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BORDERWALLS V
December 16 – January 7, 2023
The Border Project Space and Arcade Curatorial is pleased to present Borderwalls V from December 16 – January 7, 2023.
BORDERWALLS V—a group show consisting of small artworks by artists whose work we find alluring and who support both galleries’ mission of building a community-oriented art space with exceptional work.
We believe in creating a fair and open system and strive to exhibit and support artists with diverse voices and backgrounds. The Border Project Space and Arcade Curatorial will be holding another open call from January 1st – February 15th, 2023. We are looking for artists to show and who want to be part of a community of artists. We discover a lot of artists via our annual open call every year and we hope you can submit your work. We are immensely grateful for your continuous support.
Participating Artists: Jing (Ellen) Xu, Maggie Pucket, Sanié Bokhari and Manon Wada, Zac Hacmon, Noga Cohen, Mona Saeed Kamal, Kelly Chuning, Judit Kis, Alex Paik, Niceli Portugal, Sue Jin Jo, Neil, Jacki Davis, Constantine, Natsuki Takauji, Eva Mueller, Graciela Cassel, Arantxa Ximena Rodriguez, Aaron Schraeter, Fred Fleisher
Fiber Reveries
Gabriella Moreno, Janet Loren Hill,
Jongbum Kim, Ruth Jeyaveeran, and Yura Adams
October 7 – 29th, 2022
The Border Project Space is pleased to present Reverie, a group exhibition with artists Janet Loren Hill, Jongbum Kim, Gabriella Moreno, Ruth Jeyaveeran, and Yura Adams. Each artist reflects on the show’s theme with their playful textile sculptures, exhibiting their distinctive relationship with the medium and their interpretation of dreams.
Reverie (n): a state of being pleasantly lost in one’s thoughts; a daydream
Janet Loren Hill’s surrealistic and voyeuristic sculpture—Binocular Viewpoint: Like snow; a silencing blanket; a collapsing shelter—evokes a dream-like, tantalizing experience as she plays with the absurd motif of the 1950s Chattering Teeth toy: “We see them filling the air with their misdirections, sinking their bite into flesh softened by fear and fantasy, and ignoring logic gaps in service of their desperate self-preservation.” By skewing the eye with vibrant dots of variegated hues, her pointillistic implementation lures and hypnotizes the viewer as they attempt to comprehend the artist’s depiction of the unconscious bubbling to the surface.
Jongbum Kim’s work is rooted in the consideration and union of dualities: matter and spirit, inner and outer, and good and evil. The Unknown (Alien), constructed with recycled textiles, is an interactive teepee designed for children to explore their “inner world,” exhibiting the imaginative and playful character we inhabited as kids and the fantasies we’d concoct. The Rugs shown reflect the artists’ multinational upbringing and as a result, the chameleon-like character they identify with. Although the rugs are varied in colors and textures, the assortment of diversity lives harmoniously and symbiotically together, conveying Kim’s embrace of cross-culturalism.
Gabriella Moreno’s textile drape, When We Lay Closely and Try to Stare Into Each Other’s Eyes, depicts one’s field of vision while intimately laying in a bed across their lover: “laying so closely that one’s eyes almost cross, or go out of focus, and how when this happens one’s other senses can take prominence.” The hodgepodge of fabric scraps, representing the wrinkled sheets and covers, is anchored by two lipstick kiss marks on the top right of the piece, which alludes to the chaotic nature of infatuation and enchantment being grounded by the foundation of connection and love.
Ruth Jeyaveeran contemplates the function and the metaphor of cairns (man-made stacks of rocks) in her wool-constructed piece Woolly Cairns. The textile rocks exude energetic values of red and are overlaid with white marks reminiscent of geological lines. She ponders and invites viewers to question the metaphorical nature of these rocks, which have been used as navigational tools by cultures throughout history. Is the way forward a straight and narrow path? Or can we move toward a softer space that prioritizes communities, networks, and connections over hard, concrete divisions?
Yura Adams’ works revolve around abstracting and portraying the poetry embedded in nature and science. Influenced by her concerns about global warming and her observations of the fast-moving clouds, birds, and atmospheric shifts in the light outside her studio, Adams’ paintings are captivating and transfixing as the texture and colors induce the feeling of “the ocean of air. ”Skies in the Road re-images the beauty in nature and provides a glimpse into the way the artist perceives and interprets the environment surrounding her.
Bodily Integrity at The Border Project Space
August 12 – September 3, 2022
The Border Gallery Project is pleased to present Bodily Integrity—a group show exhibiting works by Lydia Nobles, Bianca Abdi-Boragi, Elizabeth Harney, Magdalena Dukiewicz, Georgia Lale, Christen Clifford, and Young Joo Lee curated by Jamie Martinez.
Considering the political calamity revolving around the overturn of Roe V. Wade and the violation of human rights, it has become ever more imperative to express and consider the emotional and physical complexities surrounding the principle of bodily integrity. Altogether, the disparate pieces from the seven distinct artists amalgamate into an encompassing perspective that contemplates the themes of self-ownership and autonomy.
Lydia Nobles’ sculpture Urvi, is named after and inspired by the story of Urvi—a mother of one who, after multiple miscarriages, finally finds luck until a medical issue leads to a difficult decision. The crib (made of acrylic, acrylic latex, brass, glass beads, polypropylene, resin, silk, steel, and wood) is accompanied by a film starring Urvi narrating her story.
Magdalena Dukiewicz In This is my body, this is my Blood Magdalena Dukiewicz retransforms a found lamp—“a domestic object”—and creates a skin-resembling shade using hydrolyzed collagen, organic dyes, and her blood. With this grotesque, decorative object containing traces of her DNA she denounces the objectification of women in social and political life.
Bianca Abdi-Boragi’s Map (inkjet satin print on canvas) “explores the demarcation of a body; the history of a body as territory” and the way memory and history are concomitant to one’s life trajectory.
Elizabeth Harney’s Udder Control satirizes the domestication of cows and observes how “these powerful bovines” are subservient to humans when given the assurance of safety, even when violated and tortured. Harney sees herself in the cows “I guess I recognize myself in the cow’s desire to submit while also being critical of that.” The piece is constructed by hand-tooling on veg-tan leather.
Georgia Lale critiques the inadequacies of the United States’ approach to addressing healthcare. KENTUCKY, made out of hospital gowns and sewing thread, is part of her performance-activated installation DEFENSE. The piece questions the history, meaning, and sincerity of State mottos by positioning them directly on the intimate remnants of the ongoing healthcare crises—hospital gowns.
Christen Clifford’s We Are All Pink Inside: Interior #5 (my cervix 2014) is an HD Metal print of a photo of her vagina muscle and cervix taken with a sex toy camera. Her series Interiors: We Are All Pink Inside began with interior self-portraits and expanded to include trans, cis, and nonbinary bodies of different ages and colors. Clifford’s practice centers on bodily autonomy, sexual education, and body politics by connecting trans and abortion rights. For more information click here.
Young Joo Lee’s drawing “Choir” depicts a woman laying supine, legs open, giving birth to a “wardrobe” with three blanched-faced women beside her and a fish-netted figure in the foreground. The magical realist narrative integral to Lee’s works is concisely epitomized in the quote at the bottom of the piece: “I was giving birth to a wardrobe, when I heard people saying things like ‘her vagina is not squared enough.’” What she hears in this scene symbolizes patriarchal society’s expectations and control of women’s bodies that are unnatural and damaging to their self-image.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Lydia Nobles (b.1993) is a New York based multidisciplinary artist who investigates gender dynamics and abortion access. Her ongoing project, As I Sit Waiting, is a series of sculptures that each honor a true recollection of someone’s experience with abortion. Curated by Destinee Ross-Sutton, As I Sit Waiting will open in a solo show in September 2022 in New York City. As I Sit Waiting is also a fiscally sponsored project by the New York Foundation for the Arts. Select 2022 upcoming and current group shows include Lump, Border Project Space, Lyman Allyn Art Museum, Conn College, and Culture Lab. Select past group shows include Latchkey Gallery (2022), Cindy Rucker Gallery (2022), Field Projects Gallery (2021-22), The Real House (2021), Pink Noise Projects (2021), LoBo Gallery (2020), Trestle Gallery (2020), Practice Gallery (2019) and Westbeth Gallery (2017), among others. Her work is featured in Hyperallergic (2022) and Smack Mellon’s Hot Picks (Sept 2022). Nobles’ recently completed the artist-in-residence program at Field Projects Gallery (2021-22), Pink Noise Projects (2021), and Trestle Art Space (2020). www.lydianobles.com
Born in Warsaw, Poland Magdalena Dukiewicz is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. With a multidisciplinary approach that is often site-specific, her practice is mostly process-based with a combination of material experimentation and method. Carefully choosing materials for their innate characteristics, she explores topics such as consumerism, environment, identity, and gender. Dukiewicz is a PhD candidate at the Complutense University in Madrid, where she obtained her MFA degree in 2013. Dukiewicz exhibited her solo projects at The Border Project Space (New York) and Stand4 Gallery (New York) in 2020. Her works have been included in group exhibitions in BioBAT Art Space and SciArt Center in New York, Camden Art Centre in London, Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, and were featured during Berlin Art and Science Week, among others. Dukiewicz is a recipient of the Nessa Cohen Grant for Sculpture and a grant from the Polish Minister of Culture and Heritage. She was a resident at the studio of Carlos Amorales in Mexico City and at the Bio Art Residency at SVA NYC. She is slated to have a solo exhibition at Ivy Brown Gallery in New York in the fall of 2022. www.magdalenadukiewicz.com
Bianca Abdi-Boragi is a French-Berber/ American interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Paris, France, who received her BFA from ENSAPC (Paris) and her MFA from Yale School of Art, Sculpture in 2017. Abdi-Boragi has been living in New York since 2010. Currently in residency at Pioneer Works her shows were reviewed on Hyperallergic, Artnet, Artspiel, ANTE mag, Taggverk Magazine, among others. Solo exhibitions include the Border Project Space Gallery and CADAF Art Fair, she has exhibited with SPRING/BREAK Art Show, the Flux Factory, Heaven Gallery Chicago, the Immigrant Artist Biennial, NARS Foundation, The Border Project Space, VCU Arts, NURTUREart Gallery, Chashama Gallery, Field Project Gallery, Galerie Protégé, The Clemente Soto Velez Center NY, throughout the United States and internationally and has screened art films at Anthology Film Archive, UnionDocs, Video Revival, NY, the Whitney Humanity Center, and Loria Center, New Haven, CT. Abdi-Boragi was the recipient of the JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights from the Yale Law School and was recently in residency at NARS Foundation and previously at MASS MoCA’s studios, the Centquatre, Paris, France, Pact Zollverein, Essen, Germany, CalArts, Los Angeles. www.biancaboragi.net
Elizabeth Harney was born on a US military base in Enid, Oklahoma. Through her multi-disciplinary practice, she interrogates the ethics of sanctioned violence. Elizabeth received her MFA at Hunter College in 2019. In 2013 she received her BFA from New Jersey City University. She was a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing in 2014, completed the SOMA summer program in 2017, and was a Key Holder at the Lower East Side Printshop residency in New York in 2021. www.elizabethharneyart.com
Georgia Lale is a Greek visual artist with Anatolian heritage. Through their multidisciplinary practice, Lale explores the human body’s blueprint on the social and political realm of contemporary society. They received their MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NYC, and their BFA from the Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece. Lale’s performance #OrangeVest was presented at the Greek Pavilion at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. They are the recipient of the Goulandris Foundation scholarship and the School of Visual Arts Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for Exceptional Achievement in MFA Fine Arts studies. Their work has been shown internationally, including New York City, Berlin, Venice, Brussels, Izmir, and Athens. Lale has participated in performance festivals, such as the Nuit Blanche Festival in Brussels, the Venice International Performance Art Week, and Art in Odd Places, NYC. Lale’s work has been exhibited in various New York City area galleries, including Smack Mellon, Shiva Gallery, The Border, and The Hole. They have been a panel member of academic conferences organized by the Dedalus Foundation, the MoMA Archives, the Yale History of Art Modernist Forum, and the Yale School of Management. Lale’s work is represented by the A.Antonopoulou Art Gallery in Athens, GR. www.lalegeorgia.net
Christen Clifford is an artist working with photo, video, installation, writing, performance, and painting. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the writing program The New School, where she won the nonfiction award, and a BFA in theatre from NYU, where she won the Tisch Artist and Scholar Award. Her work has been seen in the group shows Abortion is Normal (Project for Empty Space, Newark and Eva Presenhuber, New York), Curriculum: spaces of learning and unlearning (EFA, New York), The Will To Change: Gathering as Praxis (Lyman Allyn Art Museum, CT), My Obvious Presence (Deak Gallery, Budapest), The Unseen (Quantus Gallery, London) and Queer Art for the Here and Now (PrideArt, NYC/Berlin) among others. Awards, fellowships, and residencies include: NYFA, NYSCA, Newark Creative Catalyst,
Some Serious Business, Museum of Motherhood, Feminist Incubator. She is working on her first film, supported by the Independent Film Project (now Gotham) and Women Make Movies; she was an IFP Documentary Screen Forward Fellow. She teaches at The New School and curates at Dixon Place. As a writer, she has published in The Guardian, Hyperallergic, Broadly, Filmmaker, and also the essay Mother, Daughter Moustache in the NYTimes bestselling anthology Women In Clothes and The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art. Her first Risograph artbook, BabyLove, was acquired by the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Selected press includes 3AM, Abortion Is Normal in Hyperallergic, Interiors in Hyperallergic and ARTFORUM, PussyBow in NYLON, Refinery29 and HuffPoUK. Clifford is a studio member at Project For Empty Space, Newark and she lives in Queens and online: www.christenclifford.info
Young Joo Lee is a multidisciplinary artist from South Korea, currently living in Cambridge and Los Angeles, USA. She holds an MFA from Yale University (2017) and from Staedelschule Frankfurt (2013). In her recent moving image works, Lee’s personal narratives as an immigrant, South Korean, and a woman interweave with the current and historical narratives to investigate the issues of alienation, discrimination, and mental illness in late capitalist society.
Lee’s works have been exhibited at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art- Seoul, The Drawing Center-New York, Curitiba Biennial, and GLAS animation festival, among others. Lee completed several artist residencies including Macdowell, Sanskriti Foundation, and Incheon Art Platform. She is currently a Harvard Film Study Center fellow and a resident artist at the Boston Center for the Arts. www.youngjoolee.net
Kyoko Hamaguchi: Never Since
The Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez
June 10 – July 3rd, 2022
Kyoko Hamaguchi, born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, is a conceptual mixed-media artist living and working in New York City. By utilizing her daily experiences and social systems, she creates transient forms to reflect her ever-shifting perspective as an immigrant. Her practice takes form in many different media including photography, sculpture, and installation.
This time in her work, Hamaguchi utilizes systems of direction to construct an installation exploring navigation in its many forms.
