Re: Turning
Dear dear Kevin Eubanks,
How are you? This is Prem Krishnamurthy; we met years ago after a show of yours in NYC. I always meant to follow up on our conversation, but time flows so quickly sometimes.
Recently, though, while curating the Parsons Fine Arts 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition, I returned to listening to your 1992 song “Turning Point.” The song made a major impression upon me as a young guitarist. Even today, it still leaves my heart pounding—the juxtaposition of an ethereal intro with tight, perfectly synced guitar-flute melody, followed by accelerating, explosive solos and a final, heady return. As in the best music, all four musicians respond carefully to each other while still showing off their prodigious individual talents. “Turning Point” feels calculated at times and unforeseeable at others. When the melody folds back upon itself at the song’s close, it’s like time rewinding for a moment before launching forward again… A reprise and yet another departure.
Working on this MFA show, I’ve been recognizing your singular song as an apt model for the restless, wide-ranging creative path. So, in response to your title, I’ve decided to name our show Re: Turning. The exhibition lives and breathes in the uncertain space between past and future, repetition and reinvention. Our cohort of emerging artists are right in the thick of it, exploring the cyclical transformations of artistic practice together. Some of them share work from different phases of their MFA work, opening up further comparisons and questions. Mirroring how I’ve rediscovered your music after all of these years, this approach suggests both forward motion and recursion. Think of re-turning—to past ideas, to unresolved gestures, to critical influences, to the moments when meaning bends and reshapes itself.
Across fourteen distinctly different artistic approaches, common connections arise: between memories and materials, movements and multiplicities. Some artists, like Andrew Samuel Harrison, Shangari Mwashighadi, Sumaiya Saiyed, and yeabsera tabb, work with sculpture and space to share ways of navigating the world in unfamiliar, intimate, and occasionally uncomfortable ways. Others, such as Felisa Nguyen, Guangyuan (Sam) Xing, Spencer Strauss, and Teresa Olds, reimagine painterly forms and drawn figures to recall both pivotal and quotidian personal moments. Danielle Sargeant, Faith Henderson, Jinghui Chen, and Sona Lee offer transcendental, in-between spaces and surfaces for exploration. At the same time, artists including Hannah Bang and Qasim Ali Hussain incorporate their bodies directly through durational, performative gestures, inviting visitors to join them in improvisatory play.
Like time, artistic practice rarely moves in a straight line. It doubles back, speeds up, lags, changes its mind, swerves. I’ve always admired artists whose work transforms before they become too good at something. A work begun months or years ago may return to the artist as something new, or unfinished, or suddenly urgent again. Are these repetitions an undoing or a deepening? Is a turn breaking from the past or cycling back towards it? What does it mean to return to something—an idea, a motif, a sound, a history—even while arriving at an unfamiliar destination? Will (re)turns that appear today as accidents reveal themselves later as necessary steps?
I don’t have the answers, Kevin. But like your brilliant and timely tune, which circles back to a familiar phrase only to twist it into something new, I hope that Re: Turning will keep pointing towards somewhere else. As a dear friend often reminds me, life and art are “never straight, always forward.” I’m looking forward to what’s yet ahead.
Warmest,
P! Krishnamurthy
New York, March 2025