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Current Fellows

Ali Kaeini

Ali Kaeini

Ali Kaeini (he/him) is an Iranian artist and earned his Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, New York, NY, in 2019. His paintings reflect a religious society in turmoil, and the ancient civilization that has shaped his upbringing. Rooted in Persian epics and childhood stories, Kaeini blends ancient Iranian tales with religious motifs. His work fuses contemporary experimentation with forms reminiscent of Persian and Islamic architecture. By blending homemade natural dyes, fabric collages, sewing, and printmaking, he reconstructs decorative elements, delving into his identity and cultural displacement. The visual tension and displacement of ancient relics and designs within his art convey his own immigration story—a fusion of belonging and non-belonging. His art has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, including being a finalist for the Trawick Contemporary Art Award in Bethesda in 2022 and at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA.

new.now. (2024)

Neha Misra

Neha Misra

Neha Misra नेहा मिश्रा (she/her) is a contemporary eco-folk artist, poet, and an award-winning climate justice advocate. Misra’s feminist-Earth-wisdom-centered interdisciplinary studio embodies the transformative power of art to build bridges between private, collective, planetary healing and liberation. Misra’s creative practice centers her Global Majority lineage as a first-generation, multi-lingual immigrant woman from New Delhi, India, who calls a solar-powered community in the Washington metro region her adopted home. She has been honored as a Presidential Leadership Scholar, and as a Regenerative Artivist by the Design Science Studio—a partnership of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and habRitual for leading planet conscious artists. Misra is a 2022 fellow of the Public Voices Fellowship on the Climate Crisis, an initiative of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the OpEd Project, and Ann MacDougal, to change who writes history. She serves as the inaugural Global Ambassador for the nonprofit Remote Energy, which is dedicated to making the solar photovoltaic field more inclusive for BIPOC communities, especially women of color.

new.now. (2024)

Hien Kat Nguyen

Hien Kat Nguyen

Hien Kat Nguyen (they/them) was born and raised in Saigon, Vietnam, and is currently living in Richmond, Virginia. They earned their Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2022. Nguyen communicates their experience as a queer 1.5-generation Vietnamese immigrant through sculpture. Using Vietnamese folklore and their multicultural history, they nurture the concepts that have anchored them. Through woodworking and 3D fabrication techniques, Nguyen creates installations and game-like sculptures that facilitate interaction and use humor to approach taboo subjects surrounding assimilation experiences. They earned over seven VCUarts scholarships and grants between 2020 and 2022. They have attended residencies at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO; Peters Valley School of Craft, Sandyston, NJ; and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Richmond, VA. They were the recipient of the Windgate–Lamar Fellowship from the Center for Craft, Asheville, NC, and the Undergraduate Fellowship in Sculpture from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA. Nguyen has shown work at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond and the Anderson; Richmond, VA.

new.now. (2024)

Kat Thompson

Kat Thompson

Kat Thompson (she/her) is a multidisciplinary Afro-Jamaican American artist based in Virginia, who works in photography, textile, sculptural collage, and installation. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from George Mason University and her Master of Fine Arts in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work combines these mediums to explore notions of Black selfhood within the African Diaspora. Being of Jamaican heritage, Thompson confronts her dual identity through recent projects that depict traces of her family’s journey through personal and found materials. Her focus is to uncover stories that mirror parts of ourselves back to us, including our histories, current realities, and future possibilities. Her work has been exhibited at the Fenwick Gallery and the Gillespie Gallery of Art at George Mason University, and the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, Reston, VA. She was the 2021–2022 recipient of the Young Alumni Commissioning Award from George Mason University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts.

new.now. (2024)

Misha Ilin

Misha Ilin

 

Misha Ilin (b. 1985; Protvino, Russia) received a Master’s in Mathematics and Informatics from the National University of Science and Technology in Moscow, Russia. In 2016 he moved to the United States and received his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Ilin’s recent exhibitions include wish the past never to repeat itself, the kitchen, Berlin, Germany, inquisitive instructions, Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, China, Artist-As-Organizer, Washington Project for Arts, DC, hostipitality, Baltimore, MD, and order of things, Homme Gallery, DC.

new.now. (2023)

Artist statement

My work explores the practice of instructions and situations as a medium to reveal the intimate connection between our layered identities and the contractual social interactions that exist around us. By experimenting with different forms of unities emerging between participants of his performative installations, I seek to provoke both collaborative and rival relationships with their audience to problematize our domestic rituals, social practices, and behaviors and comment on issues of labor, social roles, immigration, race, and inequality.