In early Japan, there were twelve compass directions, each represented by an animal of the zodiac (imported from China) including the mouse, ox, tiger, rabbit, etc. People consulted sorcerers to help them navigate their lives, believing in superstitions about whom to marry, where to live, and where to take a trip, among others. For example, a sorcerer might say: “You cannot marry someone whose family is located in the rabbit direction this year.”
Now, Hamaguchi creates her own system of navigation by combining the Western directions of North and South represented by the letters “N” and “S” with the phrase “Never…Since…” Each phrase describes how her habits have changed after both big and small events in her life. In something akin to an updated Zodiac, these phrases, each inscribed on a compass hanging in the gallery, offer a new approach to life’s meanderings.
Hamaguchi also floats her compasses in salt water tanks as if they were ships floating aimlessly in the open ocean-oriented only by Earth’s magnetic field. Swimming in the tanks are sea monkeys (brine shrimp), a creature found in saltwater lakes, that descend from those Hamaguchi hatched at the start of the pandemic as a hobby. Just as we long to find our way more than ever in uncertain times, these acrobatic filter feeders always appear to be in search of something, but they are unable to read the signs floating above.
DEFENSE
Installation-Performance by Georgia Lale
Opening reception on April 16 from 3-6 pm and closing reception on April 23 from 3-6 pm.
The Border Project Space is pleased to present DEFENSE, a performance-activated installation by the artist Georgia Lale curated by Jamie Martinez.
DEFENSE is an installation-performance that speaks to the ongoing healthcare and political crises in the United States. The space is dominated by a 10 feet long American flag made out of hospital gowns. Fragments of gowns such as sleeves, pockets, and laces form the USA flag. Fundamentally, the piece challenges the inadequate health care system and the government response during the Covid-19 pandemic and honors first responders, essential workers, patients, and the memory of the people that lost the battle with the virus.
Both at the opening and at the closing reception, Georgia Lale will perform three-hour-long pieces with hospital gowns that have U.S. state mottos sewn on them. The performance questions the history, meaning, and sincerity of state mottos by positioning them directly on the intimate remnants of the ongoing healthcare crises—hospital gowns.
Lale has been working with hospital gowns since her cancer diagnosis in 2019. The gowns are donated by healthcare professionals and patients.
The installation will be on view by appointment from April 17 – April 23.
Georgia Lale is a Greek visual artist with an Anatolian heritage. Through their multidisciplinary practice, Lale explores the human body’s blueprint on the social and political realm of modern society. Their #OrangeVest performance was presented at the Greek Pavilion at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. Lale is a Goulandris Foundation scholar. They have presented work in major art festivals, such as the Immigrant Artist Biennial in NYC, Nuit Blanche Festival in Brussels and the Venice International Performance Art Week. Lale’s work has been exhibited in the New York City area, including Smack Mellon, Shiva Gallery, and The Hole, among others. They have been a panel member of academic conferences organized by the Dedalus Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, the Yale History of Art Modernist Forum, and the Yale School of Management. Lale is represented in Greece by A.Antonopoulou Art gallery.
BORDERWALLS IV
Opening reception: Friday, 12/17 6 – 8:30 pm
December 17 – January 8, 2022
Participating artists: Adrian Edgard Rivera, Anika Todd, Bruna D’Alessandro, Gianluca Bianchino, Joseph Moore, Josias Figueirido, Ingrid Tremblay, Jiwon Rhie, Julie Alexander, Liliana Farber, Marianna Peragallo, Martin Wannam, Mateo Gutierrrez, Meryl Meisler, Nicholas Cueva, Sam Sherman, Shavana Smiley and Tony Moore
The Border Project Space is pleased to present Borderwalls IV from December 17 – January 8, 2022.
BORDERWALLS IV—a group show consisting of small artworks by artists who have never shown at the space and all of whom support the gallery’s mission.
We believe in creating a fair and open system and strive to exhibit and support artists with diverse voices and backgrounds. The Border Project Space will be holding another open call from January 1st – February 15th, 2022. We are looking for artists to show, we hope you can participate and we are immensely grateful for your continuous support.
THEATER OF THE ABSURD Curated by Nina Mdivani
Dual exhibition of Roberto Clemente De Leon and Shiri Mordechay
Border Project Space, October 22- November 13, 2021
Setting
In the dual show at the Border Project Space, Brooklyn-based drawer and painter Shiri Mordechay and South Carolina-based multidisciplinary artist Roberto Clemente De Leon will present six distinct works that challenge our understanding of shared reality and its norms. Viscerally connected to the Theater of the Absurd, one of the most distinguished cultural movements of XX century, Shiri Mordechay and Roberto Clemente De Leon dazzle with their alternative ways of seeing human society. The elusive narrative they work with might come across as dark, but nonetheless, it is raw and real. As European playwrights Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter the two artists address the absurdity of the contemporary society. They construct works where humanlike figures, animals and hybrid creatures find their way from a subconsciousness into the daylight and also confront us with the way we treat them. Presenting the works at the Border Project Space known for its experimental approach is timely because both artists speak to the present. They offer a vision that could be our reality, but does not have to be if we make different choices. For Mordechay the setting is her psyche, a dimension that exists within the inner eye consisting of realism of this plane, but also of other imaginary planes. De Leon’s setting is any animal farm across the U.S. and the world where millions of animals are slaughtered based on popular demand.
Actors
Mordechay’s dense, large drawings with ink and watercolor consist of self-conscious figurative characters – people, animals, furniture, plants- all arriving in an organic form. Her characters are phantasmagoric and at the same time comic to an absurd degree. They are obscure, yet, they seduce us – as they act out traumas. Domesticated animals are protagonists for De Leon who uses clay, wood, and porcelain. He has consistently interrogated imagery of domestication due to his deep concern for the inhuman reality dominating the U.S. food industry, asking questions of how animals live and how their lives affect ours.
Plot
At a time when language is no longer needed in modern society, largely becoming a barrier rather than a way to connect, pantomime and theatrical gestures gain insignificance. The therapeutic quality of laughing at our absurd state, at our inability to understand the depth of another person’s suffering can be achieved through looking. Art can stand in as it did throughout the disrupting realities of XX century Europe ravaged by human destructiveness and inhumanity. Existential loneliness of human beings is the main plot of this exhibition and presented art is the means to grasp it.
Artist bios
Roberto Clemente De Leon
Roberto Clemente De Leon was born in Santa Clara, Cuba, but raised in Miami, Florida by the age of nine in 1993. His introduction to clay began in 2013 while attending Miami International University of Art and Design where he received his BFA in Visual Arts. During his time in Miami International University of Art and Design, he developed a body of work that would bring awareness to endangered species and animal cruelty. In 2017, he was accepted to the University of South Carolina and awarded the Presidential Fellowship where he received his MFA in Studio Art.
Shiri Mordechay
Shiri Mordechay was born in Israel and raised in Nigeria. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from School of Visual Arts in New York, where she now lives. In 2013, she was named as one of “25 Artists to Watch & Collect” by Artvoices Magazine. She has been interviewed by Juxtapoz, Artillery and Art in America magazines. She was featured in the 2020 New American Paintings publication (juried by Jerry Saltz). Mordechay describes her paintings as if the ideas arrive from outside- yet anyone with an eye for the grotesque and sardonic can spot the humor that could only be her own. Imagery seems to arrive by chance and move about within a pre-moral realm and conjure what Julia Kristeva calls an “oceanic feeling.” Selected solo exhibitions: “From Afternoon Until Midnight,” Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; “Tempest in a Teacup,” Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; “Serpents of the Rainbow,” Alter Space Gallery, San Francisco, CA; “Impossible World,” at The Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona, Italy;“ Primeval Systems” Plane Space Gallery, New York, NY.
Curator: Nina Mdivani
Nina Mdivani is Georgian-born and New York-based independent curator, writer and researcher. Her academic background includes International Relations and Gender Studies from Tbilisi State University, Mount Holyoke College and, most recently, Museum Studies from City University of New York. Nina’s book,
King is Female, published in October 2018 in Berlin by Wienand Verlag explores the lives of three Georgian women artists and is the first publication to investigate questions of the feminine identity in the context of the Eastern European historical, social, and cultural transformation of the last twenty years. Nina regularly writes for outlets such as Arte Fuse, White Hot Magazine, Arte & Lusso, Indigo Magazine, Art Spiel. As curator and writer Nina is interested in discovering hidden narratives within dominant cultures with focus on minorities and migrations. Her recent exhibitions include Defied Logic at Ivy Brown Gallery,
This is Not My Tree at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, Rooms & Beings at 68 Projects, Berlin and New York Meets Tbilisi: Defining Otherness at Kunstraum LLC and Assembly Room, New York City. Public Digital Art Platform is another new global initiative that is curated by Nina.
Nicki Cherry: Speaking with Lions
The Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez
July 9 – July 31, 2021
The Border Project Space is pleased to present Speaking with Lions, a solo exhibition with works by Nicki Cherry and curated by Jamie Martinez.
If a lion could speak, we could not understand him. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Nicki Cherry’s practice explores the subjectivity of language and assesses how communication is only fully effective within a space of shared experience and context. Her alien-like, mixed-media sculptures, although foreign in nature, have a human sensibility. The ceramics are placed on medical step stools, evoking vulnerability and the gestures of the forms emulate the expansive range of human feelings: “failure, fragility, pain, awkwardness and aspiration.” Cherry invites the viewer to engage with these amorphous figures with hopes to transcend through the barriers and into the connective tissues.
Deriving inspiration from speculative fiction, Cherry alludes to sci-fi novels, religion and folklore. Out of the Calf, into the Mouth refers to the first-century Ancient Greek text A True History, written by Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata, where alien species give birth through incisions in their calves and pull newborns out of their legs. The seemingly misconfigured “calf” is leaking a milky liquid that points to our own bodies’ fragility.
The milky liquid, circulating within the piece, is also found in Look at her tears, they have been poured into a leg. The sculpture, where water trickles from the toes, is a direct reference to ancient Iranian wine vessels made in the shape of human legs and the title is influenced by the quote, “Look at Mary’s tears of blood: they have been poured into a Christian’s leg.”
The Trepan series—consisting of stoneware forms—are plastered onto the walls as if they’re budding within the gallery space. Trepan I-V refers to Hieronymus Bosch’s “Cutting the Stone” where a doctor removes a mythological stone of folly from a patient’s head and replaces it with a tulip. Cherry expresses how the series represents her “anxiety as a bundle of undulating sprouts that struggled to shoot out of my chest.”
The sculptures on display are made out of an assortment of stoneware, wax, fiberglass, plaster, cement and latex. Ceramics are integral in Cherry’s works as they contemplate the profound history of ceramic and stone objects, often the only connection we, in the modern-day, have to our past civilizations:
“If digital and paper records are lost 10,000 years from now, what objects will remain as artifacts for future humans to study our present civilization? How would the objects I am making be understood by people living with an entirely different context?
Nicki Cherry is a visual artist based in Queens, New York. Cherry received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2019 and her BA from The University of Chicago in 2014. She has exhibited her work nationally, including at Shin Gallery in New York; Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia; Archer Beach Haus, the Reva David Logan Center for the Arts, and Slate Arts and Performance in Chicago; and Green Hall Gallery in New Haven. In 2014, she completed a residency at Tyler School of Art.
Elizabeth Harney: With This Love, We Protect Your Wealth
At the Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez
June 19 – July 3, 2021
Intimacy is vulnerability (risk of rejection) + safety (acceptance) = bond (intimacy).
Bonds are units of circulating debt
Debt begins at birth as life-debt
Currency is a representation of life-debt
Hate is an unbearable bond
Love is service to a bond, often creates surplus
Hierarchical economy – surplus from love is hoarded by a few
The Border Project Space is pleased to present With This Love, We Protect Your Wealth, a solo exhibition with an installation and video created by Elizabeth Harney curated by Jamie Martinez.
Elizabeth’s works interrogate the hyper-commodification and romanticization of “the hero”: an archetype that bolsters the narrative of self-sacrifice for the greater good. Her works reveal the reality of domestication and control embedded within this paradigm by deglamorizing and reinterpreting the fantasy of “the hero.” Her use of veg-tan leather and calf hide structures, a material that resembles supple skin, represents the “violence inherent in domestication.”
In the video Hero Baby, a young man’s face is molded like dough, subservient to the control of an older man who aggressively manipulates the interlocutor’s expression while eerily singing the romantic pop song Hero by Enrique Iglesias. Despite the forceful treatment of the younger man’s face, his skin maintains its buoyancy—a reference to the veg-tan leather and the resilience of youthful skin.
The leather sandbags of the installation We No Longer Need to Think of What to Do With Life are composed in an infantry-line formation and confront the viewer with a protective and defensive stance. In the forefront is an opened, grotty bag that Elizabeth refers to as “Old Salty” [Old Salty is a term of endearment for someone who served in the military for many years]. The bag has lost its “freshness” and stands vulnerable in front of the pack. Imprinted on the inner skin: “we no longer need to think of what to do with life.”
Sanctioned, made from veg-tan calf hide with screen printing bleach, portrays iconography influenced by US military and police training materials. The cheeky piece reflects the psychology of sanctioned killing, providing the justification and motivation to obey and kill for “the good of the collective.”
Elizabeth Harney moved to New York City in 2013. While she investigated the phantom line between aggression and protection through her art, she was navigating the taboo space between intimacy and economy as a sex worker. As she explored the differences between sex work and marriage, and mercenaries and militaries, she found that the taboo and intimate spheres of sex and violence were factitiously separated from economy through romantic notions of self sacrifice for the greater good, i.e. country and family. This realization led to her most recent body of work which aims to re-imagine and deglamorize the fantasy of the “hero” by bringing a focus to its commodifiable value.
Elizabeth received her BFA from New Jersey City University in 2013. In 2014, she was a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing, and she participated in SOMA Summer in Mexico City in 2017. Elizabeth received her MFA at Hunter College in 2019 and is currently a Key Holder at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York.
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To Ripple with Water
Bel Falleiros at The Border Project Space
May 22nd to June 12th, 2021
Opening reception on May 22nd from 6-8 pm (open from 3-8 pm)
The Border Project Space is pleased to present To Ripple with Water, a contemplative and immersive installation by the Brazilian artist Bel Falleiros curated by Jamie Martinez.
Falleiros’ terracotta, double-conical sculpture is circled by a curtain of cascading ceramic beads and a light that illuminates a water vessel at its center. Atop the grounding structure, the basin-vessel holds water that has been collected from the Hudson Valley springs where the artist resides. Water is present not only in the physical form – as a reflective mirror — but also in the audio that resonates within the space.
The ambient melody, which includes the trickle of water accompanied by the artist’s breathing and lullaby-like chants, resembles a mantra and creates a vibratory atmosphere. The sounds signify the “relationship between the body and place,” re-establishing the connection between the self and the land we all inhabit. It provokes us to ask, what remains when we slow down and listen? Taken together, the work invites us to ground, to make space for silence, to recall what’s left in the dark.
