Material Mythologies
12.22 — 2.09
I've long envisioned showcasing a program featuring designers and sculptors whose creations resonate with the natural world, exploring forms that mirror human experiences and the elements of nature. This exhibition aims to provoke introspection into the essence of objects, illustrating how they can harmonize in both domestic and public spaces. Titled "Material Mythologies," the show delves into narratives and symbolic significance embedded in various materials and objects. Beyond their tangible and functional aspects, objects carry cultural, historical, or metaphorical meanings, navigating the complex human-object relationships influenced by external value systems. Distorted by control mechanisms and desires, objects often conceal their origin, emphasizing a mythological value.
In the creative realm, artists and designers across disciplines manipulate arrangements through observation and method. Objects undergo deconstruction, transformation, and recombination, birthing new creations. These creatives strive for an active engagement with their subjects, acknowledging the ontological confusion between objects and the masking sign systems. Their efforts aim to disrupt and leverage the mediating functions governing all things, ultimately contributing to the exploration of the profound connections between human experiences and the objects that define our spaces.
-James MS
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Raul De Lara (b. 1991 – Culiacán, Sinaloa, México) is a sculptor based in NYC. His practice is rooted in storytelling via woodworking. De Lara immigrated from Mexico to the United States at the age of 12 and has been a DACA recipient since 2012. Growing up in Texas as a non-English speaker, and still currently unable to leave the USA, his work questions ideas around nationality, queer identity, and the immigrant experience. Exploring forms inspired by flora, mask makers, furniture design, and architecture, De Lara imbues his sculptures with a hybrid mixture of Mexican/American cultural references, and functions. His research preserves, honors, and propels forward traditional uses of wood while combining them with new developments in the global industry of woodworking.De Lara received his MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University (2019), and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin (2015). His selected awards include the 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Craft/Sculpture, 2023 Art in America Magazine’s Top 20 Global Talent to Watch, Penland Distinguished Artist Winter Fellowship, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Residency, Haystack Mountain School of Craft Open Studio Residency, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Fellowship, The National Park Services OCARC Residency, Ox-Bow School of Art Fellowship, a Chicago Artists Coalition HATCH Residency, a Queens New Arts Grant, a New York City Arts Corps Grant, and the International Sculpture Center Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.
Bella Carlos (b.1998) is a glass artist from North Carolina. Dual enrolled, they earned a BA in illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in socio-cultural anthropology at Brown University in 2021; after which they promptly went on to study metalsmithing at the Royal College of Art in London. Bella’s work has been featured in New York Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week, British Vogue, Vogue Scandinavia, The New York Times and Paper Magazine. As an anthropologist, they have done research on systems of power and how they manifest materially in Sapporo, Japan, Vescovado di Murlo, Italy, and Washington D.C., United States. Bella was taught how to work with glass by their mother who is a stained glass artist and comes from a tradition of Southern craft. They currently have a residency at Urban glass in Brooklyn, a feature in volume 5 of Far Near, a publication on Asian art and culture and is working on a group show at Silke Linder in NYC
Chloe Seibert (b. 1989, New York) lives and works in New York. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include Mickey (New York, NY), ASHES/ASHES (New York), Chris Andrews Gallery (Montréal), and No Place Gallery (Columbus). Seibert works primarily in large scale, figurative sculpture. She has made this unique series of functional candelabras for No Place Gallery inspired by Peter Schumann’s Cheap Art Manifestos.
Zachary Armstrong (b. 1984) lives and works in Dayton, Ohio. Recent solo exhibitions include GNYP Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2023); Tilton Gallery, New York, NY (2022, 2018, 2016); Faurschou Foundation, New York, NY/Beijing, China (2022, 2021); The Contemporary, Dayton, OH (2021); Carl Kostyál, London, UK (2019); GNYP Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2019, 2017); Sabsay, Copenhagen, Denmark (2018); Melser/Feuer, New York, NY (2016); Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2015), and Dayton Visual Arts Center, Dayton, OH (2014). Armstrong was included in Inherent Structure, a survey exhibition of contemporary abstract painting at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH in 2018. That year, he also participated in the residency program at Lefebvre & Fils in Versailles, France.
Olivia Pi’ilani Whittier ( b.1999) is an artist based in Columbus, Ohio. She endeavors to reveal the intricate relationship between hands and the earth. Employing clay as her medium, she creates vessels that delve into ancestral and ceremonial storytelling traditions, touching upon themes such as fantasy, romanticism, grief, generational trauma, and the interconnectedness of nature and the human experience. Whittier is pursuing a BA. in Psychology and Minor in Ceramics at The Ohio State University.
Catalina Ouyang has presented solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York, NY; No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Make Room, Los Angeles, CA; and Knockdown Center, Queens, NY. Their work has been included in group shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D, Portland, Maine; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Kimball Art Center, Park City, UT; Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles; Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, Austria; and Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA, among others. Ouyang is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, and was a 2020-21 Smack Mellon Artist in Residence. Their work has been written about in publications including the New York Times, Flash Art, Frieze Magazine, Momus, and Artforum. Ouyang holds an MFA from Yale University and is based in New York City.
Ben Quinn (b.1991, