Elevate: John Felix Arnold | Invocations of Entanglement

Invocations of Entanglement presents landscape as a living body — holding memory, capable of gesture, and bound by interconnectedness.

Rooted in Durham and shaped by his parents’ movement practices and his mother’s journey with Alzheimer’s, John Felix Arnold creates assemblages that act as poetic portals, surfacing suppressed histories and layered stories
embedded in materials.

As anthropologist Anna Tsing reminds us, our world is made of “divergent, layered, and conjoined projects.” Arnold’s works echo this entanglement, transforming objects into vessels of memory and truth, and challenging us to imagine new mythologies of care, connection, and resilience.

John Felix Arnold (b. Durham, NC) is an interdisciplinary artist working
at the intersection of sculpture, drawing, installation, movement research,
and new media. He holds an MFA from UNC Chapel Hill and has exhibited
and presented with SFMOMA, Nasher Museum of Art, Tiger Strikes
Asteroid NY, and Ackland Museum of Art. He is a Mellon Foundation
Southern Futures Fellow, has received grants from Foundation for
Contemporary Arts and Duke Arts, and has been in residence with the
Wassaic Project and Cassilhaus. His practice is based in Durham, NC and
San Francisco, CA

Elevate at 21c presents temporary exhibitions of works by artists living and working in the communities surrounding each 21c Museum Hotel. Elevate provides hotel guests and visitors with unique access to the work of notable regional artists, while featuring their work in the context of 21c’s contemporary art space.