Falleiros incorporates all four elements in the installation: water, fire (the firing of the terracotta), air (the audio) and the earth (both the clay and the wood chips scattered on the ground, which were also obtained from the land where the artist resides). Not only does she enmesh these components in a transient collage, her extensive knowledge of land, identity and autonomous thinking transform the work as a whole into a ruminative and meditative space.
Bel Falleiros is a Brazilian artist whose practice focuses on how contemporary constructed landscapes (mis)represent the diverse layers of presence that constitute a place. Walking is core to her practice and fundamental to her first solo show at CAIXA Cultural São Paulo, as well as to her residency at the Sacatar Institute in Bahia, Brazil (2014). Since arriving in the U.S., she has worked to create spaces for grounding and connecting people, including a site-specific installation at Pecos National Park, New Mexico (2016), an earth-work at Burnside Farm, Detroit (2017), sculptures for the garden of Tewa Women United, during the SFAI Equal Justice Residency (2018), and a brick (un) monument at Socrates Sculpture Park (2020). Beyond her studio practice, she participates in collaborative projects across the Americas connecting art, education and autonomous thinking. She is currently a More Art Engaging Artist Fellow in New York and a teaching artist at Dia:Beacon.
LAST WASH AT MIDNIGHT at Home Gallery and The Border Project Space
Chelsea Nader, Jaejoon Jang, Nicholas Oh and Jamie Martinez
Curated by Jamie Martinez at The Border Project Space
February 12 – March 20, 2021
Opening night February 12th from 6 – 8:30 pm
The Border Project Space is pleased to present Last Wash at Midnight. The ominous exhibition, evoking a laundromat, displays works by Chelsea Nader, Jaejoon Jang, Nicholas Oh and Jamie Martinez.
The Border is opening a laundromat at its 56 Bogart location called Last Wash at Midnight, where things don’t appear as they seem, but things, once unseen, begin to appear. We have hired the night shift and are excited to open our doors for you. The first wash is free! Come to the opening night on February 12th from 6 – 8:30 pm. Let me introduce you to our employees below.
Night Shift Worker (artist): Chelsea Nader’s distorted laundry machine considers the relationship between mothers and caretakers and the emotional and lonely toll of domestic practices. The conveniences that laundry machines provide resemble works that women traditionally perform–acts we all take for granted and often disregard as menial. The fatigued form of Nader’s sculpture is exhausted: “they are squeezed, rusted, leaking and used up,” that is until they break.
Night Shift Worker (artist): Jaejoon Jang’s works are poetic in their simplicity yet profound in their subtle obscurities. The broken clock—hastily secured with masking tape—and collars— manipulated only to show the top of dress shirts—are cheeky and charming. His treatment of objects is delicate and slight, yet, similarly to artists’ use of readymades in the 20th century, his works transcend our understanding of the familiar. Jang challenges our connection to items that have fixed purposes, which, in turn, questions the designated meanings they have in society.
Night Shift Worker (artist): By laborious methods of 3D scanning, casting and mold-making, Nicholas Oh assembles chests that appear to be floating with the head almost grazing the ground. The expandable foam body parts reversely situated, aggressively question and confront the relationship between racial identity and skin color. Contending with his Korean heritage, he uses his sculptures to scrutinize the conflicting parallels of cultural incongruences and systemic oppression.
Manager (curator and artist): Jamie Martinez’s mystical floating replica clay hands, overlaid with a visionary spell, ask for permission to access the underworld. The permission spell, first written in English then translated using Mayan glyphs, is dedicated to the divine God A—the determiner. Martinez’s practice is devoted to preparing his soul for the underworld; his artworks act as channels to guide him into this unknown. The exhibition is a precursor to his journey, a place to wash your clothes (soul).
*Social distance orders are mandated: two to three people are allowed in the space at once. Masks are required.*
BORDERWALLS III
Opening reception: Friday, 1/15 6 – 8 pm
January 15 – February 6, 2021
Participating artists: Alexander Stevens, Courtney Dudley, Daesup Song, Jin Yong Choi, Joy Nagy, Juna Skënderi, Hernán Rivera, Katya Grokhovsky, Michael Eckblad, and Roni Aviv.
The Border Project Space is pleased to present Borderwalls III from January 15 – February 6, 2021.
BORDERWALLS III—a group show consisting of small artworks by artists who have never shown at the space. Last year, we held our first open-call and due to the high quality of submissions, we have decided to exhibit artworks from the same lot of artists, all of whom support the gallery’s mission.
We believe in creating a fair and open system and strive to exhibit and support artists with diverse voices and backgrounds. The Border Project Space is currently holding another open-call until the end of February 2021, we hope you participate and we are immensely grateful for your continuous support.
BORDERWALLS II
Opening reception: Friday, 12/18 6 – 8 pm
December 18 – January 9, 2020
Participating artists: Andy Van Dinh, Buket Savci, Eva Mueller, Heidi Elbers, Jaynie Crimmins, Kinu Kamura, Lisa Levy, Paul Behnke, Robert Zurer, Rodrigo Valles Jr., Sherri Littlefield, Susan Reedy, Xiao Wang
The Border Project Space is pleased to present Borderwalls II from December 18th – January 9, 2020.
The Border Project Space is pleased to present BORDERWALLS II—a group show consisting of small artworks by artists who have never shown at the space. Last year, we held our first open-call and due to the high quality of submissions, we have decided to exhibit artworks from the same lot of artists, all of whom support the gallery’s mission.
We believe in creating a fair and open system and strive to exhibit and support artists with diverse voices and backgrounds. The Border Project Space will hold another open-call in January 2021, we hope you participate and we are immensely grateful for your continuous support.
Leila Seyedzadeh: An Absent View
Curated by Jamie Martinez at The Border Project Space
November 20 – December 12, 2020
The Border Project Space is pleased to present An Absent View, a solo exhibition by the Iranian visual artist Leila Seyedzadeh. The show, curated by Jamie Martinez, will be on view from November 20 to December 12, 2020.
Seyedzadeh’s works—influenced by Persian miniature and landscapes—contemplates the “dwelling in-between two worlds,” the chasm between presence and absence. Her pieces are saturated with dichotomies: physical and non-physicality, inner and outer space, weight and weightlessness, transparency and opacity, and altitude and gravity. As an expatriate living on the east coast of the United States, she has struggled to connect to Western landscapes. In turn, she has assembled an installation that is reminiscent of Tehran: “I have been carrying my memories of the mountains of Tehran and I’m trying to recreate them.”
To pay homage to her native land, she uses materials imbued with cultural and symbolic profundity: large hand-dyed fabrics and Persian hand woven jajims, handmade textiles, woven from cotton or wool (a fabric that has contributed to Iran’s rich, artistic history). She, tactfully, constructs peaks and contours with ropes and folds, a contrast to the rigid, stable structure of the jajims that lay beneath the vibrant and playful collage of cloth. Seyedzadeh integrates her narrative—extractions from her subconscious—into her installation, which manifests into an expansive, dynamic reflection of an absent view.
The Blue Sky
The Sky is not blue in all places
There are mountains, there are trees
There are no mountains, there are trees
Yet the sky here is higher
The shadows follow me
The outlines around the objects
My imagination of the perception of the objects
A single sugar cube dissolved in the ocean
Tied to a familiar object in a suitcase
I have placed my hand on a driftwood of memories
From the zenith to the nadir, from the abyss of the ocean to the apex of the sky
Towards which haven in this endless ocean?
“Here my heart is full of yearning and wistfulness
And every instrument whose sound I hear is inharmonious
Let’s pack our travel satchels
And head towards an endless journey
To see whether the sky is the same color in other places”*
Leila Seyedzadeh
*Mehdi Akhavān-Sāles
Leila Seyedzadeh is an Iranian visual artist based in New York who received her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2019 and BFA from The University of Science and Culture in 2014. She was a recipient of the H.Lee Hirsche prize and Soma Summer fellowship at Yale School of Art. She has been invited to participate in exhibitions which include shows at High line nine Gallery, The Ford Foundation, Dubai art fair, Whitebox Gallery and Her work is represented in institutional exhibitions in the US and Iran which includes Green Hall Gallery at Yale University and Ahvaz Contemporary Art museum in Iran. She is currently an artist in residence at Nars Foundation in New York and completed her residency at NYFA (New York) and SOMA (Mexico City) 2019-2018.
Email [email protected] with any inquiries on press, pricing or information on the show or the artist.
Bianca Abdi-Boragi: The Heel of the Loaf
Curated by Jamie Martinez at The Border Project Space
Oct 23rd – Nov 14th, 2020
New York, NY. Oct. 23rd, 2020. The Border Project Space is pleased to present The Heel of the Loaf, a solo exhibition by Bianca Abdi-Boragi. The exhibition, curated by Jamie Martinez, will be on view from October 23rd until November 14th, 2020.
This large scale sculptural installation, a 4’x4’x4’ dice made of discarded bread, is a meditation on fragile structures, sacred subsistence, and competition, literalizing the impression that the most elementary needs of society seem to be left to chance alone, in late capitalism’s game where people’s odds of winning are stacked against themselves. The warm and radiant hues of bright and contrasting tones invite the audience to step closer and stare into the sculpture’s cavities while stepping over a bed of bread crumbs. The familiar and playful oversized object made of a crumbly surface creates an uncanny sense of distorted reality.
Stemming from the failure of governments to adequately care for people during this time of crisis, The Heel of the Loaf highlights the conflict and disparity between classes. While this crisis has benefited and enriched a small segment of society, playing around with an excess of money, it has left the American dream and chances of prosperity for the majority stripped down and reduced to the chaos of chance.
Regarding this piece, Bianca Abdi-Boragi writes, “I remember last March during the lockdown, sitting at the kitchen table, feeling tethered to stability by a thread. There was a piece of bread on the table, a needle and thread, I took a tiny piece off the center, ate it and stared at it, grabbed the thread and needle and sewed around it, giving into an impulse withdrawn from the meaning of things. I finished and saw a splendid Zero. It was this surrealist gesture that triggered the entire project. I wanted to convey this feeling, for a viewer to share this feeling through their experience of the presence of this sculpture.”
The Heel of the Loaf reflects upon the legacy of Surrealism and Arte Povera draws upon the vocabulary and creative structure of minimal and conceptual art, and engages with ephemeral practices at the intersection of painting, sculpture and performance. Often engaging with ephemeral works, Bianca Abdi-Boragi has previously worked with food in her work–sugar (Cotton Candy), salt (Drift), couscous (Transmission) –to unravel themes of substance, subsistence, fulfillment, trajectory and precarity. Following the lineage of masters such as Louise Bourgeois, Salvador Dali, Pierro Manzoni and Claes Oldenburg, this piece projects a gaze of poetry and radical beauty during an uncertain future.
This site-specific installation, however, posits the possibility of hope: while these systems and games dominate the lives of so many, they are built upon illegitimate and fragile foundations that can be crumbled if enough of us say enough. Ultimately, The Heel of the Loaf offers a glimpse of hope to reset, start fresh, and begin anew.
Bianca Abdi-Boragi works across media using sculpture, video, installation, and painting to enact representations of self and others, often using found materials and landscapes as receptacles to address different states of being, with a specific focus on alienation and territory. Tending towards the absurd though with care and respect, her works respond to the contemporary political and social environment in the United States, France, and Algeria, engaging with themes of gender, violence, and migration while linking this moment to the historical repercussions of post-colonialism.
Bianca Abdi-Boragi is a French-Algerian/ American interdisciplinary artist who received her MFA from Yale School of Art, Sculpture, in 2017, and obtained her BFA from ENSAPC. Her video pieces have been screened at CADAF Art Fair, the Immigrant Artist Biennial, Anthology Film Archive, UnionDocs, Video Revival, NY, the Whitney Humanity Center, and Loria Center, New Haven, CT. She has exhibited works at NARS Foundation, The Border Project Space, VCU Arts, NURTUREart Gallery, Chashama Gallery, Field Project Gallery, Galerie Protégé, The Clemente Soto Velez Center NY, throughout the United States and internationally, and was the recipient of the JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights from the Yale Law School. She was recently in residency at NARS Foundation and previously at MASS MoCA’s studios, the Centquatre, Paris, France, Pact Zullverein, Essen, Germany, Cal’Arts, Los Angeles.
For further press inquiries: [email protected]
Placid at The Border Project Space
Sandra Lee, Cecile Chang, and Snow Yunxue Fu
Curated by Jamie Martinez
Sept 25 – Oct 17,2020
The Border Project Space is pleased to present Placid, a group show with works by Sandra Lee, Cecile Chang, and Snow Yunxue Fu. The exhibition, curated by Jamie Martinez, will be on display from September 25 to October 18, 2020.
Placid considers the notion of tranquil contemplation and investigates the relationships between the environment, modernization, and human existence. Influenced by the serene aesthetic of East Asian traditional landscapes, the artists capture and portray the harmony of nature and humanity as one.
Sandra Lee’s Pond, an installation created with scattered machine-cut sheets of acrylic, is reminiscent of water, evoking calmness and reflection. A distinctive dichotomy is at play: the industrial qualities of the piece, juxtaposed by the natural characteristic of what is being portrayed, ponders the relationship between rapid urban development and green spaces. Pond invites you to look at the mirroring surface of the acrylic sheets and, in turn, yourself. The installation’s industrial components—the materials and the yellow and black structures, alluding to hazard or caution tape found in construction sites—consider the complex contrast of how one is to reflect while modernization is accelerating and uprooting all of society and the environment.
Cecile Chang’s whimsical paintings, portraying episodes of imagery obtained from vintage children’s books, consider cross-cultural narratives that have only increased due to growing globalization. The clever use of varying materials, sourced from all around the world (pigments from Morocco and India, volcanic ash from Ecuador and Asian paper), bolsters the notion of cultural interaction. Additionally, the twenty-five to thirty coats of encaustic alludes to the layering of identities and places, a concomitant result of cultural exchanges. Chang’s works have a nostalgic quality providing the viewer an intimate experience of looking back at their past while also contemplating the present.
“While the humans are staying indoors, the corals are slowly making a come back.”
Trench, Snow Yunxue Fu’s hypnotizing virtual reality installation, projects digital abstractions of the ominous yet majestical oceanic territory. The subliminal experience of traveling through the expansive and foreign space illustrates nature’s beauty but also reveals the extensive damage of human activity with glitches that are triggered by data collected from environmental research. Diving deeper and deeper into the ocean, Fu presents a cerebral journey that immerses the onlooker into the techno sublime and activates rumination about the potential demise of marine life.
*Social distance orders are mandated: one person or a pair are allowed in the space at once. Masks are required.*
Magdalena Dukiewicz: Elements of Perturbation
Curated by Jamie Martinez at The Border Project Space
June 12 – July 11th, 2020
The Border Project Space is pleased to present Elements of Perturbation, a solo exhibition by Magdalena Dukiewicz curated by Jamie Martinez from June 12th – July 11th, 2020.