Madyha J. Leghari

Madyha J. Leghari

 

Madyha J. Leghari (b. 1991) is a visual artist, writer, and educator working between Lahore and Washington, DC. She earned a BFA at the National College of Arts, Lahore (2013) and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2018) on a Fulbright Scholarship. Her practice often revolves around the possibilities and limitations of language, and is often positioned in the indeterminate spaces of translation, cultural friction, and semantic lacunae.

Madyha has been the recipient of the Mansion Artist Residency; Delta Research Placement at the Flat Time House; Siena Art Institute Artist Residency and the Murree Museum residency.

She has exhibited her works internationally at platforms such as the Pera Museum, University of Colorado Boulder, Bennington College, Sea Foundation, The Institute for Experimental Arts, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Nottingham Arts Mela, 17th Athens Digital Arts Festival, Antimatter, and others across the Americas, Asia, and Europe.

Madyha has written on art for a number of publications including ArtNow Pakistan and the Dawn Newspaper. She has teaching experience at the National College of Arts, Lahore, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston and the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.

new.now. (2023)

Artist statement

I am moved by the possibilities as well as the limitations of language. Growing up, I spoke Saraiki at home, Balochi with cousins, Urdu amongst peers and, later, English at school. This background attuned me to the fraught nature of language. It is one of the finest tools in the human inventory, and yet it fails us every day through its incomplete nature; its inability to accurately map the world; its (mis)translations; and its easy assimilation into communicative capitalism. I use these failures as fertile points of departure. Thus, my work is often positioned in the intermediate spaces of translation, cultural frictions, and linguistic lacunae.

Through various strategies, I attempt to negate word and describe a world without the interference of language. These strategies include plasticity, which emphasizes that language can belong to the empirical as equally as the rational. I examine physical manifestations of language as book, paper, library, and archive to emphasize its sensuous promise.

In some works, I focus on literalism, attempting the most direct possible realizations of language to both demonstrate its tenuous relationship with this world and to open up a different one. In other works, I examine the relationship of speech, voice, and the body, unpacking assumptions behind the authority, neutrality, and visibility of the narrator. Moreover, I remain interested in chance operations wherein language is severed from intention. Lastly, I lean on the ability of poetry and fiction to bend language away from description to say much more than mere ‘fact.’ I use multiple forms such as video, photography, sound, installation, printmaking, and painting, but language consistently remains important across all of them.

Edgar Reyes

Edgar Reyes

 

Edgar Reyes (b. Guadalajara, Mexico) is a multimedia artist and educator based in the Baltimore and Washington D.C. area. Reyes’s work invites viewers to think about the people, places, and connections they carry with them. His practice draws on the specifics of his own life, and reflections of shared experiences of resettlement and migration. Through his art making he explores his family’s Mexican and Indigenous roots.

Reyes earned his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has taught at nonprofit organizations, schools, universities, and museums. His work has been prominently featured in large scale public installations including Sueños, a monumental light box and banners displayed during Baltimore’s Light City Festival (2017), and Xochitl, vivid abstract patterns installed in shop windows in Rockville, MD as part of the VisArts Make It Visible project (2021). His work has been featured in galleries and public spaces across the United States. He has developed installations for the Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, MD), where his work was exhibited in dialogue with the permanent collection, and encouraged community participation. Recent honors include Rubys Artist Grant recipient (2021), Keyholder Resident Artist at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (2021), Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize Semifinalists (2021), and Bresler Resident Artist at VisArts (2021).

new.now. (2023)

Artist statement

Many of my projects are autobiographical and a reflection of my personal journey as an undocumented youth in the United States. My work focuses on the precious and difficult moments my family and community face. Overall my practice is inspired by our shared experiences and my passion to highlight connections between the art of our ancestors and the contemporary Mexican diaspora. I explore how the blending of Indigenous and European traditions is an ongoing process of conquest and resistance. My art making is centered around building compassion and understanding around the complex history of forced and volunteering resettlement throughout the Americas. I emphasize the beauty of being Mexican American, yet question my national and cultural traditions. I usually create pieces in a collaborative platform as an act of healing and as a resource to creatively engage others in our connection to the land and our narratives of survival.

