Trinket

Curated by Anne-Laure Lemaitre
Parent Company, 154 East Broadway (basement), New York
November 5 – [closing date], 2026

Trinket is a group exhibition of pocket-scale artworks; totems, talismans, or keepsakes that consider meaning and materiality in condensed, crafted, intentional objects.

It gathers a multigenerational group of artists brought together around a single constraint: no artwork may exceed 2 x 2 x 2 inches. Within this deliberately narrow frame, Trinket opens onto an expansive field of questions about value, protection, memory, and the stories small things are asked to hold.

The show imagines artworks as companions rather than autonomous objects, decor or monument. They may disappear into a pocket, ride along in the lining of a bag, cross borders and time zones, sit for months on a nightstand, retain the temperature of a palm. Each piece carries the intent and intimate charge infused by their maker. It becomes a living conduit between one mind and body and another.

Installed in clustered constellations on the gallery walls, the works float on prongs reminiscent of numismatic displays. This classically museological mode of presentation, often reserved for coins, medals, and other instruments of sanctioned value is reoriented toward objects whose worth is primarily relational and fragile. From a distance, the installation reads as a scattering of points, nearly illegible at scale; up close, it unfurls as a dense cosmos of micro-worlds, each with its own orbit of references.

By bringing together artists at different stages of their careers and across a wide range of practices, Trinket proposes a temporary community of objects and stories that circulate beyond the gallery. The show considers portability as both a practical and conceptual condition: a scale suited to travel and shipping, but also to precarity. In a moment when attention is fragmented and spectacle often defines visibility, Trinket slows the gaze to a hand-held tempo, insisting that what is most potent may also be what remains intimately and physically tangible.