Tag Archives: art

Alexis Duque

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  • Asteroide (2017)
    Citadel (2016)
  • Planet 5 (2014)
    Planet 5 (2014)
  • Rolled (2019)
  • Orbit (2018)
    Orbit (2018)
  • Wheel (2016)
    Wheel (2016)
  • Asteroid (2016)
  • Manantial (2016)
    Manantial (2016)
  • Citadel (2016)
  • Infinite City (2016)
  • Dwelling (2018)
  • Tower (2017)
  • Monolith (2015)

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Artist’s Statement

The chaotic and unavoidable process of urbanization in our globalized and over populated world are the central focus of my work. I am interested in depicting clustered spaces and precarious constructions that seem to multiply and overflow with crowded objects in one continuous urban sprawl, at the same time as such structures begin to crumble and decompose from within. Through the use of exaggerated drama and distortion, my work attempts to challenge the way the viewer confronts the idea of consumerism and urbanization within contemporary culture and draw the viewer’s attention to the isolation of the transitory residents, like semi-nomads that emigrate hoping to find a better life on the outskirts of large metropolises.

Newly globalized economies have engendered major changes, from expanded trade networks to new methods of commodity production and the shifts in the labor force these activities require. In recent decades, new patterns of migration have emerged and significant populations have moved to rapidly expanding urban centers, transforming the individual’s relationship to the city. I investigate the conditions of metropolitan landscapes, including the effects of gentrification and urban renewal, political expression, and power.

Alexis Duque holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of Antioquia, Colombia. His work has been exhibited in numerous venues including: at The Heckscher Museum Of Art, El Museo del Barrio, The Drawing Center and Praxis International Gallery in New York; The Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, CA; Champion Contemporary, Austin, TX; The Alden B. Dow Museum of Science and Art, Midland, MI; RudolfV Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands and Galleri Oxholm in Copenhagen, Denmark. Duque’s work has been featured in several publications, including: “Imagine Architecture: Artistic Visions Of The Urban Realm”, “Caribbean: Together Apart Contemporary Artists from (part of) the Caribbean” Imago Mundi – Luciano Benetton, Blue Canvas Magazine, LandEscape Art review, Beautiful Decay, Artistaday, New American Paintings, Studio Visit Magazine, The East Hampton Star, The East Hampton Press and El Diario of New York. Duque currently lives and works in NYC.

Beth Lo

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Artist’s Statement

My work in ceramics and mixed media collage revolves primarily around issues of family and my Asian-American background. Cultural marginality and blending, tradition vs. Westernization, language and translation are key elements in my work. Since the birth of my son in 1987, I have been drawing inspiration from major events in my family’s history, the day-to-day challenges of parenting, and my own childhood memories of being raised in a minority culture in the United States. I use the image of a child as a symbol of innocence, potential and vulnerability.

Beth Lo makes work in ceramics and mixed media about family, culture and language. Her Good Children vessels and sculptures have been exhibited internationally and she has been the recipient of a United States Artist Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, Montana Arts Council Individual Artist Grant and an American Craft Museum Design Award. She is also a children’s book illustrator and professional bass player. She retired after 30 years of teaching ceramics at the University of Montana in 2016.

Miriam Hitchcock

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Artist’s Statement

Making art is a function of living, a material practice that allows me to examine the ordinary and illuminate the familiar. My creative attitude and working process are largely informed by the inherent displacement and fragmentation characteristic of contemporary life and the landscape we now inhabit, against a diminishing wilderness. Allusions to aftermath and anachronism reflect my fascination with the experience of time. Finding that text and sound are potent collaborators, I now make short time-based media projects alongside painting, which constitutes the core of my studio practice.

Miriam Hitchcock lives and works in Santa Cruz, California. Born in San Francisco, she grew up in a nature loving family on the peninsula, attended University of California at Santa Cruz and went on to complete an MFA in Painting from Yale University. Miriam has taught Painting, Drawing and Design at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design and Cornell University. Returning to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1990, she instructed studio Art courses at Stanford University, San Jose State University, and continuously from 1992 to 2012, the University of California at Santa Cruz. Miriam has led studio intensive courses in Rome, Italy through the Cornell University Dept. of Art and Architecture and The American University in Rome as well as University of California at Santa Cruz. She began incorporating animation and time-based media into her life-long painting practice in 2012, and received an award for Best Experimental Film in the 2018 Annual Copenhagen Film Festival, Denmark.

Eozen Agopian

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Artist’s Statement

In my artwork I create visual parallels between rational and cosmological worlds through constructing and deconstructing, layering and erasing, scraping and marking, unraveling and reconnecting. I incorporate techniques of drawing, painting, sewing and weaving. I started using thread in my work more than twenty years ago. I liked the practical properties of the material, thread’s use to put things together, to mantle, to unify. Threads also soothed my desire for fluidity: I could manipulate them to create mass, sculptural forms, to penetrate the canvas or just leave them loose. I would sew different layers of colored yarns to create chromatic filters where underneath you could see shimmering shapes.