Dukiewicz interprets and co-opts mathematical theory by connecting it to life itself, considering how expectations of our idealized future seldom come into fruition as planned, resulting in necessary alterations and adaptations to cater to reality. Responding to the pandemic, she re-contextualized her piece In Every Dream Home a Heartache into a post-apocalyptic setting: transforming the floor into a lifeless, arid landscape. Confronting the pending feeling of hopelessness, she provides a space that instigates a moment of rumination—an individual and collective reflection—for the human species to “regroup, rethink and adjust to a new reality.”
The house, made out of a bio-textile cover, fabricated with hydrolyzed collagen and vegetable glycerin, natural pigments, and the artist’s blood, are all interconnected and interlinked to represent a “non-place—a space of transience” (referring to Marc Augé). The symbolic nature of the house also alludes to the artist’s childhood, when she would be “playing house,” which had engrained the restricting social roles that were expected from her at an early age, acting as a source of anxiety and discomfort. The yellow light radiating from the house is welcoming but also concurrently hostile. The dichotomy of a semblance of safety and an eventual cataclysmic collapse is embedded within the piece, bringing forth contemplations and re-evaluates notions of security.
Magdalena Dukiewicz invites you, the viewer, to lay down and underneath the house, to ground your senses, and to fully immerse yourself into a meditative state—to consider how you must rebuild your home to reflect and respond to your ever-evolving reality.
Born in 1982 in Warsaw, Poland Magdalena Dukiewicz is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. With a multidisciplinary approach that is often site-specific, Dukiewicz’s practice is mostly process-based with a combination of material experimentation and method. Her work revolves around the binomial of art-science and interactive art.
Dukiewicz solo exhibit In Every Dream Home a Heartache was presented at Stand4 Gallery in Brooklyn in March. Her installations were selected for the inaugural show at BioBAT Art Space in New York (2019) and SciArt Center exhibition at UsagiNY Gallery in Dumbo, NY (2019). She was featured during Berlin Art and Science Week (2018) and Work in Progress exhibition in Camden Art Centre in London (2019). Dukiewicz is a recipient of the Nessa Cohen Grant for Sculpture and a grant from the Polish Minister of Culture and Heritage. She was a resident at the studio of Carlos Amorales in Mexico City (2017) and at the Bio Art Residency at SVA NYC in 2018
ZAC HACMON: BEYOND THE PALE at The Border Project Space
Curated by Eva Mayhabal Davis
Feb 4 – March 15, 2020
The Border Project Space is pleased to present Beyond the Pale, a site-specific sculpture installation by Zac Hacmon with guest curator Eva Mayhabal Davis.
Responding to a natural inclination towards society’s parameters, both physical and conceptual, Zac Hacmon studies barriers. In Beyond the Pale, Hacmon presents a series of sounds and sculptures.
With sound, a sense of the topography and voices seeps through the gallery. While the viewers’ body navigates a sculptural form in order to hear and find function. Stepping into a role that crosses back and forth, physically maneuvering amongst imposed barriers. The sculptures are in the form of a military hedgehog, a massive border fortification, of intersected ‘l’ beams. Their history traces back to the border fortifications used for the Atlantic Wall during World War II. The tile that defines their surface is reminiscent of the in-between spaces that Hacmon often makes. Creating a more palpable fortification that although overwhelming on-site, sits within the parameters for the viewer to listen to the sounds coming out from the vents in the sculpture.
During volunteering trips to the Arizona-Mexico border, Hacmon collected sounds each one reverberating from the vents in the sculpture. In one, the rustles of walking through the Sonoran Desert, following migrants’ trails during a water run to refill tanks maintained by the Humane Borders Humanitarian Organization. Other stories include: an anonymous asylum seeker and worker from the Casa Alitas Shelter and an undocumented worker recounting his journey across Arizona. There are also words of wisdom from Jose Rivera on the delineated border conflicts between the border and the US land relations with the Tohono O’odham Nation. Finally, a poem, shared by a member of the Tucson Samaritans: NO ANSWERS ––NOW OR EVER, dedicated to an unknown baby that died at milepost 19 on the Arivaca Road.
These forms and stories enter a complicated territory of history and land. The in-betweens, like corridors, valleys, and ultimately borders that are a consistent conflict in Hacmon’s work. For Beyond the Pale, he continues to work within this framework moving with a bird’s eye view and activating first hand. Seeing these enclosures of land as one of many markers of historical epochs. At one point, the British Empire established borders with pales, Irish territory was invaded and divided, the pale determining a governable side and ungovernable. In the same way that to this day the United States corrals its deemed ungovernable populations.
There are over 300 reservations for Native American nations and 2.3 million peoples in prison complexes including immigration detention centers. The border that separates the terrain between the USA and Mexico also impacts the wild life, channeling not just animals but people through even more dangerous gaps of desert terrain. Just along Arizona, according to Humane Borders between October 1999 and December 2018, 3339 migrant deaths were recorded, an inconceivable number in any which way and unimaginable through today.
The stories presented here vary in perspective but their strength and conviction for being in this in-between is defiant of the borders created by governments. The very human work and essence goes beyond any pale and the vessel the audience interacts with distrups physical and psychological borders for empathy. This work will expand and continue.
We would like to thank the participating individuals for their generosity and time.
Sarah M. Reed, Program Coordinator at Casa Alitas Program – Aid for Migrant Families and Jose Rivera Director of Tohono O’odham Nation Culture Center and Museum. The poem is read by Gail Kocourek, a member of the Tucson Samaritans, the support of Humane Borders Humanitarian Organization and the anonymous contributions. We also acknowledge and thank the caretakers of the Sonoran Desert and Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge.
Zac Hacmon is a New York-based artist born in Holon, Israel. Hacmon is a sculptor and installation artist, whose work investigates modes of control and the delineation of private and public spaces. His exhibitions include King of the Hill, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, UNBORN, mh PROJECT nyc, New York 2019, Code vs. Code, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, Empathy, Smack Mellon, New York 2018. Publications include 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, Thames & Hudson, Kurt Beers, September 3, 2019. Hacmon is a recipient of the Santo Foundation Individual Artist Award 2019 and Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation NYC Fall Visual Project Exhibition Grant 2019. His previous residencies include LMCC Workspace Residency (2018-2019), Salem Art Works Residency Fellowship Program, Salem, New York (2017), International Artist-in-Residence Program at MeetFactory Studio, Prague, Czech Republic (2015), MMCA International Artists Residency Program at National Art Studio, Changdong, Seoul, South Korea (2014). Hacmon received an MFA from Hunter College and a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art (Israel).
Eva Mayhabal Davis has curated exhibitions at BronxArtSpace, En Foco, Expressiones Cultural Center, MECA International Art Fair, Queens Museum, Smack Mellon, and Ray Gallery. In 2020, she will be the Curator-in-Residence at Brooklyn’s Kunstraum LLC and co-director at Transmitter. Based in New York, she works with artists and creatives in the production of exhibitions, texts, and events. Her personal immigrant narrative drives her work in advocacy to advance equity and social justice values through the arts and culture. She is a founding member of El Salón, a meetup for cultural producers based in NYC. She has spoken on her curatorial work at the AC Institute, Artist Space, Queens Museum, The 8th Floor, Brooklyn College, and NYC Crit Club. Her writing has been featured in Hemispheric Institute’s Cuadernos, Nueva Luz: Photographic Journal, CultureWork Magazine, and the Guggenheim Museum Blog.
This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and by the
Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC, who have awarded a 2019 Fall Visual Grant to Zac Hacmon to help
realize the exhibition Beyond the Pale
DERIVA at The Border Project Space
Curated by Graciela Kartofel
Nov 8 – Dec 1, 2019
Participating artists: Diego Anaya, Pablo Caviedes | Hermann Mejía, Moses Ros | Carlos Torres
Diego Anaya, Pablo Caviedes, Hermann Mejía, Moses Ros, and Carlos Torres Machado are the five artists who are part of the ArteLatAm collective, producing artwork in various disciplines. They are now presenting their first portfolio of prints, entitled Deriva / Adrift: The Migrant Experience. This linoleography edition of twenty-five prints and three artist’s proofs, in 11’ x 8.5”, deals with a very significant topic all over the world.
The Migrant Experience is rooted in the history of the world. One can even say that it is rooted in humanity itself. Migration is not a one-way action, nor does it have only one reason for being or a specific beginning and end. The art experience is equally rooted in the world’s history. In the sentence above, the word ‘art’ can easily replace the word ‘migration’ and it would all still make perfect sense. Both terms are intertwined, and both have to do with origin and survival. Humanity has survived many natural disasters and wars. The suffering of people adrift, trying to escape violence, torture, famine, flooding, and more, frames situations like family separation and lives lost in the process of fleeing.
Each artist created a tryptic with titles and images that reveal the five different aesthetic approaches.
Diego Anaya, a Mexican-American artist, presents Thread #1, #2, and #3, a trio of black-and-white prints that relate to sown fields, a road, and a path-through. These prints are abstract geometric drawings which the artist created using the linoleum graphic process. Linear, squared, and diamond-like patterns appear throughout the prints. It could very well be understood as a reference to the people who live in the country, those who must flee through a path, the road itself, solitary, isolated, and with unexpected risks. If one would not try to interpret the images through the lens of reality, one could understand that this artist created an aesthetic geometric triad.
Pablo Caviedes, an Ecuadorean-American artist who has a professional relationship to France, created three prints that can be understood as going from figurative to abstract or vice versa, depending on whether one begins looking at them from the right or from the left. Their titles are On the map #1, #2, and #3. A squared black rim with rounded angles frames each print, giving depth to the imagery, and a variety of graphic doodle signs saturate the surface of the prints except in the central part, where a form—an island-head shape—emerges. Coincidentally, one could understand the empty central form as that, an empty form. The other print has an inventive articulation of a pirate or an Afro figure migrating into the form, and the third central presence is Pablo’s self-portrait, evocative of Picasso’s self-portrait.
Hermann Mejia, a Venezuelan-American artist, calls his prints Yendo #1, #2, and #3. This Spanish word means ‘going’; the verb is active and refers to an action with no relation to when or where the person will stop or arrive. It is an open expression that does not include a time frame; it is related to movement, departure, moving away. Hermann Mejía’s figurative expressionist, narrative drawings have textural gestures placing and defining each of the three figures, one in each print. A tragic expression of sadness, solitude, fear, and anguish prevails. It is a reflection of people in motion, a destiny of not being settled.
Moses Ros is a Dominican-American artist and, as an established printmaker, is the leader of this project. Moses Ros creates mobiles based on prints. He is also the creator of numerous public art sculptures and incorporates public interaction in many of his artworks. His semi-figurative prints use a few synthetic lines to communicate his ideas. In Avioneta / Airplane, a woman, representing an airplane, longs to take flight from her situation. In Enraizamiento / Taking Root, a man’s body absorbs the gestural surroundings as he puts down his roots in a new environment. Mentalmente / Mentally shows a head, a plaster sculpture drawn in white against the black-inked surface of the print, representing how one sees oneself. In all three prints, black is used as a way of intensifying the drama.
Carlos Torres Machado, an Ecuadorean-American artist, refers to something universal like neighborhood in the titles: Mi Barrio, Tu Barrio, El Barrio, meaning My Neighborhood, Your Neighborhood, The Neighborhood. The lines of varied thickness draw invented maps that feature open-ended roads. One could understand this as a positive expression for the people who emigrate. The Migrant Experience can be more difficult when it is enclosed, and limited. Although choosing among many open roads can create anxiety, at least they are open opportunities. These artworks have a predominance of organic forms and curves that orient the prints in the human realm, and one can discover a couple of figures as well.
In the digital era, communicating
via a print portfolio is an interesting approach,
as it maintains the manual aesthetic experience
as well as offering a technical challenge.
This dynamic encourages us
to believe that the world is looking for solutions,
and that challenges can be transformed into opportunity.
Graciela Kartofel
CRSA, AICA-NY, CAA, PEN
VESSEL MEMORIES at The Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez
Nov 8 – Dec 1, 2019
Participating artists: Amanda Nedham | Mattia Barbieri | Sa’dia Rehman
The Border is pleased to announce Vessel Memories, a group exhibition featuring sculptures by Amanda Nedham, paintings by Mattia Barbieri and drawings by Sa’dia Rehman curated by Jamie Martinez.
Our subconscious holds the weight of withheld insight and information that eventually manifests into our consciousness—resulting in a recalibration of oneself and fuels into a more robust sense of self-awareness. Using mechanisms and practices to access the subconscious we are leading a route towards self-revelation and raw introspection. Our bodies act as vessels, entities that carry the profusion of mental and emotional mass that we accumulate as time passes by. With the exhibition, visitors become privy to the subconscious-psyche of the participating artists through experiencing the intimate physical embodiments of the vessel they’ve created.
Utilizing the Japanese Zen practice of Ikebana as a philosophical and formal reference, Mattia Barbieri’s, low-chromatic and balanced, still life paintings—depicting containers staged with branches—evoke visceral, melancholic tranquility. Sa’dia Rehman’s drawings optically encapsulate the viewer’s gaze by providing a hypnotic visual choreography that is influenced by the notion of belonging. Amanda Nedham’s Aloe plants and cigarette animals are carefully crafted whimsical episodes that speak about an experience that shed light on an initial reticence towards regeneration transformed into a sense of irritation when stagnancy takes place. The idea of letting a part of you go as a means to catalyze growth is conveyed with the supplement of her narrative written by the “Imaginary Peacekeeper”.
Amanda Nedham completed her BFA at OCAD University in Printmaking, her MFA at RISD in Painting, and resides in Brooklyn. Her practice is interdisciplinary with an emphasis on drawing and sculpture. Nedham recently published a book of letters and drawings titled, My Boyfriend is a Peacekeeper, and is currently working on a book of poems and drawings dedicated to Dian Fossey. Recent exhibitions include I’ll draw you a fly at Field Projects (NYC), Frida Smoked a t Invisible-Exports (NYC), and Extract IV Young Art Prize at GL Strand (Copenhagen). Nedham recently attended the Wassaic Artist Project residency and the ARTHA studio residency. She runs workshops on alternative love letters in New York City and regularly curates.
Mattia Barbieri (Brescia, 1985), lives and works between Milano and New York. First and Second Degree in Visual Arts, Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, Milan. Among the Solo show: 2019, The Butter Monk, Pablo’s Birthday Gallery, New York: 2017, Le Stelle Senza il Tramonto, Palazzo Ranzanici; DUE * The Full Frontal, Pablo’s Birthday Gallery, New York; 2016; Tango for the Shadow, Milano; 2014, Vedute, The New Fragrance Galleria +, Bologna; 2013, Pitture Domestiche, Federico Luger Gallery, Milano; 2007 Apero’l Barbieri and Bicipiti Di Stracciatella in 2006, 42 Gallery, Modena. Groupshow: 2018, Ixion, Museum of Contemporary Art of Lissone, Lissone; 2016, By The Way, Pac, Milano; 2014 VIII Biennale, Mam, Mantova; 2010, 2nd Moscow International Biennale, Winzavod Contemporary Art Center; Winner of Lissone Prize 2012. An active member of the magazine E il Topo.
