HOUSE & UNIVERSE
About the jurors –
Yael Eban is an Israeli lens-based artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA in Photography & Video at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been exhibited most recently at Stellar Projects (NYC), FJORD (PA), Center for Creative Photography (AZ), The Chrysler Museum of Art (VA), and Houston Center for Photography. She has been featured in Hyperallergic, Artsy, Collector Daily, and FADER. Eban has attended residencies at MASS MoCA, Wassaic Project, and Vermont Studio Center. She is co-director of the NYC branch of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces.
Jackie Hoving lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her large scale wall installations incorporate painting, printmaking, wallpaper, animation, and collage. Hoving’s work has been featured in solo projects at Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, Ripon College in Wisconsin, Rebekah Templeton Gallery in Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Airport, and group exhibitions at the Artist-Run Art Fair in Miami, Storefront Gallery in Brooklyn, and The Museum of Drawing in Laholm, Sweden. As a current co-Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Brooklyn Hoving has had the opportunity to curate several exhibitions. Her curatorial projects and her own work have been written about in publications such as The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, The Bushwick Daily, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.
About the artists –
Tania Alvarez: Tania Alvarez is a visual artist based in Columbia County, New York. Alvarez received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2005 and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2017. As an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant recipient, Alvarez has exhibited internationally, with group shows in London, Norway, China, and throughout the USA. She has been awarded residencies at The Studios at MASS MoCA, Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, and James Castle Foundation in Boise, Idaho.
Sean Cocoran: Sean Corcoran is a visual artist based in Albany County, New York. Born and raised on Long Island, he received his BA in Psychology from St. John’s University in 2014. Sean received his MA and MFA in Studio Art at the University at Albany, SUNY in 2018 and 2020, respectively. His artistic practice is based in photography, audiovisual installations, and drawing. Sean is available for commissions, short term assignments, and long term regional documentary work. In addition, Sean maintains an independent fine art documentation practice and his clients include regional artists, museums, galleries, and art institutions such as The University Art Museum at the University At Albany, SUNY, and Stair Galleries in Hudson, New York.
Todd Kelly: Todd Kelly is a visual artist based in Ulster County, New York. Born and raised in Michigan, Kelly received his BA at Anderson University in Indiana in 1998 and MFA at the School of Visual Arts in NYC in 2000. Kelly lived and painted in London for several years before returning to NYC in 2007. His work has been shown around the US including New York, Chicago, LA, and abroad in London and Galway, Ireland. Kelly has been represented by Asya Geisberg Gallery in NYC since 2011.
Jiatong Lu: Jiatong Lu is a mixed media artist and photographer based in Dutchess County, New York. Born in 1988, she grew up in Northwest China and graduated with an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts. Rooted in her own growth experiences, her work focuses on family, childhood trauma, self-identity, and gender issues, questioning the legitimacy of the disciplinarian culture that is deeply rooted in patriarchy and the traditional Chinese social structure. Jiatong is a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Photography from The New York Foundation for the Arts.
Claire Sherwood: Claire Sherwood is a visual artist based in Rensselaer County, New York. Claire Sherwood’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States in venues such as the U.S. Smithsonian National Botanic Garden, the Corcoran Museum of Art, Delaware Contemporary, Cornish College in Seattle, WA, Grounds for Sculpture, and numerous galleries, museums, and colleges in upstate NY and the New England region. Currently, Sherwood is a co-coordinator for the Upstate NY chapter of The Feminist Art Project and an art teacher at The Robert C. Parker School. She has received numerous awards and grants, including NYS Individual Artist Grant, New York State Strategic Opportunity Stipend, Southeast College Art Association Award of Distinction, Ohio River Border Initiative Grant, International Sculpture Center/ Sculpture Magazine: Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture.