Eozen Agopian was born in Athens, Greece. She received her MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute (1993) and her BFA from Hunter College (1989). Her first solo show was at Michael Wall Gallery (N.Y. 1993). Since then her work is shown in several solo, three person and group exhibitions in Greece, France, Italy, Germany, China, Russia and the United States, such as, Shiva Gallery of the John Jay College (New York), Fox Gallery NYC (New York), Lesley Heller gallery (New York), Hellenic American Union (Athens), AAW Gallery, (Beijing), Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete (Greece), State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessalonica, (Greece),Smack Melon (New York) In 2014 she was a resident artist at the Triangle Arts Foundation in Brooklyn. The last years she lives and works both in New York and Athens. Currently she has a solo exhibit at the Consulate General of Greece in New York. Her next solo show will take place at Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery (Athens, Greece) in the Spring of 2019.

Etty Yaniv

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Artist’s Statement

How we form narratives out of patterns that recur daily and how we process diurnal time in relation to memory and place have preoccupied me since early on. In my artwork I imagine multiple ways in which narratives may form out of fragmented knowledge by constructing and deconstructing pieces of repetitive documentation.

In a process–oriented approach I use a wide range of materials from my studio and from every-day life — such as found objects, drawings, paintings, and photographs which depict autobiographical fragments from my environment. Together, these disjointed pieces form a holistic image, widely varied in scale — from small scale collage paintings to monumental immersive installations. In either format I aim to create hybrid mindscapes in which the viewer is placed somewhere between the real and the imagined, the organic and the artificial, landscape and topography.

While on the whole I frequently allude to the fragility of our Eco system and complexity in our civilization, the layered fragments are like coded messages or excavated memories which present new clues. Each layer documents a particular moment in time and only up close the viewer may discover the content underneath, invited to choose their own perspective.

Etty Yaniv was born in Tel Aviv, Israel and currently works on her art, art writing, and curatorial projects in Brooklyn. Her work includes drawings, collaged paintings and immersive dimensional installations which merge photography, drawing, and painting. Yaniv exhibited her work in solo and group shows at galleries and museums nationally and internationally, including The Haifa Museum of Art, Israel, State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia, Newark Museum of Art, NJ, Torrance Art Museum, CA, AIR gallery, Brooklyn, Long Island University, Brooklyn, and Leipziger Baumwollspinnerie, Leipzig Germany. She holds BA in Psychology and Literature from Tel Aviv University, BFA from Parsons School of Design, and MFA from SUNY Purchase. She has been writing for several NYC art blogs and recently she has initiated Art Spiel, her own fine art blog. In 2018 she was awarded the Two Trees subsidized studio space Program in Dumbo.

Julie Peppito

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Artist’s Statement

In “Nature, Fashion & War,” I have created large-scale charcoals and tapestries that draw connections between the human desire to want more of everything versus the destructive impact our consumerism has on the environment and the survival of our species. The colorful, multi-layered, fashion-inspired tapestries in “Nature, Fashion & War” contain objects that were on their way to becoming trash. At one time these items were desirable status symbols or served a functional purpose. By smashing, wrapping, and sewing old shoes, clothes, toys, jewelry, cans, and other debris into pliable surfaces, then combining them with carefully painted and drawn images of politicians, nature, people, and monsters, I create topographical narratives that comment on the systems destroying life on earth.

These works are my answer to author Naomi Klein’s assertion that “No Is Not Enough.” This exhibition speaks to the catastrophic effects unregulated industries are having on us, the role human nature plays in that, our coping mechanisms, and strategies towards a healthy inhabitable world. My titles often reference books and articles from notable journalists like Naomi Klein, Jane Mayer, Sharon Lerner, Brene Brown and Arundati Roy. Since the recent re-invention of “fake news,” I have set out to create mammoth illustrations interspersed with giant word balloons inspired by these authors’ well-researched works. These works are intended to illuminate the intricate web of violence, greed, love and beauty that comprise human nature, in order to help tip the future towards our positive instincts and away from those hurling us towards extinction.

Julie Peppito was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then moved to New York City, where she received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1992. She received her MFA from Alfred University in 2004, and has shown extensively for the past 25 years. She has received several grants including a New York Foundation of The Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in 2001. She has also created art for several New York playgrounds. In April of 2018 she presented her seventh solo exhibition titled “Nature, Fashion & War” in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has become increasingly involved in creating agitprop for marches and is now focusing on elections. Most recently she has co-curated an exhibit called “In Her Hands” with Orly Cogan (Robert Mann Gallery, New York City, June 14 – August 17, 2018). “In Her Hands” consists of portraits of progressive women candidates running in the 2018 elections, handmade by 15 women artists from across the country. To see more of Julie’s work, visit juliepeppito.com

Jerry Siegel

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Artist’s Statement

I am a strong believer in place, and how a region, community and a home will shape who you are. The place I know, where I was raised, is the Black Belt region of the American South. It is how I was raised, as a Southerner and as a Jew in a small southern town, instilled with belief in family and tradition that motivates me to document the place I call home.