Sa’dia Rehman (b. Queens, NY) has shared work nationally and internationally at venues such as Twelve Gates Gallery (2019), The Kitchen (2018), Aicon (2018), Alwan for the Arts (2018), Center for Book Arts (2015), Local Projects (2015), Los Angeles Sony Theater (2015), Taubman Museum (2013), Queens Museum (2012), Brooklyn Museum (2010) and Pakistan National Council of the Arts, Islamabad (2006), among others. Rehman was a nominee of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, a recipient of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Grant (2018), Meredith Morabito and Henrietta Mantooth Fellowship (2018) and Ann Hamilton Travel Grant (2016). And has been awarded residencies at the NARS Foundation (2019), Edward Albee Foundation (2018), Byrdcliffe Woodstock (2018), Vermont Studio Center (2018), Rasquache Residency (2016), ASI/LMCC & Creative Capital (2011) and AIM Bronx Museum (2008). Rehman’s work has been featured in the NYTimes, Harper’s, Art Papers and ColorLines. Rehman received a MA from City College, CUNY (2006) and MFA from Ohio State University (2017). Upcoming exhibitions include: Five Myles, Brooklyn (October 19 – December 16, 2019) and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC (May 26-October 30, 2020).
TERRAINES at The Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez
Sept 20 – Oct 20, 2019
Participating artists: Anh Thuy Nguyen | Adam Liam Rose | Frank Wang Yefeng
TERRANES—Comparable to the shifting of tectonic plates resulting in the fruition of new variations and geological formations, Anh Thuy Nguyen, Adam Liam Rose and Frank Wang Yefeng’s pieces individually create alternative and well-cultivated perspectives pertaining to political relationships, social dynamics and cultural conflicts by pushing past and against the normalcy that has been cemented and engrained in human consciousness by society. Together, their works interact to produce an immersive infusion: a blend of disparate mediums—sculptures, drawings, and video—that interconnect and inform one another with the underlying commonality of shedding light onto significant and polarizing issues.
Anh Thuy Nguyen’s sculptures focus on the relationship between objects and objects, which act as bodies within a space, in order to “render the aporia of belonging/dis-belonging and togetherness/separation.” In both An Act of Simultaneous Looking and Dependable Distance, the flesh-hued silicone covered objects (pipes and stone respectively) refer to human [fragility] against the harsh steel structures bolstering the forms. While the visceral tension between materials creates striking compositions, the pieces themselves are also meant to be viewed in a performative manner. Nguyen’s works require one to imaginatively strap themselves onto or into the forms, prompting a restricting and burdening experience, therefore physically realizing an allegory of spatial relation by means of objects and one’s own body.
With encapsulating structures acting as a forefront to Adam Liam Rose’s installations, Stages of Fallout (2019) reveals another interpretation of his works as a series of drawings based on The Family Fallout Shelter (a guide made by the US Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization in 1959). Accessing influence from the political relationship between Israel, Palestine and the United States, his artworks are physical manifestations of his erudite study of “aesthetic systems of power embedded within architecture”. Rose’s drawings are intimate and delicate, evoking a sense of a slight voyeuristic gaze into an ambiguous, architectural depiction of rough graphite textures and chiaroscuro contrasts.
[’penthaus], a synchronized video installation on loop, provokes an elaborate stew of emotions: perplexity in conjunction with curiosity, filtered through tension and discomfort. Frank Wang Yefeng’s skilled use of 3D animation in conglomeration with his eery content provides surrealistic and cryptic realms of fantasy and realism. Inspired by a story in the old Chinese book A New Account of Tales of the World, Yefeng’s production of symbols (pig, pants, and house) alludes to his personal experience of moving to the States from China. “The virtual spaces are both macroscopic and microscopic, the time is both moving and still[…]”—the video, similarly to his other works, provides a hallucinatory and ephemeral voyage as the viewers fall into a delusional stupor.
Adam Liam Rose (b. 1990) is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, photography, video, and installation. Born in Jerusalem and raised mostly in the United States, his works investigate the aesthetic systems of power embedded within architecture. Rose draws inspiration from political realities in Israel / Palestine and the United States, often looking to structures of separation and control whose intentions either manifest outright or slither beneath the surface. Rose has exhibited at museums and institutions including the Jewish Museum (New York, NY), the Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL), Marinaro Gallery (New York, NY), Mana Contemporary (Chicago, IL), Sullivan Galleries (Chicago, IL), Ortega Y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), and the Pfizer Building (New York, NY), to name a few. He was a fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ AIM Program, the Art & Law Program in New York, and is a recipient of an Artis Contemporary Residency Grant. Rose was awarded artist residencies at Triangle Arts Association (Brooklyn, NY), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, MI), A-Z West: Institute of Investigative Living (Joshua Tree, CA), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) and the Chicago Artists Coalition’s HATCH Residency (Chicago, IL). He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (’12) and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts (‘17). Rose joined as co-director at artist-run gallery Ortega y Gasset Projects in 2019. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Anh Thuy Nguyen ( b.1993) is a visual artist from Hanoi, Viet Nam. She earned an M.F.A in Interdisciplinary Fine Art from School of Visual Arts (2018) and a B.A in Studio Art and English (Writing) from DePauw University (2015). Her work consists of installation, sculpture, and performance that allegorize the interpersonal effect between bodies amidst the landscape of displacement, absence and nostalgia.
Anh Thuy has exhibited at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, BOSI Contemporary, Radiator Gallery, Chinatown Soup Gallery, The Java Project, Pfizer Factory, Trestle Gallery, Nha San Collective (Hanoi, Viet Nam) among others…Residencies include The Studios at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Brooklyn Art Space. Plus a solo exhibition at Assembly Room (New York).
Anh Thuy Nguyen is based in Brooklyn, NY where she is currently a member of Brooklyn Art Space, Adjunct Professor at Hudson County Community College (NJ) and a recent Visiting Artist at Pratt Institute.
Frank Wang Yefeng is an interdisciplinary artist. He was born in 1984, in Shanghai, China. He left China for the United States after completing his BFA at Shanghai University and received his MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. In 2013 he began teaching and building the Digital Media Art program at Rhode Island College as an Associate Professor. Yefeng is currently based in Providence, RI and New York, and constantly travels back and forth between the United States and his hometown, Shanghai.
Yefeng actively pursues his artistic career in both East and West and continues to think and work critically across media including Experimental 3D rendering and animation, video installation, virtual reality, and 3D printing. Yefeng has extensive experience exhibiting in venues internationally, which include Co-prosperity Sphere Culture Center(Chicago, IL), El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe(NM), Herald Square(NY, NY), Xuzhou Museum of Art(Xuzhou, China), HEREarts Center(NY, NY), The Museum of Luxun Academy of Art(Shenyang, China), Gene Siskel Film Center(Chicago, IL), Hyde Park Art Center(Hyde Park, IL), Hong Kong Art projects Gallery(Hong Kong), Between Art Lab(Shanghai, China), Governors Island Art Fair (NY,NY), Chi K11 Art Museum (Shanghai, China), etc. He was also a residency artist and juried panel member in NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, NY.
ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS at The Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez and Raul Zamudio
Aug 2 – Sep 6, 2019
Participating artists: Alva Mooses | Mauricio Cortes | Óscar Moisés Díaz | Adriana Furlong
The Border Project Space is pleased to present On the Shoulders of Giants, an international, mixed-media group exhibition featuring Mauricio Cortes, Óscar Moisés Díaz, Adriana Furlong, and Alva Mooses. On the Shoulders of Giants is curated by Jamie Martinez and Raul Zamudio. The show runs from August 2 to August 25th with an opening reception on August 2 from 7-9 pm.
The exhibition’s title is borrowed from a well-known metaphor first popularized by Isaac Newton, but an earlier reference comes from the twelfth-century Neo-Platonic philosopher Bernard of Chartres. Bernard is attributed with the phrase “that we are…perched on the shoulders of giants, and thus we are able to see more and farther….And this is…because we are carried aloft and elevated by the giants.”:
On the Shoulders of Giants highlights how the exhibiting artists are inspired by their histories and artists that preceded them, as if they were “perched on the shoulders of giants and able to see more and farther….” The artists also address a contemporary America situated where the past cannot be easily resolved and the future remains uncertain in sustaining the American ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all within its current, contested socio-political climate. The artworks address this via a myriad of issues of a topical, historical, and even personal nature. Yet even with the latter category, the political is also poetically and subtly embedded.
Alva Mooses (b. Chicago) is a Mexican-American artist based in New York. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union and her MFA from Yale University. Recent exhibitions include: Buen Vivir/Vivir Bien at the Mexic-Arte Museum (Austin, Texas), Retrato de un Paisaje at Museo Sívori (Buenos Aires, Argentina), A Day’s Dust at Studio17 (Stavanger, Norway), and Internalized Borders at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (NYC), Grupo <11> Instituto Cervantes (NYC), Portrait of a Landscape at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center (NYC), Local Metrics at the Logan Center for the Arts (Chicago), among others. She has completed residencies at The University of Chicago, Columbia College, Tou Trykk in Stavanger, Norway, MAG in Saltillo, Mexico, the Davidoff Art Initiative in the Dominican Republic, and Casa Wabi, Oaxaca, Mexico. Alva is a recipient of a Yale University Schoelkopf Traveling Fellowship, the Rema Hort Mann Community Engagement Grant and UChicago Arts Grant and a 2019 Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship.
Mauricio Cortes Ortega is a Mexican-American multidisciplinary artist based in New York. His work explores Latin American colonial history through painting and sculpture. He is interested in precious objects like textiles and crowns with complex trajectories as they relate to power and splendor. He holds degrees from The Cooper Union (B.F.A) and the Yale School of Art (M.F.A). Mauricio has held numerous fellowships and residencies; he was a fellow of the 39th cycle of the Artist in the Marketplace program (AIM) at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, in 2018 he was an artist resident at Museo Arte Grafica in Saltillo Mexico, and the Smelser Vallion Visiting Artist at the Doel Reed Art Center in New Mexico. He was a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Community Grant in 2017, the Schell Center for International Human Rights Travel fellowship (Yale Law School) in 2015 and the Jóvenes Creadores Fellowship (Mexican National Council for Culture and Arts) in 2014. During his time at The Cooper Union, he was awarded the Menschel Travel Fellowship Award and the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Painting Fellowship (Norfolk Yale School of Art).
Óscar Díaz (b. 1993, El Salvador) is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and writer based in New York City. Recent exhibitions include Under a Dismal Boston Skyline at Boston University,
Re: Construcción at Western Regional Museum, El Salvador, Sonora for the X Biennial of Central America, a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art & Design, Costa Rica, PERFORMEANDO at the Queens Museum, The Intangible to Tangible at Kunstraum Walcheturm in Zürich, Switzerland and Espacio Intermedial for The International Film of San Salvador. They’ve been a recipient of grants and art residencies from the Y.ES Foundation, BRIC, and The Arc.
Adriana Furlong (b. 1998, New York City) is a citizen of Ireland and the U.S. now based in Brooklyn, NY. Her multimedia pieces on immigration have been featured in both Musée Magazine and Teeth Magazine. She has work in a private collection in Shanghai, will be shown in a gallery there in 2020, and has received a painting residency at the Bullough Foundation in Virginia. She is a student in the Fine Arts Program at the Parsons School of Design.
MINERAL STEAM at The Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez
June 21 – July 21, 2019
Participating artists: Esperanza Cortés | Michael Pribich
The Border Project Space is pleased to present Mineral Steam, a duo exhibition with works by artists Esperanza Cortés and Michael Pribich, curated by Jamie Martinez, from June 21 to July 21, 2019. The opening reception will be on June 21 from 6 – 8:30 pm.
The multidisciplinary artists and couple utilize decorative and utilitarian materials as a means to evocatively scrutinize the conditions and history of labor—focusing on the ramifications and issues of identity, race and class. With such themes in common, the kinship between the artists captures the zeitgeist of the social climate in regards to evaluating and critiquing the past and its influence on the present.
Esperanza Cortés poetically and intricately creates works that encourage viewers to reconsider historical narratives, cemented by society, by raising questions about the politics of erasure, concealment, oppression and exploitation under the realm of Colonialism. Using music and fragments of history as departure points, Cortés’s process allows for her intuitions and insights to lead towards an investigation of a myriad of contemplations which then resolve and come into fruition as physical sculptures. Her varied, technical methods in conjunction with reworked found objects impregnated with cultural symbols, evidence her ability to prolifically produce pieces that act as an intimate repository for individual and collective memories.
Michael Pribich ponders the multiple strategies that individuals use in order to suspend adversity with the hopes of gaining agency and success. His process-oriented approach conceptually links labor and alternative perspectives driven by notions of displacement, colonialism and patriarchy. For many years Michael Pribich has utilized the symbolic content of cooking pots, salt, human hair, and medicine balls to refer to the eternal need for labor.
Esperanza Cortés is a Colombian born multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Cortés has been exhibited nationally in galleries and museums including The Neuberger Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of Art, Queens Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, MoMA PS1, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Mexi-Arte Museum and The Cleveland Art Museum. Internationally, Cortes has also exhibited in Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Japan, Mexico, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Spain and Greece.
Cortés is a recipient of fellowships and grants including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship: BRIC Media Arts Fellowship: Museum of Arts and Design, Artist Studios Residency: Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Grant: Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant: and Puffin Foundation Grant. Cortés’s work is in private and public collections including the American Embassy in Monterey, Mexico.
Michael Pribich was born and raised in Northern California. He lives in New York City with his wife Esperanza Cortes. He has an MFA degree from Hunter College, NYC and a Bachelors degree from California State University Sacramento. His work uses labor to address themes of displacement and migration in both rural and urban settings. He explores the idea that labor can be viewed as cultural production, resulting in an expanded social space.
He has completed public art projects with the Public Works departments in Sacramento and Woodland, California. Recent projects and exhibitions include Rishikesh, India in 2019, Tajikistan, Guadalajara, Hong Kong, Project Row HousesHouston, Cuchifritos Gallery, NY, Webb School, Knoxville, Tn. Group exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Mocad, Detroit, Orange County Cultural Center and Flux Art Fair, NY. He has been awarded a Pollock Krasner Grant, and received a Fulbright nomination to Macedonia.
LIVING BETWEEN ROOM at The Border Project Space
Curated by Claire Kim and Jamie Martinez
May 10 – June 7th, 2019
Participating artists: Danni Lin | Amia Yokoyama
The Border is pleased to announce the opening of the two-person exhibition “Living Between Room,” featuring works by Danni Lin and Amia Yokoyama on Friday, May 10th, 2019. This exhibition is curated by Claire Kim and Jamie Martinez.
