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2021-2023

Kyrae Dawaun

Kyrae Dawaun

 

Kyrae Dawaun was born on the edge of Queens, NY, transplanted from this affective mecca onto Baltimore, Maryland, then Washington, DC. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in 2013. His timely return to working in DC came soon after an achieved Master of Fine Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

He has been invited to work, reside, and exhibit in Los Angeles, Italy, Toronto, and Berlin. In 2016, Pyramid Atlantic hosted him as a Denbo Fellow and in 2017 DC Commission on Arts and Humanities awarded him an Arts and Humanities Fellowship. He has recently exhibited at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in Hampton Roads and Sculpture Center in Long Island City.

Artist statement

The human dependence on inorganic matter and nonhuman existence is the very fault I excavate from for my inspiration; geological transactions as it implicates human relationships.  As a painting based artist I began with the investigation into the origins and chemistries in applied color—thus far including the consideration of chemistries defining our extended built environment too.  What is revealed about the processing of such can connect these geological interests to human histories, behaviors, and realities.

In complaisant gesture, the sculptural work are vignettes dressing abstract figurines of casted earthen matter. Appraising finiteness, hazard and expense they are modest in size; they stand for careful indulgence.  This rehearsal of an unconditional hospitality still lies in the waking Patriarchy, globally domineering and exclusive.

My studio agenda is organized as a web of entendres.  I collect language, as it describes society, and allow it to reappear, reify, fold over and contradict itself.  In parallel my descent into alchemical meditation and practice I am minding quotidian experiences I witness personally, locally, abroad, and broadly.  Enter realist painting not devoid of abstraction.

The painted imagery I offer to an audience is edited to represent, challenge and defend a perspective more generous than my black livelihood. I am directly entangling the absent care and perverted use of this earth demonstrated by the United States hegemony to the inherent mistreatment, dismissal and neglect it has delivered to the black, and brown persons constitutional to this country today.  In accordance there are many scenes to be painted in reflection of this reality, the art and media we produce in testimony, past and present.

Cecilia Kim

Cecilia Kim

 

Cecilia Kim (b. Seoul, South Korea; lives and works in Richmond) is a video artist who received her MFA in Photography + Film at Virginia Commonwealth University, and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kim has lived in five countries, including Australia, England, Singapore, and the United States.

Kim was recently awarded Best in Show, First Place, at the 19th annual Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards. Her work has been shown in solo and group shows, including The Immigrant Artist Biennale, virtual; 0 GALLERY, Seoul, Korea; Target Gallery, Alexandria, VA; Hume Gallery and Sullivan Galleries, Chicago; and at film festivals and screenings, including the NoFlash Video Show, The Anderson Gallery, Around International Film Festival Amsterdam, and Student Experimental Film Festival Binghamton. Kim was a resident artist at the Busan International OpenArts Residence in 2020, and at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in 2021.

Artist Statement

My work is shaped by immaterial exchanges and conversations with my family, community, and friends.

Interpersonal relations and domestic spaces anchor my roots as I navigate my evolving transnational identity as both an insider and outsider in Korea and the United States. As a Korean woman living outside my home country, how I speak and present myself becomes a self-aware performance of authenticity. I ask questions on what it means to uphold traditional expectations towards women and how I belong to or represent my culture. 

I exchange shared narratives in my videos, blurring the boundaries between the personal and collective, and explore the interplay between the documentary and constructed image. I document emotionally resonant moments of care and universal narratives that withstand cultural and language barriers. I hope to bridge human connections and provide space for shared intimacy and vulnerability. These nonlinear narratives capture the cyclical and repetitive nature of labor and generational time, with its symptoms of disappearance and erosion. My practice exists within the invisible spaces of labor that I turn my lens towards. I seek what it means to occupy the in-between spaces that I find myself in. In this liminal space of otherness, I examine the translation of culture and language—how language fulfills or fails as a tool and the impossibility of translation. Through my practice, I push against boundaries and hierarchical systems of power.

Ara Koh

 

Ara Koh (b. Seoul, South Korea; lives and works in Washington, DC) received her BFA in Ceramics and Glass from Hongik University, Seoul, in 2018, and was an exchange student at California State University, Long Beach, in 2016. Koh graduated with an MFA in Ceramic Art at New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2020. Her works are installations claiming space across a variety of materials, particularly clay.

Koh’s work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries, including the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT; and Korea Culture Center, Washington, DC. Koh has received numerous awards, including the Minister of Foreign Affairs Honor by the Korean government. Her works have been collected by Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, Daekyo Culture Foundation, Winell Corporation in Korea, and many private collections.

Artist statement

I speak Korean, English, and clay. My studio practice is a form of translation. Working with clay is a vehicle for memory, honesty, reflection. I translate the invisible and the amorphous into something visible and solid. A balance between polarities; light and heavy, dense and loose, ephemeral and concrete.