Born in Selma, AL, Jerry Siegel is a photographer living in Atlanta, GA, and working throughout the Southeast. Siegel focuses his work in the traditions of documentary and portrait photography. His work in the Black Belt region of Alabama was recently published by the Georgia Museum of Art. This monograph, Black Belt Color, focuses on the unique, cultural landscape of the Black Belt region. His first monograph, Facing South, Portraits of Southern Artists, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2011, and features portraits of 100 Southern artists.

Raven Halfmoon

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Artist’s Statement

Over the past year, I have been focused on producing a body of work that reflects how I feel both as a woman and an American Indian living in the 21st Century. In this body of work, I have strived to illustrate how I feel about the ancient legacy of my heritage while at the same time acknowledging the modern day and age. Each piece reflects my understanding and interpretation of Caddo tribal culture and the fight to maintain a place for it in today’s world. With the election of a new president, climate change and social oppression, it is more important than ever before to have a unique voice, express it, and strive to make it heard. In my work I try to explore themes of “the other,” cultural appropriation and history. With my work, I hope to create awareness and address issues that affect people who share a similar story. Through my installations, I hope to tell a story both of how one understands self and culture, but also what defines these ideals in America today.

Raven Halfmoon is from Norman, OK. She attended the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville) where she earned a double Bachelors Degree in ceramics/painting and cultural anthropology. Her work has been featured in multiple exhibitions throughout Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, Montana and California. She enrolled in the Post-Bac at the University of Oklahoma and was also accepted to several short term residencies from 2015 to 2016. In 2017, Raven completed a long-term residency at the Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, Montana. Raven is currently based just outside of Dallas,Texas where she is working to establish her own studio and continues to produce work at Texas Women’s University.

Millicent Young

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Artist’s Statement

Art and Earth define us as human beings. The rupture of connection with either renders us senseless and therefore only brutal. The language of art is sensual. It can stir the heart. It can bypass rational, linear processes. Art can be a transformer. The idea that imagination begets empathy and is awakened by the senses has shaped all that I have attempted as a citizen artist.

Through my work, I am interested in building a vocabulary that will one day tell a new story: a new mythology that restores mystery, beauty, silence, and imagination as central to our co-existence. My visual language favors archetype and allusion. Like dreams, it is a code simultaneously familiar, layered, and elusive. The Koan, a Buddhist teaching tool that takes the form of a paradoxical question, is another model for my work. Insight follows contemplation and the willingness to lose what one knows.

The materials I use are both substance and symbol. As substance they are ordinary, simple, and sometimes found yet within them, there is beauty. As symbols, they do not comfortably stand for one thing. On the scent of something large, they dodge the straight line of equation. The exacting repetitive gestures associated with the crafting of much of my work make the process a meditation; however, the parallel thought flow, or its absence, that accompanies these gestures also infuses the work.

The record of time is evident though silent in my work. Slowly taking form through accretion, thousands of horsehairs are individually threaded through hundreds of holes drilled in vines or tiny dowels. In the White Luminous Room, each of the 1500 ten foot long strands are made by tying and gluing tiny bundles of hair to a long thread. The liquidity of plaster is recorded in its hard celestial surface. The flow of ink is remembered by the contraction of the washi paper in the drying. Every ring of ink on each of the 80 hammered lead pans is a record of the evaporation of that single pool — concentrated, diluted, rinsed, repeated — until the right mark is made.

The Anthropocene is now — the first epoch defined by the impact of one species — ours — on the planet and all the systems that have spawned and supported what we have named “life.” The Cantos are my witness and meditations on now.

Millicent Young was born in New York City in 1958 and attended Dalton School. Shortly after receiving her MFA from James Madison University, she received her first of two Professional Fellowship Awards from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Exhibiting widely, her work has been recognized by curators and directors from institutions including DIA, New Museum, and Whitney Museum. Young’s work received a top award at the 2005 Biennale in Florence, Italy. Her upcoming solo at Les Yeux du Monde in Virginia is Cantos for the Anthropocene. She resides in the Hudson Valley of New York.

Karen Hampton

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Artist’s Statement

I am a conceptual mixed media artist, addressing issues of colorism and race. I seek to break stereotypes and address issues related to my life. My artwork is steeped in oral history and is an expression of the narrative. As a storyteller, I impart conceptualized stories about the “other” in society. I view myself as a vehicle for ancestral stories to transcend history and remain part of the historical record. The canvas of my artwork is fabric which I age and imbue with conceptualized images of a forgotten part of the American story. Using images and text, I embed the cloth with the hopes and visions of my ancestors, particularly those whose stories have remained invisible. Whether woven or stitched, every time my weft crosses the warp or my needle pierces the cloth, it reaches through another layer of scorched earth that slavery has left behind. In this way I attempt to reframe critical issues of race.

Karen Hampton (born January 28, 1958, in Los Angeles, California) is an African American conceptual mixed-media artist addressing issues related to race. She was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2000 from the University of California, Davis. In 2008, she received the Fleishhacker Foundation’s Eureka Award. Her artwork is exhibited internationally and is in the collection of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum and the Honolulu Museum of Art. Currently, she holds the position of Designer in Residence at Michigan State University in Critical Race Issues.