In Living Between Room, artists Danni Lin and Amia Yokoyama explore reality through the subconscious using multi-layered, absurd, and sometimes fragmented images from their individual research and histories. Through vastly different mediums, Lin and Yokoyama blur the line between what is real and what is fake— questioning their own ideas of truth while simultaneously destabilizing the viewer’s preconceptions of authenticity.
The title of this show, Living Between Room, reflects on the multifaceted, complicated, and humorous ways in which both Lin and Yokoyama question what is real through the “in-between.” The exhibition showcases artwork in a makeshift living room, inviting the audience to explore the living, the unreal, and the spaces in-between in a familiar setting, for where better to explore notions of authenticity and truth than in the comfort of a domestic space?
SPECTER IN THE THRESHOLD at The Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez
April 19 – May 5, 2019
Participating artists: Paul Maheke | Bianca Boragi | Elliott De Cesare | KS Brewer | Robert Balun
The Border Project Space is pleased to present Specter in the Threshold, an exhibition curated by Jamie Martinez displaying works across media that illuminate haunting remnants. The Participating artists are Bianca Boragi, Elliott De Cesare, KS Brewer , Paul Maheke and Robert Balun.
Using the materiality of their medium, the works in Specter in the Threshold access alternate spaces, unresolved histories, diasporas, and the apparition of bodies that inhabit them. Across sound, painting, drawing, and installation, these artists manifest haunting as a means of reconciling the individual, the collective, and their shared spaces and histories.
While these works have been derived from an array of inspirations–mystic encounters with psychics, dreams, domestic interiors, the ruins of capital, or processed possessed psyches–they all orbit and seek to access that which is missing and gone, yet persists nonetheless, haunting the individual and the collective.
Bianca Boragi (b.1985 in Paris, France) received her MFA from Yale School of Art, Sculpture department and her BFA from the National Superior School of Arts from Paris- Cergy. Her work has been screened recently at the New-York Amazigh Film Festival, Festival Mutocospio, Mexico and at independent cinemas such as Video Revival and Anthology Film Archive, NY. She has exhibited her work for group exhibitions at NURTUREart Gallery, Chashama Gallery, Field Projects Gallery, NY, internationally in France, India, Italy, Scotland and throughout the United States. She was recently awarded the recipient of the JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Right and was an artist resident at MASS MoCA’s Asset for artists residency program and priorly at the Centquatre, Paris, France, Pact Zullverein, Essen, Germany and Cal’Arts, Los Angeles, USA.
Elliott De Cesare (b. New York 1989) received his undergraduate education from both The New School and School of Visual Arts where he received his BFA. In addition To Elliott’s schooling he continues to the present date, psychoanalytic studies as members of both Aprés Coup and Das Unbehagen. From 2014-2016 Elliott worked as the assistant to leading American art critic, art historian, and writer, John Jonas Gruen. His work has been shown in The Katonah Museum of Art, The National Arts Club, Kurt Seligman Center, the prestigious windows of Bergdorf Goodman and various other galleries in New York and overseas. Elliott is presently the founder and Director of 5-50 Gallery in Long Island City, NY.
KS Brewer (b. 1992) combines time-based and multi-sensory forms with extensive research on psychological trauma and its personal and collective impacts. Her work attempts to bypass the barriers to communication that trauma creates by appealing directly to viewers’ senses and emotions.
Brewer holds a B.A. in Film & Television from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She will be a resident artist at ChaNorth this May, is currently a participant in Trestle’s Critical Feedback Program (2019), and formerly a recipient of Honor USA’s Audience Choice grant (2016), and a finalist for Peripheral Vision’s publication fellowship (2018). She has exhibited and performed at numerous venues including Chashama Gala (upcoming), Aggregate Space Gallery, Lucas Lucas Gallery, Plaxall Gallery, Superchief, and Flux Factory. Her work has been featured in publications including Forbes, Ravelin Magazine, Museé, Emergency Index Vol. 7, and Vice show Desus & Mero. She is the curator of the current exhibition STAG: The Illicit Origins of Pornographic Film at the Museum of Sex.
Paul Maheke is an artist, born in France, and living and working in London. He completed his MFA at l’École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy in 2011 and a programme of study at Open School East, London in 2015 where he pursued a period of research and a series of public conversations entitled ‘Beyond Beyoncé: Use It Like a Bumper!’ Maheke was awarded the South London Gallery Graduate Residency 2015-16 and his exhibition ‘I Lost Track of the Swarm’ was exhibited in the first floor galleries in late spring 2016.
Paul’s art conceptualises the body as a container of history and meaning. “For queer people of colour there is this huge imbalance between those moments of erasure and absolute invisibility, and simultaneously there is an hyper-visibility and a demand for that, and how do you navigate that.” He’s seeking to rearticulate, destabilising dominant narratives. “There is something that has to, for me, go beyond the representational because the representational is also violent.” He is creating space for understanding identity beyond colonialist, hierarchical frameworks. To make room for discussion. “There is this idea of placing myself somewhere outside — believing in the position at the periphery of things, and the periphery can address the centre by staying at the periphery.”
Represented by Sultana Gallery, Maheke is doing his New York debut at the Abrons Art Center in Spring 2019. Recent projects include: ‘Ten Days Six Nights’, cur. Catherine Wood and Andrea Lissoni, Tate Modern, London, UK (2017); ‘Acqua Alta’, Sultana Gallery, Paris, FR (2017, solo show); ‘What Flows Through and Across’, Assembly Point, London (2017, solo show); ‘In Me Everything is Already Flowing’, Center, Berlin (2016, solo show); ‘No Ordinary Love’, Galerie Sultana, Paris (2016); ‘The Rebel Man Standard Festival’, Guest Projects, London (2016); ‘I Would’ve Done Everything for You / Gimme More’, cur. Cédric Fauq, London (2016); Festival de l’Inattention, Paris (2016); ‘I Lost Track of the Swarm’, South London Gallery (2016); artist-in-residence at Darling Foundry, Montreal, Canada (2015); ‘ODRADEK’, Les Instants Chavirés, cur. Mikaela Assolent and Flora Katz, Montreuil, France (2015); ‘59th Salon de Montrouge’, Montrouge, France (2014)
Robert Balun is an adjunct at The City College of New York, where he teaches creative writing and composition. His poems are forthcoming from Reality Beach and Powder Keg Magazine. Recent work appears in TAGVVERK, Tammy, Prelude, Barrow Street, Poor Claudia, Apogee, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. He is the Coordinator of the Digital Chapbook Series for The Operating System. His debut collection of poetry, Acid Western, will be published in 2020.
This piece in this show is the second in an ongoing series of works that seek to reconfigure how poetry is normally encountered; off the page, beyond the stage, and into a physical space. I think that poetry tends to be generally siloed and specialized, rarely encountered unless you are already the kind of person who seeks out poetry. Similarly, the performance of poetry tends to be a one-sided interaction between reader and audience. By placing poems in a physical space, new audiences, who might not have otherwise, are able to encounter poetry. And just as the poetry of performance or page ask for specific considerations of medium, the public poem offers its own implications of form.
VERGE at The Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez
February 15 – March 24, 2019
Participating artists: Anna Costa e Silva | Iván Sikic | Fanny Allié | Qinza Najm + Saks Afridi
The Border Project Space is pleased to announce Verge, a group exhibition featuring artworks across mediums by Anna Costa e Silva, Iván Sikic, Fanny Allié, Qinza Najm, and Saks Afridi curated by Jamie Martinez. The work being shown by these five immigrant artists comments on borders, territories, immigration, people, and edges.
Walls, borders, and immigration are part of a daily argument going on in society today – an argument fueled by fear and misunderstanding. The symbol of the Wall emerges as an attempt to demarcate a final separation between two cultures that are irrevocably entwined.
“A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” (Gloria Anzaldúa).
Across language, ethnicity, nationality, borders emerge as a way to shape identity through exclusion. If this border is threatened, so is this constructed idea of the self.
By placing it at our feet, Verge inverts the concept of a wall as a barrier, transforming it into a platform for the convergence of human experience which was created with 1300 clay bricks.
Verge poses the tantalizing question of what is left when borders are brought down. Beyond borders, all space is liminal.
Beyond them exists uncertainty – and freedom.
Anna Costa e Silva (1988, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) works in the intersections between visual arts, performance, film, and social practice. Her projects explore human vulnerability, states between awareness and sleep, encounters and a constant search for the self. Anna received awards such as FOCO Bradesco ArtRio, Funarte Grant for Artistic Production and American Austrian Prize for Fine Arts. Between 2014 and 2018, she has done 10 solo shows, in institutional spaces such as Centro Cultural São Paulo, and Caixa Cultural Rio de Janeiro and galleries such as Superfície, São Paulo. She also participated in group shows in spaces such as Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius) Art In Odd Places, Interstate Projects (NYC) A Gentil Carioca Gallery, Triângulo Gallery, Oi Futuro (Brazil) and others. She was an artist in residency at the Salzburg Academy for Fine Arts (AAF Fellowship), Phosphorus, Pivo Pesquisa (Sao Paulo) and the School of Making Thinking (NY). Anna has an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, with the Edward Zutreau Memorial Grant, having lived in NYC between 2011 and 2013. She lives and works between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
Fanny Allié is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She was born in Montpellier, South of France and graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (The National School of Photography) in Arles, France in 2005 and moved to New York City shortly after graduating.
Princeton University, DOT Art, A.I.R Gallery, New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, Fresh Window gallery, Chashama and St Eustache Church in Paris, France have organized solo exhibitions of her work. NYU/Gallatin Gallery, Freight + Volume Gallery, Field Projects, BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Dekalb Gallery/Pratt Institute and The Bronx Museum among others have featured her work in group exhibitions. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, NY Magazine, Brooklyn Magazine, Hyperallergic, Le Monde Diplomatique, DNA Info, Marie Claire Italy and Artspace Magazine.
She recently exhibited her mixed media work for El Espacio with Rata Projects and Good To Know during Art Basel Miami 2018.
Iván Sikic (b. 1983, Lima, Peru) makes work about issues he believes to be unsustainable in our society: how violence affects women, the destruction of our natural resources for the sake of greed, mass consumerism, social inequalities and the unjust treatment of the disenfranchised and what it means to be an immigrant. He responds to these themes through durational performance, installation, public intervention, sculpture, and photography.
His work has been shown at The 8th Floor (New York), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn), Km 0.2 (Lima and Mexico City), Luis Adelantado (Bogotá, Madrid, and Valencia) amongst others and he has attended residencies in the USA, Europe, Latin America and Australia. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Qinza Najm is a Pakistani-American artist whose work explores gendered violence, human rights and social justice issues particularly in regard to marginalized populations. Utilizing performance, multi-media, video, painting, and other means, the artist, originally a trained Psychologist, understands herself as a denizen of the world, using artistic means to create empathy and understanding between societies, cultures and both East and West in order to address the deepest social traumas.
Born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, Najm pursued her fine arts studies at Bath University and The Art Students League of New York. She has a Ph.D. in Psychology and has exhibited internationally, including at the Queens Museum (NY), Christie’s Art (Dubai), Art|Basel (Miami, FL), and the Museum of the Moving Image (NY). Her work has been featured in ArtNet News, the Huffington Post, the NY Daily News, International Business Week, Buzzfeed, and Herald. She lives and works in New York.
Saks Afridi is a multi-disciplinary artist, born in Pakistan and raised in several countries; he now lives and works in New York City. Saks’s art practice is two-fold: Collaborative and Personal. His personal work investigates the predicaments and perplexities of the life of an ‘Insider Outsider’. His collaborative work has tackled themes around human rights, Islamophobia and drone warfare. His work is also spiritual in nature, hybridizing Islamic Design/Architecture with Science Fiction narratives to create a new genre he calls ‘Sci-Fi Sufism’, a sub-category of ‘IslamoFuturism’.
Saks is the proud recipient of 2 Gold Cannes Lion Awards, 3 D&AD Pencils, 2 OneShow pencils and a United Nations Award for Peace & Understanding. His work has also been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, CNN and The Colbert Report.
COLOR MATTERS II at The Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez
Dec 21 – Jan 20, 2019
Participating artists: William Bradley | Noriko Mizokawa | Pilar Uribe
The Border Project Space presents “Color Matters II”, a group show featuring the work of William Bradley, Noriko Mizokawa and Pilar Uribe from December 21, 2018 (opening night 6-8pm), to January 21st, 2019. Color Matters II is the second part of “Colors Matters” which recently closed at Galerie Richard, in the Lower East Side, and gathered seven painters: Koen Delaere, Carl Fudge, Dennis Hollingsworth, Kim Young-Hun, Jamie Martinez, Noriko Mizokawa, and Joseph Nechvatal. Both exhibitions emphasize the diversity of artistic choices and the singularity of each artist in their color decisions.
With two solo exhibitions at Galerie Richard in New York in 2013 and 2016, the presentation of his works in the collection of the Rema Hort Mann family in Tribeca, William Bradley made his name in the New York art scene. However, this is the first exhibition dedicated to his watercolors on paper. His watercolors are unique and stand for themselves. Watercolor has regained public interest as its process requests a subtle sensibility to colors and they request a fluid sense of control that the viewers really enjoy nowadays. William is very sensitive in the subtle difference shades of the colors he uses. In his paintings, he frequently presents three shades of each color, when most painters would already be very satisfied with only one. William Bradley’s watercolors fully express his talent for colors but at the same time, his first focus is composition, that he will precisely reproduce in his paintings. His watercolors have rarely been exhibited and this is a real opportunity to enjoy a new aspect of his creativity.
Born in 1984 in London, he currently lives in London and New York. He got an MFA at Wimbledon College of Art, University College of the arts, London, and a BA, Art, and Design at York St John University. In 2011 he got the Catlin prize, Shoreditch, England. His works are part of the Hort Mann Family Collection, the University of the Arts London Collection, and several major private collections in the USA and Europe.
Noriko Mizokawa presented four large vertical paintings of her new series The Origin of the World at “Color Matters”. As Audra Lambert reported in Ante, November 1st, “Mizokawa draws from a homogeneous lexicon of forms: her organic shapes and dots similarly arrange themselves across the surface of all her works The artist’s range of color from bright hues to pastel tones articulates the unique approach she mounts in creating each unique artwork. Congruent, yet surprising, Mizokawa’s compositions delight both long-standing fans of the artist’s work and those new to her practice”.
Noriko Mizokawa studied Japanese calligraphy in Takasago and has collected first national prizes for many years in Japan. She moved to Paris in 2004 and has developed paintings with a calligraphic “abstract” pattern, that she has combined with a representation of a female body with few lines of graphite. She began to draw the colorful new series titled ‘The origin of the World’ in Paris in 2017 and she deliberately wanted to show them for the first time in New York City.
