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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Rise and Shine
Brooklyn, New York. July 16, 2026 Canton Projects is pleased to announce the opening on August 1, 2026, of an exhibition curated by Emily O’Leary of art by Leonard Ursachi, featuring his kinetic sculpture Rise and Shine with related works. The show will be on view through October 31, 2026. There will be a gallery event on Thursday, October 1 at which the artist and curator will be present.
Ursachi fled his native Romania—then a dictatorship—in 1980 and was granted political asylum in France. Labeled “an enemy of the people” for defecting, he could not return to his homeland for nearly a decade. Ursachi maps the exile’s miasma of displacement and loss onto physical objects—sculptures, photographs, drawings—as both an act of resistance and a talismanic vision of homecoming.
Elisabeth Sussman, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, has described Ursachi’s work as “thought provoking and quite moving … dealing with an important aspect of our culture and … both sensitive and intelligent.”
Rise and Shine is a transparent oval vessel resting on a rusted steel base. The vessel is filled with water and a translucent resin rendition of Ada Kaleh—a small island in the Danube River that was submerged by Romania’s despotic leader, Ceaușescu, to realize a hydro-electric project. The resin island, lit from below, is drowned and resuscitated as the water continuously rises and falls.
In contrast to the grayness that muffled the rest of Romania, Ada Kaleh was an explosion of color and noise, and home to a vibrant Muslim community that traced its roots to the Ottoman Empire. Everything was slightly miniaturized, to suit the island’s modest scale—the market where turbaned vendors sold olives, pastries, and jewelry, the ancient fortifications, the mosque, and the narrow, winding alleys.
Before the government razed and dynamited the island, the graves of generations of past inhabitants were dug up and reburied in a mass, jumbled grave on nearby Șimian Island, while its living inhabitants were forcibly displaced. A plan to reconstruct Ada Kaleh on Șimian never materialized. Nor did the hydro-electric project bring about the prosperity that had been promised to the uprooted islanders. Rather, it marked the intensifying of the regime’s systematic destruction of culture and history and its flattening of difference.
Ursachi visited Ada Kaleh as a child, and, as a young adult, he returned to the site of the vanished island to attempt— unsuccessfully—to escape Romania by swimming across the Danube to Yugoslavia.
On the gallery walls are other artworks by Ursachi that speak to estrangement, loss, and reclamation.
About the curator
Emily O’Leary is a Bronx-based writer, copy editor, curator, and art historian. She earned a dual degree in art history and English literature from SUNY Purchase College after completing a curatorial fellowship at the Neuberger Museum of Art in 2006. She has organized over 25 exhibitions of modern and contemporary art in her role as senior curator at the Derfner Museum in the northwest Bronx, including Leonard Ursachi: Bunkers (2011) and Erosion: Works by Leonard Ursachi (2017), as well as group shows of contemporary Central and Eastern European artists whose work ruminates on identity, cultural belonging, shifting borders, and global and environmental tensions. In her independent practice, she is the copy editor for the photography magazine, Nueva Luz, and a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet.
About the artist
Leonard Ursachi is a Romanian-born American artist and the founder of Canton Projects. He grew up in a dictatorship, from which he defected, and spent years border-hopping before settling in New York. France granted him political asylum and a scholarship to study art history and archeology at the Sorbonne. Ursachi’s art reflects our contemporary world of porous borders, vulnerable shelters, and mutating identities. Leitmotifs throughout his work are lost or buried histories, the repercussions of environmental choices, and the impact of borders on cultures and individuals.
Ursachi has exhibited internationally, including a solo show in 2008 at Romania’s National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest.
High resolution images available on request.