanalytic inquiry. Across this series, the collective skin is not a seamless universal body but an assemblage whose cohesion relies on the coexistence of distinct parts. This focus on interdependence complicates any simplistic opposition between individual autonomy and collective belonging.
Governing Vessels treats the spine as both an anatomical frame and an organizing principle. Adroitly crafted, it uses the book as a visual archive, its physical construction conveying cultural authority. Deconstructing the book along its spine reveals correlations between a text's architecture and the systems of thought it supports. Bassel extends this inquiry through the book’s open-ended, box-like construction, where folding and unfolding unsettle the division between container and content. The ambiguity—whether the object is a book that becomes a box or a box that becomes a book—reflects the exhibition’s broader interest in emptiness as a generative condition, present both within the object and in the space around it. Like the vessels, it becomes inseparable from the relationships it enables. References to Asian medicinal traditions, such as the governing vessel meridian corresponding to the body’s posterior midline, establish a dialogue between anatomical pathways and structures of knowledge. The parallel between the book’s spine and the human spine invites a critique of inherited hierarchies that place humanity above the natural world. Hence, book art becomes a way to examine the material and ideological structures that organize, preserve, and transmit knowledge.
Rewilding the Grid, begun in 2018, offers insight into the artist’s evolving language. Referencing earlier phases of her practice, these large-scale drawings build complex matrices in which memory and intuition shape composition. In Spillage/Diver, cutting and collaging ledger paper onto painted surfaces evokes fluid movement across physical, psychological, and topological boundaries. The grid, conventionally associated with order and containment, becomes a visual system that emphasizes permeability.
Throughout Imaginal Cells, Bassel integrates scientific inquiry with Eastern philosophy and other contemplative traditions. Her vessels, drawings, and paper function as distinct fields of inquiry that contribute to a larger composition, where meaning surfaces through their intersubjectivity. This proposition gains urgency amid political, social, and ecological crises. Developmental biology considers transdetermination, in which cells acquire a developmental fate different from the one initially specified under certain conditions. Read alongside the exhibition, this concept suggests that given trajectories are not always final. One is invited to consider how individuals and collectives might similarly challenge inherited conditioning and imagine alternative modes of existence.
The imaginal can mean the willingness to bring emerging possibilities into shared experience, and the aforesaid renders such uncertainty tangible. The curatorial approach centers not on a fixed identity but on the ongoing negotiation between separation and connection. Ultimately, the exhibition prompts viewers to consider what may become possible when boundaries are perceived as permeable rather than absolute. In this sense, Imaginal Cells can be seen as the dormant “goo” that holds us together.
Imaginal Cells is on view through November 24, 2026, at the Visual Arts Gallery, 100 Culver Avenue, Jersey City, New Jersey 07305.
Vessels for Holding Emptiness, walnut ink and colored pencil on handmade paper, 40 x 22.5”, 2022
Vessels for Circulating Emptiness, 8 circulation objects: ceramic vessel, journal, circulation cards in pocket box, bubble wrap, participants, 2026