Abed Elmajid Shalabi

Abed Elmajid Shalabi

 

Abed Elmajid Shalabi (b. 1991) is a Palestinian Israeli artist, living and working in Richmond, Virginia. Shalabi joined the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture (2022); he holds an MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University (2021) and a BFA in Fine Arts from The Berlin University of Arts and Shenkar College in Tel Aviv (2019). Shalabi was awarded the Virginia Museum Of Fine Arts Graduate Fellowship (2020-2021), The Paul F. Miller Graduate Scholarship in Sculpture (2020). He was awarded grants from Artis, United States Artist, and the Robert Weil Family Foundation. Shalabi’s work was exhibited in Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Richmond, VA.

new.now. (2023)

Isabella Whitfield

Isabella Whitfield

 

Isabella Whitfield (b. 1998; Centreville, VA) is a multidisciplinary artist who works in collaboration with manufactured and natural environments. After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2020, she completed a year-long postgraduate program as an Aunspaugh Art Fellow. Whitfield has exhibited major works at New City Arts, Ruffin Gallery, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Museum, and InLight 2021 with 1708 Gallery. She has participated in residencies with the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, OxBow School of Art, and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center.

new.now. (2023)

Artist statement

Isabella Whitfield’s artistic practice encompasses site-responsive installation, papermaking, sculpture, and landscaping. She makes meditative, performative work that considers the contradictory relationships between the environment, physical homeland, human labor, and historical object functionality. Whitfield’s projects often contain an act of collaborative generosity, inviting the viewer to become part of the work through physical immersion or participatory artistic creation.

The process of creating installations adopts motions of repetitive labor, often presenting a challenge of physical endurance through performative digging, measuring, and stitching. Incorporating both ephemeral materials and sacred geometries, her work hinges on fragile precision and is expected to formally deteriorate over time. The inevitable decomposition of materials echo notions of life cycles and renewal; examining continuous de/reconstruction of self.

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.

María Luz Bravo

María Luz Bravo

 

María Luz Bravo (b. 1975, Mexico; lives and works in Washington, DC) is a Mexican photographer whose work highlights major social phenomena, focusing primarily on cities in conflict, political boundaries and community resilience and revolves around the use of space, both urban and architectural, in the contemporary urban landscape. She holds a Bachelor’s in Architecture from Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, Mexico and a Master of Arts in New Media Photojournalism from Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally in the US, Mexico, and Europe. María Luz Bravo’s 2014 series Reclaims was selected to be part of the XVI Photography Biennale in Mexico.

Artist statement

My body of work revolves around the use of space, both urban and architectural in the contemporary urban landscape to highlight major social phenomena, focusing primarily on cities in conflict, political boundaries, and community resilience.

In Mexico, I have photographed the effects of violence in Ciudad Juarez and the political boundaries of México City. In the US I have documented urban decline, racial segregation, and socioeconomic contrasts mainly on the East Coast and the South.

Jason Bulluck

Jason Bulluck

 

Jason Bulluck (b. Chester, PA; lives and works in Washington, DC) is an artist, writer, and teacher living in Washington, DC and working in both DC and Chicago. His work draws largely on the possibilities emerging from discourse between non-Western and Western world-building narratives. Bulluck holds an Masters of Fine Arts from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018), a Masters in Education from George Washington University (2010) and a Bachelors in Fine Arts from Howard University (2005). Bulluck has exhibited his work nationally at galleries including,  Take Care Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Sullivan Galleries in Chicago, Il and Conner Contemporary in Washington, DC.

Artist statement

I have situated my practice within discourses of critical geography, critical race studies, and Buddhist dialectics.

