The Dinner of sublimation

Presented by M. David & Co. at Art Cake in partnership with Yellow Chair Salon

June 6 – June 27, 2026
Opening Reception: June 6, 2026, 6-9pm

Gallery B
Art Cake: 214 40th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11232
Hours: Friday & Saturday, 1-6 pm and by appointment

We are pleased to present The Dinner of Sublimation, a solo exhibition of recent works by Margarita Fainshtein at Art Cake in conjunction with her participation in the Yellow Chair Independent Study Program (ISP).

The Dinner of Sublimation centers on a large handmade plexiglass table set for sixteen guests — a sculpture etched with official documents drawn from the artist's familial archive, their forms intentionally abstracted until they become at once illegible and universal, relating to multiple histories and communities at once.

The table functions simultaneously as sculpture, archive, stage, and social space. The layered documents on its surface speak to the bureaucratic language overpowering and flatten lived and personal experience. The etched surface of the table also has elements of the nonfiction personal essay written in a hermit crab format - an organism that survives by inhabiting abandoned shells. This metaphor operates structurally within the installation: The table becomes a shell. The guests temporarily inhabit it.

A window screen is presented as an additional sculptural element on the wall, extending the installation's logic into the surrounding space. Like the table, it is an ordinary household object transformed into something structural: a surface that filters, separates, and mediates. Together, the table and screen propose the home as a site of both refuge and regulation, where borders are felt most intimately. A window screen extends the work into the surrounding space, introducing themes of filtration and borders. Together, these elements construct a spatial condition in which viewers encounter identity as something unstable, layered, and continually negotiated.

The table is set for sixteen people. The number operates as a structural and conceptual tool: in North America, sixteen marks the "sweet sixteen," a coming-of-age threshold; in many places it signals legal milestones such as consent or the right to drive. These are the ages at which institutions begin to formally recognize — and regulate — the individual. The place settings include fully functional sublimated plates, reinforcing the table's dual role as both sculpture and site of gathering. Sublimation operates on two registers: as a heat-transfer process that permanently bonds image to surface, and as a metaphor for the way personal and familial memory is absorbed, transformed, and preserved within cultural and administrative form.

The blank recipe cards in the space offer the participatory element of the installation, where the guests are invited to share recipes; both real and the conceptual ones that connect to the hermit crab essay etched on the table.

The installation joins a lineage in which the table functions as monument, archive, and social space — a tradition shaped in part by Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1979), which reimagined the table as a site of collective memory and historical visibility. The Dinner of Sublimation extends this thinking into the terrain of migration and document, asking how personal histories survive — and are altered by — their passage through official systems.

Margarita Fainshtein (b. 1982, Kherson, Ukraine) is an artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She holds a BFA from the University of Haifa, Israel, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago; Chicago Art Department, Chicago; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Art Gallery of Acadia University, Nova Scotia; Halifax; Katzman Art Projects, Halifax; and venues across North America and Europe. Upcoming exhibitions include solo exhibitions at The Artist House, Jerusalem; Chester Art Centre, Nova Scotia, and Art Cake, New York. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Acadia University, Art Bank Nova Scotia, and the Art Institute of Chicago.