There is room for awe and even for childhood trauma, fading or reliving. My sculpture encapsulates the dialogue of internal memories and external landscapes. Making is reliving fading traumatic memory as a landscape painting.

Landscape made in clay links to geologic time and metamorphosis. Questioning how architecture and landscape hold humanity, I think about my body contained in the spaces, my body as a container, and the space contained in the larger body of humanity. Experiencing body and reasoning what that experience does is questioning self in relationship with space.

My work reclaims my position of authority, a space that is my own space. Physically imposing enough to envelop the viewer, intensity of the labor, repetitiveness, and palliative obsessiveness manifest as the understanding of the universe. It asks about my identity as an artist, a daughter, and a human most honestly and genuinely.

Samera Paz

 

Samera Paz (b. Washington, DC; lives and works in Washington, DC) is a multidisciplinary self-taught visual and performance artist, activist, educator, and community organizer. Her work is inspired by social-political issues, mental health, and her identity as a Black and Colombian woman in today’s modern world. In 2015, Paz founded Girl Power Meetups, a women’s empowerment organization that hosts monthly meetups to empower, educate, and support young women in the DC area. She is active in her community as an organizer who facilitates public meetings and events and is a member of NW4BlackJustice, an activism collective founded by DC natives in the summer of 2020.

Paz has exhibited her work and performed in art exhibitions around the United States. She has been interviewed and published in blogs and media for her art and work, including Teen Vogue, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Politico, The Washington Post, Glamour Magazine, and many more.

Artist statement

I consider my art practice to be a documentation of my life's experiences. My introduction to art came at a young age and throughout my life, I turned to art to cope and express myself through difficult times. I've always known art to be truthful, and my goal is to create work that allows me to be my most vulnerable and fearless self. The process of artmaking is just as important to me as the result. Connecting to the work and creating art that resonates with people emotionally and personally are critical to my process. 

As a photographer, I am interested in capturing everyday moments and documenting people as they are, wherever they are. Whether it be strangers, friends, family or even myself, I try to connect to subjects and adapt to my environments. My visual art, specifically when I work with menstrual blood, is visually abstract but revolves around social and political issues. The themes of womanhood, race, gender, and identity are common in my art and activism. My performance art is emotionally driven and, at times, trauma based. It involves being completely transparent with my audience to invoke an emotional response and using my body as a medium. From my visual art to performance art, there is a consistent theme of storytelling, documentation, and an expression of emotions. I lean towards creating work that involves interactiveness and intimacy meant to be felt, interpreted, and discussed. There is freedom in sharing personal parts of myself through my art, and ultimately, there is a sense of healing I experience when that artwork is shared with the world.

Matthew Russo

 

Matthew Russo (b. Worcester, MA; lives and works in Washington, DC) earned his BFA in Painting from Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, Old Lyme, CT, and his MFA from American University in Washington, DC. As part of his art education, he studied in Prato, Italy, where he focused on traditional forms of painting and printmaking. His work actualizes theoretical research into sculpture, painting, and drawings. He uses abstraction as a language to dissect the relationships between objects, materials, and their roles in gender, consumerism, class, and personal history.

Russo has recently exhibited his work at Dodomu Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, and But, Also in Washington, DC.

Artist statement

Rooted in the scholarship of Objects and Things, my practice explores these notions as concrete knowns and abstract unknowns. Abstraction becomes a tool I can use to dissect, transform, and juxtapose known qualities of the objects and materials I source to create my work. The forms I develop are esoteric versions of material reality and personal history. They come from scraps of broken buildings, garbage I pick up, plastic toys, rusted-out fences, cartoons, advertisements, architectural motifs, art historical images, and the odd screenshots on my phone. The abstraction of these objects allows me to participate in a discourse surrounding material relationships to gender, class, and consumerism through a lens of personal experience.

These abstractions live in the metaphysical place of my experience where they become twisted, clumsy, brightly colored, impotent, rough, soft, plastic, sensorial, and animated. In the distance created by abstraction, questions arise about how I come to know my material reality through visual and learned experience. I can ask what extraneous non-physical qualities or ideas are bundled up in this material, object, or thing and how those can be implemented, opposed, or developed further. This theoretical work is actualized in the creation of both sculptures and 2-dimensional work.

When working flatly with painting and drawing, I develop images that float between abstraction and representation. I confuse space, alter forms, and re-work the image to create a sense of a trajectory and history of the objects, things, and spaces portrayed. While working sculpturally, I use fabric, foam, resin, plastic, wood, paper pulp, and other materials with specific processes, physical traits, and extraneous qualities. I weigh these elements against each other to develop relationships that confront and confirm what I know about them. This confrontation and confirmation produce things that feel equally unknown.