THE PILE
Chinatown Soup is pleased to present The Pile, an exhibition by current artists in-residence, featuring mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking, and the written word. The show includes works by HUNTER, Matt DeLuca, Sasha Davydova, Art Jones, Victor Castro, and Michelle Marie.
As a collective, we understand that making art takes up SPACE—physical, mental, emotional, interuniversal—and even after a work is hung on a wall, published in a book, given away to a welcoming home, or discarded at the curb, the process is never over. Managing this ongoing creative life is a co-created practice among the artists and friends who inhabit the underground studio here. In solidarity with ourselves, each other, and the ever-expansive storage solutions we continue to manifest within the finite square footage of a Chinatown basement, The Pile moves upstairs to Soup Gallery.
Here you’ll find HUNTER’s Humble Constellations, a 6’ by 3’ collection of linoleum plates and bristol prints created between August 2024 and the present. These works reflect on studies of process and medium, offering a post-rationalized perspective and a chance to commune with the experience of creation.
Matt DeLuca’s 2025 paintings (36” x 48”) Charting Affective Geometries and Big Green Vase with Two Snakes and Words hold open renewal, insufficiency, and repetition through both fantastical and grounded gestures. The former encounters the Lacanian barred subject and objet a with a single brush made in one go while listening to the Pogues, and the latter is caught in moments first first recorded first first recorded first.
Sasha Davydova’s HUNGER escapes its container, questioning desire, compulsion, and nourishment. A 48” x 48” mixed media work on wood panel accompanied by satellite elements forms a partially metabolized nervous system, visualizing an act of resistance against pressure and self-surveillance while insisting on art that remains playful, raw, and true.
Art Jones’ Pomegranate Letter 26 collages city thoughts and images. A variable-dimension photographic installation with acetate and audio for smartphone includes enlarged filmstrips that interweave texts and images encountered during travels through the city, revealing a montage of welcome and intrusive thoughts.
Victor Castro’s The Tinfoil King revisits symbols, entheogens, and what once was “crazy” that has become common sense. Originally a 2016 self-portrait exploring the social and symbolic power of conspiracy, over a decade of engagement with psilocybin has shifted the work’s meaning, asking viewers to consider the line between hubris and curiosity in symbols once dismissed as absurd.
Michelle Marie’s don’t trust me is a generative text installation drawn from an iPhone Notes list of 150+ “Never trust a person who…” full-sentence entries, tracing experiences from her early twenties in New York into adulthood. Interspersed AI-generated continuations complicate reception, showing that how we process authority, memory, and cultural bias in the age of machine text is ultimately a question of trust.
The Pile gathers these works-in-progress into an alternative space of deeply ordered chaos, demonstrating the labor of making, storing, and living with art. Join us for an opening reception on Wednesday, March 18th, from 6–8 pm.
More about the artists:
HUNTER
HUNTER is a New York–based artist from Weehawken, NJ, who studied in Hoboken, Jersey City, and North Bergen before earning a Bachelor of Architecture with a minor in Architectural History from Penn State University, where he became interested in the relationship between digital design and physical fabrication. He has spent more than seven years building and operating scenery as a stagehand at the Marquis Theater on Broadway, regularly enters architectural design competitions, and maintains a persistent curiosity about the intersection of design and human interaction. Hunter practices a variety of printing techniques, spray painting, and sewing, and in October 2025 he designed and installed his largest commission, An Unfamiliar Path, a 128-square-foot mural in Jersey City. At the core of his practice is a desire to build a supportive community of artists and creatives.
@tears_of_hunter
MATT DELUCA
Matt DeLuca is a poet and painter living in New York City. He is a graduate of Boston College and Fordham University School of Law. His poems have been published in Offcourse, The Amsterdam Review, Wild Court, Open Ceilings and elsewhere. He published his first chapbook, Flowers, Birds & Gods, with Everything Matters Press in 2025.
@nosmoderni
SASHA DAVYDOVA
Sasha is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She has been working as a professional tattoo artist since 2018, but her work also spans drawing, painting, installation, collage, photography, writing, and music. Her explorations in every one of these mediums is united by a shared inquiry about inner landscapes as sites of connection, transformation, and healing.
@sashatattoo.nyc
ART JONES
Art Jones works with moving images, sound, and installation. His object-based work explores the relationships between collective memory, history and power at specific times and places. Jones' dj/vj audiovisual performances often utilize mainstream media and popular culture as raw material to be sampled and remixed in order to examine implicit meanings or suggest new ones. He has performed and collaborated with a variety of musicians and artists and has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally at venues including Ars Electronica, Tate Gallery, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Times Art Center Berlin, and MoMa.
@artjones3000
VICTOR CASTRO
Victor Castro is a Bronx-born photographer and mixed-media artist whose career began during a period of forced stillness, when a medical emergency led him to drop out of college and teach himself the technical side of the lens. That self-driven start grew into a 17-year freelance career in New York City, working with clients including Microsoft, The Met, Adidas, and Billboard. In recent years, his focus has shifted inward, bridging his technical background with a deepening spiritual practice and exploring where art and ritual meet—most often in his studio in the basement of Chinatown Soup.
@potencia.studio
MICHELLE MARIE
In spring 2014, Michelle toured 16B Orchard Street for the first time and immediately knew she wanted to fill it with things. Today, she sits among them, writing on her laptop, drinking tea, and reading Tarot cards for passers-by.
@chinatownsoup