68 Prince Street Gallery

| CURRENT |

solo exhibit | october 18 - november 16, 2025
DOUGLAS NAVARRA

present tense : past participle

DRAWING & CERAMICS

Navarra’s work unfolds across two intertwined platforms: drawing on found papers, many more than a century old, and the making of vessels in clay. Both practices are acts of mark-making that respond to surfaces already imbued with history. In his drawings, aged documents—creased, stamped, stained, and written upon—become palimpsests. Onto these fragile grounds, Navarra layers his own gestures, engaging in a dialogue between anonymous historical traces and contemporary presence. Each page becomes a meditation on how we encounter our collective past, and how choices to erase, amplify, or transform shape what we bring into the present.

Navarra’s ceramic works continue this conversation through the vessel, one of humanity’s most enduring forms. In dialogue with T. S. Eliot’s notion of tradition as a living continuum, Navarra creates pots that honor archetypal structures while expanding their sculptural potential. Each form—articulated by foot, belly, shoulder, lip, and rim—recalls both architectural space and the human body. His vessels are at once reverent and inventive, grounding tradition in renewed expression.

Together, these works explore the layering of time, the persistence of memory, and the ways in which history is reactivated in the present. As Navarra reflects, “Marks and forms hold time softly. Memory and tradition whisper across each surface, as the work breathes in the present, carrying renewal into a future of possibility.”

Present Tense : Past Participle offers a space where then and now are held in tandem, where fragments of history become alive again in the immediacy of mark, gesture, and form.