Null Object presented repose/reprieve, a solo show by New York-based artist and fashion designer Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen. Extending the themes of her Autumn/Winter 2026 ready-to-wear collection, repose/reprieve transforms the Null Object space into an immersive installation that moves between the sacred and material realms.

Whalen's practice is rooted in the conviction that clothing functions as an emotional communicator and as a psychic vessel. With this philosophy, the artist and designer uses craft and technical skill to harness the innate emotional and spiritual weight of an object. Working primarily with antique linens alongside deadstock fabric, Zoe continues to handmake many of the garments presented in her collections, elevating textiles left to waste and devalued in their beauty. Her silhouettes draw from pre-industrial body-modifying forms: medieval and Victorian shapes reanimated through a contemporary lens. The collection on display references pregnancy corsets, underwear and sanitary belts—ways that women would use design in conjunction with a transforming body in a pre-industrial landscape. Garments were cut twice, once in undyed linens, and again in a complex variety of reds, all hand-treated and dyed in the studio.

 

Select pieces from Whalen’s AW26 collection, birthing circle, are suspended from the ceiling as ethereal, floating forms—gathered in a circle around a central figure quilted together from scraps, resting in a moment that hovers between tranquility and demise. For the duration of repose/reprieve, these spectral figures become the new inhabitants and centre pieces of the Lower East Side gallery gathered around a cast iron clawfoot bathtub at the centre of the room, a found object creating the scene for the sculpture. The assemblage of figures tells a story through colour: vermillion, scarlet and carmine alongside deep blacks and her signature creams, evoke a triptych representing the cycle of life, death and rebirth.

The arrangement echoes a performance staged at the close of Whalen's AW26 show, in which the designer entered the tub and emerged, soaked and defiant—invoking water’s role across spiritual traditions as a site of transformative cleansing and rebirth. The scene cuts across time, allowing the memory of “Birthing Circle” to hang in presence.

The steel-clad, gridded walls of Null Object—chrome and futuristic in character—form a deliberate counterpoint to the artifacts they hold, textile relics and found objects from another era. The space is transformed to reliquary, in the back corner of the room, a small altar tends to the unseen. A television plays footage from the runway show. Candles burn. A glass of milk, a vessel of honey, and a grilled cheese sandwich—replenished fresh each day for the duration of the exhibition—are offered to the spirit the show was made for.