My work is grounded in early Indian, Mahayana and especially, Chan/Zen Buddhist psychology, epistemology, ontology as well as personal histories and those of the Americas and Africa. I am concerned with the provocations of black cultural theorists and the liberatory possibilities posed by engaging the work of a range of black radical thinkers, Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson, and that of Fred Moten and Hortense Spillers. I suspect that an end to anti-blackness can mean an end to much of human oppression. And I am further devoted to the range of interventions that might emerge from an even rounder dialogue. I have engaged esoteric Mahayana Buddhism in search of expedient means to deploy in a dialectic between epistemes West, Buddhist and otherwise subaltern. I suspect the possibilities of epistemic and ontological harmonies in the offing of considering the critiques of post-Marxists, critical geographers, and black radical theorists vis-a-vis an engaged and critical Buddhism.

My recent work involved the production of a series of Mahayana analog relational databases that encourage meetings of disparate philosophical traditions through material encounters with a range of objects. These are often minimalist objects that make formal gestures to be touched and considered as emerging in real-time as work made in concert with the artist, material, space, etc. The relational database has made so much of the world we now recognize possible, and while it, and more powerful database designs, pose great risks to liberatory projects, the relational database itself works well as a performative allegory representing the notion that what seems discrete in fact exists in relation to all other things.

This performative allegory offered by making objects, installations or performances help to make the consideration of some Buddhist tenets, such as interdependent origination and emptiness, perhaps more ontologically legible. I have been experimenting further with more complex databases that might offer opportunities to consider Buddhist thought in the context of material geographies and analyses of anti-black structures and histories.

Joey Enríquez

Joey Enríquez

 

Joey Enríquez (b. Simi Valley, CA; lives and works in Washington, DC.) makes prints and sculptural work that consist of clay monotype prints and digital renderings about location, movement through space, and the passage of time. Enríquez earned their B.A. in Art–Design from California Lutheran University (2018) and their M.F.A. in Fine Arts at the George Washington University (2020). Originally a graphic designer from Southern California, they transitioned from design to art in 2017 to explore a more interdisciplinary creative practice. Their most recent exhibition, desierto desierto at Gallery 102, unearthed family narratives and revealed erasure of indigeneity in the southwest deserts.

Artist statement

In my work, I investigate erasure of memory and experience, environmental decay, and movement through lineage across temporal spaces. I explore the effects of generational trauma and the development of contemporary social relations by looking to archives and catalogued narratives. My own movement through space is essential in the development of the sculptural objects I build and the prints that I create. I warp the site-specificity of each object and installation in order to create friction between the linear thinking of the canon of recorded history and the reality of the spatial relations we establish. Disrupting fact and fiction, past and present, I point to power dynamics, such as race, gender, and environment, that have been put in place to silence marginalized experiences and endanger the future survival of silenced identity and experience.

With my most recent sculptural work, I questioned the record of my maternal family history and the erasure of their, and subsequently my own, mexicanx identity. Through adapting and altering the process of adobe brick making, I fabricated a sculptural ruin, "if you cant find your own, store-bought is fine" (2020), based on the real ruin of a wall at my great great grandmother?s property in New Mexico. Here, the murder of my great great grandmother and one of her daughters had been lost in time?while a newspaper article recorded the event, it remained unspoken about by future generations of my family after assimilating into white American society. Mostly relying on the abstraction of my own memory as time passes, I constructed and stacked each brick with a sense of desperation. I became compelled to forge a ruin before my memory faded and became no longer legible. Juxtaposing a murder with a captivating, monumental ruin-like adobe wall fragment, I emphasize the invisible acceptance of glossing over traumatic histories of oppression, cultural death, and erasure of identity in my work.

Stephanie Garon

Stephanie Garon

 

Stephanie Garon is an artist and educator whose work functions as abstracted expressions of a time, place, and way of life that capture paradoxes: formalism and fragility, permanence and impermanence, and nature and nurture. Garon earned both her Bachelor of Science (1994) and a Masters of Science (1996) from Cornell University and received a Post Baccalaureate degree from Maryland Institute College of Art (2010) where she now teaches. She is set to receive her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in Studio Art Summer Low-Residency (MFAST) in 2023. Her work has been exhibited internationally in London, Colombia, and South Korea, as well as across the United States. Her writing, a critical aspect of her artistic process, has been published in international literary journals and her chapbook will be published in 2021.

