In Love Will Return in a Different Way, Joey Gonnella’s first solo presentation with Parent Company, twelve graphite drawings sit equidistant around the perimeter of the gallery wall. Each drawing, slightly smaller than the size of a playing card, is placed evenly in the center of a series of framed, neatly cut mats. 

The subject of each drawing varies widely, with compositions pulled from a personal archive of images, ranging from popular culture references (a scene of Atreyu from The NeverEnding Story) to historical photographs (snapshots of an ill-fated 1896 Arctic balloon expedition), and even the image of a carefully folded paper note spelling out the words "TRUE LOVE." 

In Andreé’s Balloon (on ice) (2025), a silhouette turns towards the deflated mass of a large collapsed balloon. The artist recreates a moment from Swedish explorer Salomon Andrée’s failed 19th-century hydrogen balloon expedition to the North Pole. Cloudy and close-cropped, the scene, like many of Gonnella’s drawings, possesses a quiet mystery. In a parallel to the artist’s own process of image preservation, this artwork replicates a photo negative that was discovered intact after thirty years in the Arctic ice following the team's crash on Kvitøya Island.

The strength in Gonnella’s selection of images lies not in their similarities, but in their disparate and non-linear relationships. Sources are not confined to a singular timeline, cultural framework, or personal history; rather, they reach into varying pockets of Gonnella’s world to explore what the artist calls "little histories that risk obliteration." The artist’s sketches arrive by way of collection. Amassing a personal archive of historical and contemporary photographs, media stills, art historical references, found ephemera, and text, he selects images to painstakingly recreate through graphite. There’s a satisfaction in the unpredictability of the series, works often obscured not only through size and hazy graphic gesture, but through withdrawal of context. Reduced in scale, seeming to defy narrative structure or conceptual homogeneity, his snapshots give us hints, rarely answers. Ultimately, the drawings in Love Will Return in a Different Way do not document the world as it is, but as Gonnella experiences it: mediated, image-based, and felt through the acts of collecting and redrawing.

A thread of permanence weaves through the exhibition. Gonnella’s process of meticulous recreation is a form of archiving in itself. Nearing devotional in his reverence to these images, he preserves them eternally in graphite, encased neatly behind protective glass. In a material reassertion of this notion of permanence and devotion, tiny, lab-grown diamonds are embedded directly into the paper surface of several pieces. In Canis Major (Under the Dog Star) (2026), a hazy, Vija Celmins-esque celestial expanse is studded with a tiny constellation of diamonds, often visible to the viewer only through subtle shifts in the gallery light. For a moment, with its pure expanse couched in matboard and reduced neatly to a sketched square, the constellation Canis Major does not belong to the sky, but to Gonnella. 

Through Gonnella’s process of preservation—one which requires long periods of close-looking, the recreation of minute details, a constant back-and-forth between source image, pencil, and paper, and the delicate labor of placement—he forms an intimate relationship with the images he references. It is a relationship he ultimately invites us to experience ourselves. The minute scale of the drawings, which reinforces an idea of preciousness, demands physical proximity. To view each piece, one has to actively opt in—to share in his devotion, and to risk falling in love.

Love Will Return in a Different Way is on view at Parent Company Gallery (154 East Broadway, New York) through August 22nd, 2026.