Mimi Young: Mimi Young is an artist and fashion stylist based in Ulster County, New York. Since moving her studio to the Hudson Valley in 2016, Mimi’s work has become more focused as she shifts from an urban sensibility to a more rural one. Aside from painting and drawing, she is now including sculpture and installation in her arsenal. Her work is informed by memories of the banal, commonplace yet magnificent moments and objects from everyday life. She has her BFA from the Pratt Institute and has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions throughout New York and the United States.
Gabriel Zimmer: Gabriel Zimmer is an artist working in photography based in Ulster County, New York. In his studio-based practice, everyday objects and materials are incorporated into personal tableaus that reflect on questions of subjectivity and uncertainty in photography. Zimmer’s work is influenced by the vernacular of commercial photography, employing artificial light and saturated color to heighten the energy of the image. These techniques lend an uncanny quality to his photographs, complicating the perceptibility of the medium at hand. In 2020 Gabriel was commissioned to make work for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, TIME, The Atlantic, and Wired. He holds a BA in photography from Bard College.
Deborah Zlotsky: Deborah Zlotsky is an artist based in Albany County, New York. Deborah Zlotsky is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York and Robischon Gallery in Denver. She received a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and NYFA Artist Fellowships in Painting in 2012 and 2018. Her work is in a variety of collections in the US and abroad, and she has been awarded recent residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Bemis Center. Zlotsky teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and lives in upstate New York.
HOUSE & UNIVERSE
February 12 – March 28, 2021
Curated by Yael Eban and Jackie Hoving, co-directors of Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY.
MAIN GALLERY
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Tania Alvarez
Sean Corcoran
Todd Kelly
Jiatong Lu
Claire Sherwood
Mimi Young
Gabriel Zimmer
Deborah Zlotsky
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The exhibition House & Universe brings together work by 8 artists working across various media. The exhibition takes its title from a chapter in the book The Poetics of Space by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in which the author contemplates an experiential understanding of home as both a domestic environment and a place where imagination finds sanctuary. Bachelard considers “the house as a tool for analysis of the human soul,” drawing a parallel between the arrangement of objects in a house, and the ability of a person to think, visualize, and imagine.
The relationship between materiality and domestic referent idea is explored by Claire Sherwood, Deborah Zlotsky, Todd Kelly, and Mimi Young. Zlotsky’s use of reclaimed vintage textiles, scarves, doilies, and blankets, is a tangible embodiment of the domestic feminine space of generations past. Claire Sherwood creates intimate rock-like sculptures using the negative space around her body as template, employing banal materials from everyday life like swept dirt from daily chores, or items found in the recycling bin. Todd Kelly’s iterative constructions are similarly comprised of a list of non-traditional materials. Each successive piece, based on the past and the future, creates an infinitely expanding universe, complete with the occasional cut-out portal. Mimi Young’s work is informed by memories of the banal and commonplace objects around her, creating a lyrical language of recycled shapes and gestural lines.
Jiatong Lu’s photographs create a sense of escape from daily circumstance by transporting the viewer outside the immediate world. Lu considers the memory of home as a traumatic space from which to escape. Lu’s photographs follow the fragmented and painful experiences of childhood, and in doing so explore themes of intimacy and isolation.
Gabriel Zimmer, Tania Alvarez, and Sean Corcoran react to their interior surroundings in different but equally resourceful ways. Zimmer creates striking still life photographs, taking unremarkable objects and juxtaposing them into vibrant visual puzzles. Meanwhile, Alvarez explores memory through a series of painted interior spaces. As a group the paintings tell an autobiographical story about the isolation of living with chronic illness, and the shared human experience of being alone. Corcoran employs a mix of analog and digital photography techniques in order to investigate themes of space, object, and home.
Through various means, the artists in this show each affirm that the spaces we seek, create, or privately inhabit can unfold into expansive worlds unto themselves. In a time of unprecedented and necessary interiority prompted by the pandemic, this exhibition offers a sympathetic vision: a call to cultivate a universe of connotations and expansive associations within the seemingly finite environment of the home.
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Tags: 2021 Past Exhibitions