Artist statement

As a five year old, I tagged along with my father to "hamfests,” radio operator gatherings held in county fair parking lots. Cars would pop open their trunks like overflowing treasure chests filled with electronic wares: old radio boxes, computer boards, cables, monitors, soldering irons. It was an oasis in the heart of wooded valleys.

My father would sell or trade items he no longer needed. My job was to display them on a tattered blanket and haggle to make the sale. The setup became my stage as I pranced about, reorganizing after each barter session. In my mind's eye, we were a traveling show.

Years later, when I find myself welding and smelling the rusty steel odor of the studio, I am driving down those dusty roads again.

My work explores the limits of nature and connection through juxtaposing industrial elements with natural materials I collect. The decomposition of the natural forms provide drama and philosophic markers of fragility: green pine needles fade to brown, cement made from melted snow crumbles, and wind switches orientation of metal sculpture around trees. Rich in associations, the work functions as abstracted expressions of a time, place, and way of life that capture paradoxes: formalism and fragility, permanence and impermanence, and nature and nurture.

My work invites the viewer to contemplate how we, as people, build structures and interact with the natural world around us. Like the items I’d curate at the hamfests, my art embraces the delicacy of transforming materials to define my visual voice.

Lionel Frazier White III

Lionel Frazier White III

 

Lionel Frazier White III (b. Washington, DC; lives and works in Washington, DC) is a Washington, DC, native; arts educator; and interdisciplinary conceptual artist who works in painting, drawing, wood sculpture, installation, and mixed media collage. White’s work explores themes of forced and coerced labor and their effect on family pathology, erasure, displacement, reassertion, and gentrification. White holds a Bachelors in Fine Arts from the George Washington University Corcoran School of the Arts and Design (2018) and is a graduate of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts high school in Washington, DC. His work has been exhibited at the DC Commission on Arts and Humanities, Prince George's African American Art Museum and Cultural Center, Torpedo Factory |Connect The Dots, Rush Arts Galleries, and Area 405. White was a 2019 Halcyon Arts Lab Cohort 3 Fellow in Residence in Washington, DC.

Artist statement

I am a third and fourth generation DC native who has a conceptual socially engaged practice. The themes in my work focus on gentrification, infrastructure, rememory, reassertion, and how they affect long-time DC residents. I communicate these themes through mixed media collage, installation, and performance.

I create collages by painting, cutting, stacking, and altering copies of archived images from family, friends, and historical documents taken in DC. I hold picture parties to share this practice with others. Through my work, I hope to activate memories and the sensory emotional feelings attached to them. By understanding our relationships to these images and the feelings they trigger we learn the importance of our memories and how collective memories contextualize history. As we share stories we find commonalities that express cultural nuances.

My work shows how these stories are being obscured and erased as a result of gentrification. Performance serves to stage interventions that reassert the presence of longtime DC residents. Both performance and photographic artifacts are used to understand the relationships of persons, places, and things, and show how they all define one another. The goal is to reassert and juxtapose social histories and narratives up against currently gentrified spaces to illuminate the problematic nature of gentrification. The framework of my practice is inspired by “March On,” a collaboration between Bryony Roberts, Mabel O. Wilson, and Marching Cobras and Tricia Rose’s book Black Noise. “March On” is a performance art piece that looks at the historical significance of black marching bands, and how its performance magnifies the politics of black bodies as they navigate gentrifying space while confronting a culture of hyper-surveillance. In Black Noise, Tricia Rose describes the nature of rap as a continually evolving relationship between black cultural practice, social and economic conditions, technology, sexual and social politics, and the institutional policing of the popular terrain. My practice focuses on how black bodies navigate and contest with the politics of space. For example, in the urban environment, infrastructure like apartment complexes causes the nature of community interactions to be different than in the more spaced-out suburbs. I focus on understanding the changing nature of space and maintaining resilience against forces that would erase black people and their legacy.