The first step of the colorful vertical paintings is a drawing made with one finger on her cell phone screen. Then she meticulously reproduces it on canvas with acrylic and small brushes. Between abstraction and figuration, her work combines traditional control of calligraphy practice with digital modernity of our daily life. The Border Projects Space presents twelve delicate miniature paintings on wood box standing on a wall shelf, all different in composition and arrangement of colors, combining mat and metallic colors.
Born in Takasago in Japan in 1971, Noriko Mizokawa currently lives there, and in Paris, France. She got a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts at the University in Kobe and she studied calligraphy from 1977 to 1989 at Takasago. She got numerous prizes, the most recent in 2003: First prize Yomi–Uri, Kobe, 2002: Award of Excellence Nichi-You, Ueno no Mori, Tokyo, Hyogo Prefecture Grand Prize, Kobe, 2001: Incentive Prize Nichi-You, Ueno no Mori, Tokyo, Kobe Committee for Culture, Kobe. She exhibits regularly in galleries and in Kobe, Ashiya, Osaka, Paris, Epernay.
Pilar Uribe’s work is inspired by Rimbaud’s Drunken Ship and the Buddha’s Raft parable both of which question what is broken – what is left behind and how we go forward. The Buddha’s Raft is a parable about a man needing to cross a dangerous river. He builds a raft to cross the river. While on the river the raft provides the safety but also the potential for death as any leak or breakage can leave him far from shore. He gets to the safety of the other shore but what of the raft? Does he leave the raft and appreciate the safety it provided, or does he carry it with him adding to his burdens crossing the next unpredictable terrain?
The Bowls are made of Encaustic Medium (Bees Wax with Damar Resin) and they represent, IChing- Heaven. The large bowls all gold, Earth. green bowls, Water. blue/purple bowls.
Pilar Uribe was born in Cucuta , Colombia 1967. She received a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts Degree in 1996. She is a multimedia artist and currently has a studio in Houston and exhibits in Houston and New York.
PEREGRINATION at The Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez
Nov 2 – Dec 2, 2018
Participating artists: Elisa Pritzker | Nyugen E. Smith | Lina Puerta
The Border is pleased to announce the opening of the group exhibition “Peregrination” on Friday, November 2, 2018. As its title suggests, the exhibition represents a wandering journey through time and place that culminates with an overarching shamanistic spirit.
Like the mission of the project space itself, Peregrination brings together rich cultural traditions from the world over, making a statement about who we are as a people. Scattered across a blank palette created by an island of white stones on the floor are works by Elisa Pritzker, Lina Puerta, and Nyugen E. Smith, with each artist contributing a unique and powerful voice.
Works from Smith’s Spirit Carrier series float throughout the space. Drawing upon Yoruba crowns for inspiration, and structured like steampunk hot air balloons of sorts, Smith envisions his works as literal spirit carriers: vessels that will protect and transport the spirits of the deceased, specifically those of the unarmed black victims of police brutality. Each layer of the work adds deeper meaning, creating an overall aura of solemnity. Smith’s works are joined by Puerta’s mixed media tapestries, inspired by Renaissance tradition and modernized with aspects of contemporary culture. Through the elaborate detailing of Puerta’s works, one can catch a glimpse of the decay of our present society both morally and politically, a parallel to messages we can take from European history.
Centering the spirit of the exhibition is Pritzker’s work, Magic of the Shamans, a monumental ceremonial circle covering the floor of the exhibition. Through this project, Pritzker revives the shamanistic ideals of the now-extinct Selknam people, a native group of hunter-gatherers once based in Argentina and Chile. Implicit in the work is an allegiance to community, nature, and one’s spiritual life; together with Puerta and Smith’s works, offering a gentle reminder about the very core of our humanity.
Elisa Pritzker has exhibited at MoMA, Queens Museum and Dorsky Museum in group exhibits. She has participated at the Affordable Art Fair NYC & London UK, London Biennale-Creative Village Media party in Berlin Germany, Pinta Fair NYC, Fountain Art Fair and EGGO-Cordoba Art Fair andarteBA in Argentina. She was selected the US artist for The Pyramids of Naxos, Greece during the Olympics for an environmental project The Pyramid of Naxos. From 2004 to 2012, she exhibited with the Franklin 54 Gallery, Chelsea NYC. Among many other venues: Dumbo Arts Center & Nurture Art, Brooklyn. Others in the Hudson Valley: Kingston Museum of Contemporary Arts [KMOCA] and Hudson Valley MOCA[former HVCCA], Peekskill. In 2012 she presented a solo-installation at the prestigious Galeria Arte x Arte, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Other exhibits were at Galerie Taste Modern Berlin in Berlin Germany and Auditorium-Centro Provincial de las Artes, Argentina.
Nyugen E. Smith (b. 1976, Jersey City, NJ) is a Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist and educator who lives and works in Jersey City, NJ. His practice consists of found object sculpture, installation, writing, video and performance and is influenced by the conflation of African cultural practices and the remnants of European colonial rule in the Black diaspora. Nyugen holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a recipient Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts and the 2018 Franklin Furnace Fund. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include, Museum of Latin American Art, Columbia University, Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, Norway, and Perez Museum, Miami.
Lina Puerta was born in NJ, raised in Colombia and lives and works in New York City. She earned and MS in Art Education from Queens College and is the recipient of several residencies and grants including: the 2017 NYFA Fellowship, 2016 Dieu Donné Workspace Residency, Artprize-8 Sustainability Award, 2015 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, 2015 Kohler Arts Industry Residency (WI), 2013-14 Smack Mellon Art Studio Program, 2014 Materials for the Arts, 2013 Wave Hill Winter Workspace and the 2010 Emerging Artist Fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. Exhibition venues include: 21C Museum Hotels, Bentonville AR; Richmond Center for Visual Arts, Kalamazoo, MI; The Museum of Biblical Art, El Museo del Barrio, Socrates Sculpture Park, The 8th Floor, Wave Hill, Geary Contemporary, NYC; Pi-Artworks, London and H-Gallery, Paris. Puerta’s work has been featured in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Wilder Quarterly, Sculpture Magazine and Artnet News among others.
LIMINALITY at The Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez
Sept 7 – Oct 21, 2018
Participating artists: John Drue Scott Worrell | Frank Wang Yefeng | Jamie Martinez
The Border is pleased to announce the opening of the group exhibition Liminality on Friday, September 7. Featuring works by John Drue Scott Worrell, Frank Wang Yefeng, and Jamie Martinez, Liminality explores themes of ritualistic surreality through mixed media works.
An anthropological term, liminality refers to a sort of ritualistic limbo: the phase between one’s pre-ritualistic self and a final reformed being. During this liminal period, the individual loses all identifying or personal features, remaining as anonymous as conceivably possible. It is a disorienting phase of rebirth – the participant stands on the threshold between old and new, belonging to neither. The term holds a mysterious quality and yet seems familiar – the unease, or growing pains, during periods of personal, or even large-scale political or social change, often can seem to border on this same sense of unknowing.
The exhibition Liminality focuses on the surrealness of this idea of ritualistic transition, constructing an environment apropos of a cult induction unhindered by the constraints of time and place. Visitors will enter a sort of purgatory – being neither here nor there, to encounter mixed media works that may be more than what they seem, participants themselves in mysterious rites of passage. What happens within the liminal space remains to be seen, allowing for discoveries throughout the exhibition.
At the end of the exhibition, we will recycle the used organic & natural potting mix that we used on the floor and offer a limited amount to our guests along with Snake plants, which cleans the air, are easy to maintain, and it’s native to West Africa from Nigeria east to the Congo. The idea is to recycle the show and to keep the show/energy alive after it closes by giving it a new life through the Snake plants.
John Drue Scott Worrell received his MFA from the Yale School of Art, sculpture department and his BFA in Painting & Art History from the Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University. He has shown at Oilwik Gallery (Indianapolis, IN), Gait Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Roach Factory gallery (Los Angeles, CA) and Machine Project (Los Angeles, CA) to name a few. He was also a fabricator for Paul McCarthy and and assistant to Wayne White. John Drue Scott Worrell is the recipient of the Fannie B. Pardee Sculpture Prize from The Yale School of Art.
Frank Wang Yefeng is an interdisciplinary artist. He was born in 1984, in Shanghai, China. He left China for the United States after completing his BFA at Shanghai University, and received his MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. In 2013 he began teaching and building the Digital Media Art program at Rhode Island College as an Associate Professor. Yefeng is currently based in Providence, RI and New York, and constantly travels back and forth between the United States and his hometown, Shanghai.
Yefeng actively pursues his artistic career in both East and West, and continues to think and work critically across media including Experimental 3D rendering and animation, video installation, virtual reality, and 3D printing. Yefeng has extensive experience exhibiting in venues internationally, which include Co-prosperity Sphere Culture Center(Chicago, IL), El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe(NM), Herald Square(NY, NY), Xuzhou Museum of Art(Xuzhou, China), HEREarts Center(NY, NY), The Museum of Luxun Academy of Art(Shenyang, China), Gene Siskel Film Center(Chicago, IL), Hyde Park Art Center(Hyde Park, IL), Hong Kong Art projects Gallery(Hong Kong), Between Art Lab(Shanghai, China), Governors Island Art Fair (NY,NY), Chi K11 Art Museum (Shanghai, China), etc. He was also a residency artist and juried panel member in NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, NY.
Jamie Martinez Colombian / American artist that immigrated to Florida at the age of twelve from South America. He attended The Miami International University of Art and Design then moved to New York to continue his fine art education at The Fashion Institute of Technology and The Students Art League in NYC. Jamie’s work has been featured in multiple outlets like a TV interview with NTN24 (Nuestra Tele Noticias, a major Spanish TV channel) Good Day New York (TV interview), Fox news (TV interview), The Observer, Whitewall Magazine, CNN, New York Magazine, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, and many more. Martinez has shown in numerous galleries in New York City including Petzel Gallery, Whitebox NY, The Gabarron Foundation, Flowers Gallery, Elga Wimmer PCC, Foley Gallery, Galerie Protégé and many more. He also participated in a group show curated by Vida Sabbaghi at the Queens Museum which was very well received by the museum and the press.
BORDERWALLS at The Border Project Space
Aug 10 – 26, 2018
Participating artists: Adam Aslan, Arlene Rush, Chris Rypkema, Debra Drexler, Elena Chestnykh, Etty Yaniv, Evan Levine, Jaclyn Brown, Julia Michal Stibal, Kay Sirikul Pattachote, Krystofer Kimmel, Mary DeVincentis Herzog, Meer Musa, Monica Mazzone, Natasha Wright, Paul D’Agostino, Robert Balun, Roman Kalinovski ,Seren Morey, Sharilyn Neidhardt, Shavana Smiley, Shay Arick, Sherri Littlefield, Sofia Echa, Teresa Kudarauskas, Tim Gowan, Ventiko, William Norton, and Zofia Bogusz
The Border is pleased to announce “BORDERWALLS,” a summer group exhibition on view from August 10th to August 26th, 2018.
We lined our walls with small artworks by talented artists who have never shown at The Border before, and who have supported our mission of exhibiting first-generation and second-generation immigrant artists, along with a few locals, since we opened earlier this year. Half of “BORDERWALLS” consists of immigrant artists, and half consists of American artists. We want to encourage an open dialogue between all artists and visitors no matter where they come from, where they were born or how they got here. We also want to thank these artists and anyone else who has physically attended our shows. There’s nothing like seeing exhibitions in person and meeting the people behind them.
DATA SPELL at The Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez
July 6 – July 29, 2018
Participating artists: Ilana Saydie | Carlos Franco | Masha Vlasova | Tatiana Istomina | Raza Kazmi
The Border Space Project is pleased to announce Data Spell, a group exhibition featuring artworks across mediums by Carlos Franco, Tatiana Istomina, Raza Kazmi, Ilana Savdie and Masha Vlasova.
What spell do artist cast throughout their practice to subvert a given situation?
Data Spell features the work of artists born into an ahistorical era in which time is received in cut digital micro slices, allowing spells cast through performance or technology to resolve or ameliorate issues of memory, history, migration, and identity. Like something being unpacked; the real in the illusion disrupting reality.
“When we are dreaming, we forget, but immediately forget that we have done so; since gaps and lacunae in our memories are photoshopped out, they do not trouble or torment us.” What dreamwork does is to produce a confabulated consistency which covers over anomalies and contradictions.” (Mark Fisher). Wendy Brown suggested that dreamwork is the best model to for understanding contemporary forms of power, which operates on promises which are not only inconsistent but directly contradictory in our Neoliberal and De- democratization political era in her essay American Nightmare: Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism and de- democratization.
Data Spell offers a dreamy perspective to reflect on a reality capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment where spaces and psyches
can be processed and remain at will.
All artists in this show speculates on technology and commodity becoming ideological tool shaping directly intimate life, interactions trajectory and discourse.
Carlos Franco, Ojala que llueva metadona (I hope it rains methadone), addresses the commercial commodity that has come to marginalize economies and countries in Latin America, the drug trade.
A symbiotic relationship of supply and demand between the north and the cartels and narco states down south. economic/ political conditions that creates an upsurge of immigrants heading up north to walk into cages. A mirror stasis of the other which implies the presence of the viewer moving around the installation as well as the fluctuations of narratives of I and other morphing with claims of ownership of spaces. Here and there. You and I, native and nonnative.
The political becomes personal, the personal illusional, a mirror effect of fluctuating narratives that changed based on our vantage point and the route we are taking.
Tatiana Istomina: Hélène’s Story is part of a series of works which are loosely based on the story of Hélène Rytman, who was murdered by her husband, French philosopher Louis Althusser, in 1980. Today Althusser remains an influential thinker and is known as a major theorist of ideology. According to his theory, ideology makes us think that we are free subjects, while in fact all our thoughts and actions are controlled by ideological institutions such as state, education, family, etc. Althusser’s books written before and after the murder continue to be published and read. Hélène, on the other hand, is completely forgotten, lost in the shadow of her famous husband. Istomina’s paintings extract “data” from Althusser’s memoir, “The future lasts forever”, which offered his account of the murder, and reconstruct what could be Hélène’s side of the story.
Ilana Savdie: Facewaver No.2, function as perversions of stock photography for health and beauty put through digital disembodiment, which result in the distortion of the canons of commercial images.
Raza Kazmi: Officer with Butterflies, finds a Hartford City Police Officer examining a small box full of live butterflies. The video is a place of contradiction and reinterpretation. Here, the officer is taking part in a type of sensitivity training, while being reminded of the obfuscated nature of his task via text marking each butterfly envelope. The obscure nature of this assignment is perhaps a place for reflection on the inherently flawed logic of policing philosophy and the supposed necessity of any one person having authority over another. The elements of intimacy present in this piece are an attempt to problematize and allow the viewer to deliberate on such pervasive logic.
Masha Vlasova: Her Type, opens with my mother loading a selfie of me into FaceApp—a smartphone application that generates realistic transformations of photographic portraits. She adds a “male” filter to the picture. With the “male” filter, my selfie resembles a portrait of my Russian father, now deceased, when he was my age. The image creates an opportunity for my mother to express her desire for me (via the image of me as my father), while my camera frames my mother’s image, fetishizing it. The video explores the submerged desire between me and my mother, an immigrant and professional actress, who is my subject and collaborator.
Data Spell is on view at 56 Bogard street, New York, 11206, from June 29nd to July 29nd 2018, curated by Bianca Boragi and Jamie Martinez, open Saturdays and Sundays, from 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM. For additional information and inquiries, please contact Jamie Martinez at [email protected]
Carlos Franco, (b. San Juan, Puerto Rico) holds degrees in Philosophy and Visual Art (University of Puerto Rico), and a Master in New Genres (San Francisco Art Institute). Has presented projects at the Lab, SOMARTs, the Thing Quarterly, Diego Rivera Gallery (San Francisco), Lvl3 Gallery (Chicago), NARS Foundation (New York), Nikolaj Kunsthal (Copenhagen), Quinta del Sordo (Madrid), Universidad de Medellín (Medellín), among other trackable geolocations. Recent fellowships/grants @ NARS Foundation (New York), Can Serrat (Catalunya), Mass MOCA (Massachusetts). Conferences @ Universidad Complutense, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos III (Madrid), San Francisco Art Institute (hosted by the College Arts Association). @francocnarf / www.cfrancomaldonado.com
Tatiana Istomina is a Russian-born US artist working with painting, drawing and video. She holds a PhD in geophysics from Yale University (2010) and MFA from Parsons New School (2011). Her works have been included in group exhibitions at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum (San Antonio), The Drawing Center (New York) and Gaîté Lyrique, (Paris) among others. Istomina had solo shows in New York (2010) and Houston (2013). She has completed several artist residencies, including the ACA residency, Salzburg Summer Art School, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the AIM program at the Bronx museum of art. She is currently a participant of the Open Sessions program at The Drawing center. Istomina was nominated for Dedlaus foundation fellowship (2010), Kandinsky prize (2012) and received awards such as the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2011), the American Austrian Foundation Prize for Fine Arts (2011) and Eliza prize (2013). www.tatianaistomina.com
Ilana Savdie (b. 1986, Miami, FL) was raised in Barranquilla, Colombia and Miami, FL and is now based in New Haven, CT. She is an MFA candidate at Yale School of Art in Painting/ Printmaking where she will graduate in May 2018, she earned her BFA in 2008 from the Rhode Island School of Design. She had solo exhibitions at Stream Gallery, and International Playground, Brooklyn, NY and Ars Antiqua Galería, Barranquilla, Colombia. She was recently awarded the HP Blended Reality Grant Fellow from Yale University Center for Collaborative Arts and was an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center. www.ilanasavdie.format.com
Masha Vlasova was born in Russia and grew up in New York. She is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. She holds an MFA from Yale School of Art. She is a recipient the Fulbright Fellowship in Film-making and the JUNCTURE Art and Human Rights Fellowship at Yale Law School. Her works have been exhibited and screened at Anthology Film Archives, Abrons Arts Center in New York, and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University. She teaches at Indiana University and Cooper Union Summer Art Intensive. Her curated film series titled “Women Filmmakers at the Intersection of Documentary, Video Art, and Avant Garde” for IU Cinema is programmed for Fall 2018. www.mashavlasova.info
Raza Kazmi (b.1990, Islamabad, Pakistan) is a media artist who received his MFA at the MFA from Yale University at Sculpture Department in 2016.
INTRICATE NEIGHBORS at The Border Project Space
Curated by Jamie Martinez
May 4th– May 27th, 2018
Participating artists: Bianca Boragi | Ara Cho | Rebecca Goyette | Hyon Gyon | Sahana Ramakrishnan.
The Border Space Project is pleased to announce Intricate Neighbors, a group exhibition featuring artwork across mediums by Bianca Boragi, Ara Cho, Rebecca Goyette, Hyon Gyon and Sahana Ramakrishnan.
Our homes contain our most private possessions, memories, and personal belongings. This is where we relax, eat, sleep and cultivate our most intimate moments while feeling safe and protected from the outside world. What goes on inside our homes is a true snapshot of who we are and only people who share the space and occasionally the neighborhood, know what is really going on in there. The only true way to know someone is to live with them and to observe them in their natural habitat being themselves, a lot of times you think you know the person inside, but the reality is different.
The setting for this exhibition is a middle-class complex during the spring and it takes place between five neighbors/artists, four immigrants, and an American. The lively outdoor setting creates a welcoming environment in this charming suburb but not everything you see is as it is.
The five artists participating in this group show are willing to be transparent by opening their windows to the guests, so they can see for themselves what is happening inside their homes, souls and their creative worlds. Stop by this complex to look for yourself and to get to know these intricate neighbors, plus we need help watering the plants to keep the neighbor fresh and lively.
Intricate Neighbors, offers an eccentric look at domestic spaces, where mischievous scenes unfold with in voyeuristic intimacy. The gallery has been converted into a central green. This outdoor setting creates an environment where the artists open the windows of their creative world to the passerby, allowing visitors to look inside the private space of a person’s interior.
Intricate Neighbors is on view at 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, New York, from May 4th– May 27th, 2018, Saturdays and Sundays, from 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM or by appointment. For additional information and inquiries, please contact Jamie Martinez at 917-796-6010 or [email protected].
Bianca Boragi’s short experimental film, Cotton Candy, incorporates multiple disciplines such as sculpture and performance. This piece was shot in a furniture store in Ridgewood, NY, which she perceived as a space of repeating forms, exploring notions of fulfillment by placing a character in this particular space.
Bianca Boragi (b.1985 in Paris, France) received her MFA from Yale School of Art, Sculpture department and her BFA from the National Superior School of Arts from Paris- Cergy. Her work has been screened recently at the New-York Amazigh Film Festival, Festival Mutocospio, Mexico and at independent cinemas such as Video Revival and Anthology Film Archive, NY. She has exhibited her work for group exhibitions at NURTUREart Gallery, Chashama Gallery, Field Projects Gallery, NY, internationally in France, India, Italy, Scotland and throughout the United States. She was recently awarded the recipient of the JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Right and was an artist resident at MASS MoCA’s Asset for artists residency program and priorly at the Centquatre, Paris, France, Pact Zullverein, Essen, Germany and Cal’Arts, Los Angeles, USA.
Ara Cho recreates pictorial languages by intersecting traditional work processes with digitally reconstructed images to explore power dynamics assumed by gender roles.Ara Cho (b. 1991 in Seoul, Korea) was raised in Moscow and Chicago, she now lives and works in New York City. She graduated in 2015 with a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. She had solo exhibitions at Rotunda Gallery, New-York, Kweyeonjae Ceramic Museum, Yeongwol, South Korea. Her work has been exhibited at Castor Gallery, Space 776 Gallery, Asian Contemporary Art in Hong Kong, Zhou B Art Center and Sullivan Gallery.
Hyon Gyon‘s works have retained a sculptural element, creating a niche form of art that dwells between two-dimensional and three-dimensional states. The expressive visages that appear throughout her works, seem more passionate, vigorously attempting to escape from the canvas and burst into our world.
Hyon Gyon (b.1979) is based in New York, U.S and currently lives in Krakow, Poland. She received her B.A. from Mokwon University in Korea and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Kyoto City University of Arts in Japan. She had one-person and group exhibitions at the Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong, the Museum of Kyoto; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; Carnegie Art Museum, and Shin Gallery, New York. Hyon Gyon’s work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, the Kyoto City University of Arts, and the Takahashi Collection, among others. She has received several fellowships and awards, including the Asao Kato International Scholarship, the Kyoto Cultural Award and the Tokyo Wonder Wall Competition Prize.
Rebecca Goyette is best known for her series of Lobsta Porn videos, Goyette’s persona-based works combine sculptural elements, painting and hand-sewn costumes with an evolving ensemble cast role-playing sexual scenarios ranging from simulating nature to historic reenactment and the paranormal. Rebecca Goyette is a multimedia artist. Goyette is represented by Freight and Volume Gallery, NYC. She has exhibited internationally with solo shows at Freight and Volume, NYC, Spektrum Theater, Berlin, Germany, Jersey City Museum, Jersey City, NJ and Galerie X, Istanbul, Turkey as well as group shows group shows and live performances at Whitney Museum of Art, Queens Museum of Art, Weisman Museum of Art, MN, Joshua Liner Gallery, NYC and Gallery Poulsen, Copenhagen, Denmark. Currently, her sculptural works are on view at the Museum of Sex’s NSFW: Female Gaze.
Sahana Ramakrishnan’s work is a web of cultural interface. Mesmerizing mixtures of Hindu, Buddhist and Greek visual mythology weave together into a tapestry of pop cultural references that are upended by the artist’s exploration of identity, sexuality and gender perspectives.
Sahana Ramakrishnan (b. 1993 Mumbai, India) was raised in Singapore and received her BFA in painting at RISD. Her work has been exhibited in the Rubin Museum, the NARS Foundation, Field Projects, Gateway Project Spaces, Elizabeth Foundation of the Arts, A.I.R. Gallery and Front Art Space. She was recently an artist in residence at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York. Sahana was the recipient of the SIP fellowship at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking workshop, the Feminist-in-Residence program at Gateway Project Spaces, the Yale/Norfolk Summer program, and the Florence Lief grant from RISD.
THE BORDER – Ingaurating show
Curated by Jamie Martinez
March 2 – April 26, 2018
Participating artists: Peter Kaspar |C.J. Chueco | Levan Mindiashvili | Aphrodite Désirée Navab | Jamie Martinez
In light of the recent political focus on curtailing immigration, a cornerstone of the history and identity of the United States, the time has come for artists of diverse backgrounds to come together and present a united voice in support of multiplicity. It is in this spirit that Jamie Martinez, an immigrant artist and publisher of the art blog ARTE FUSE, announces the opening of a Bushwick-based project space called THE BORDER that will focus on supporting and showing talented/established immigrant artists living in the United States in the hopes of creating a nurturing environment for immigrants and non-immigrants alike to create a dialogue around their work. Reflecting the best of American diversity, THE BORDER will be open to everyone.
Throughout history, immigrants and the children of immigrants have played an invaluable role in shaping the face of the nation through an endless list of contributions and accomplishments. The United States is a country built upon the embrace of blending cultural traditions, and nearly every citizen has been born out of the precedent of immigration from around the world.
THE BORDER’S opening group show, curated by Martinez entitled THE BORDER #1, will feature sculptures by Peter Kaspar (Slovakia), C.J Chueca (Peru) and Jamie Martinez (Colombia), as well as a series of drawings by Aphrodite Désirée Navab (Iran/Greece) and a unique art piece by Levan Mindiashvili (Georgia). The first show called The Border #1 is currently displaying artists from Slovakia, Iran/Greece, Peru, Georgia, and Colombia. Some of the artists have had or are having museum shows in their respected homelands. Together, the exhibition explores the vibrant artistic contributions of a sampling of the immigrant community in New York City, a longtime hotbed for creativity and cultural exchange.
Participating Artists: Peter Kaspar (Slovakia), C.J. Chueca (Peru), Levan Mindiashvili (Georgia), Aphrodite Désirée Navab (Iran/Greece) and Jamie Martinez (Colombia).
Peter Kaspar is originally from Slovakia and his work explores the relationship between culture and memory. The conception of memory as a temporal phenomenon is sometimes too contracted. Either in visualized or abstracted form, one of the largest complications of memorializing our past is the fact that it is absent. Peter has shown all over the United States and also has a museum show coming up in Slovakia curated by one of the country’s most important contemporary artists.
C.J. Chueca creates walls that neither contain or separate. Instead, they provide insight into the complex ways that walls operate in our lives. (…) Poignant narratives are hinted at by small objects scattered about the backside of the walls—ceramic replications of cigarette butts, bottle caps, toilet paper rolls and beer bottles seem remnants of lives that once inhabited the spaces that these walls no longer define” (Excerpt from Eleanor Heartney’s essay, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”). C. J. Chueca is currently working on her next solo show called “Dos Cielos Azules” that will on view at ICPNA Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano on April 2018.
Levan Mindiashvili is a Georgian born (1979) visual artist and independent curator living and working in New York and Tbilisi. He holds his BFA in Sculpture from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and MFA in Crossed Media at The National University of Arts of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Among his awards are Commission Grant for Public Art Projects from National Endowments for Arts (New York, 2014) and Emerging Artist of 2011, Movistar Arte Jóven (Buenos Aires, Argentina). His works had been included in recent group exhibitions at The 7th Beijing Biennale, China; Georgian National Gallery, Tbilisi; ODETTA, Brooklyn, US; David & Schweitzer Contemporary, Brooklyn, US; Tbilisi History Museum, Georgia; Arsenal, Kiev, Ukraine; Tartu Art Museum, Estonia. Recent solo exhibitions include “Here” at Georgian National Museum, Mestia, Georgia; “Inbetween” at State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia; The Lodge Gallery, New York, US; His works are in public collections of Georgian National Museum (Mestia), State Silk Museum (Tbilisi) and National Art Museum of China (Beijing).
Aphrodite Désirée Navab, “is an Iranian-born, New York-based artist whose work mines her Iranian, Greek and American cultural heritage asking questions of its competing histories and politics. Her art is the aching inquiry of an uprooted consciousness seeking new roots. It also serves as a site of critical dialogue and debate. Ultimately, Navab’s art haunts our imagination with its beauty and complexity, inviting us to engage in a third space of transnational and cross-cultural initiations, leaving domination and demonization outside the picture.” -Reza Aslan, author of NY Times #1 Best Seller, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.
Colombian artist Jamie Martinez immigrated to Florida at the age of twelve from South America. He attended The Miami International University of Art and Design then moved to New York to continue his fine art education at The Fashion Institute of Technology and The Students Art League in NYC. His process involves constructing, deconstructing and fragmenting images, data, and information geometrically into triangulated segments. Jamie’s work has been featured in multiple outlets like a half hour personal TV interview with NTN24 (Nuesta Tele Noticias, a major Spanish TV channel) for their show Lideres, Good Day New York (TV interview), Fox news (TV interview), Whitewall Magazine, CNN, New York Magazine, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Untitled Magazine, Bedford + Bowery, Whitehot Magazine, Decompoz Magazine (print), The Examiner, Artribune, Art Nerd NY and many more. Martinez has shown in Russia, Spain, Canada, Miami, California and numerous galleries in New York City including: Petzel Gallery, Whitebox NY, The Gabarron Foundation, Flowers Gallery, Elga Wimmer PCC, Foley Gallery, Rush Gallery, Galerie Protégé, Untitled Space and many more. He also participated in a group show curated by Vida Sabbaghi at the Queens Museum which was very well received by the museum and the press.
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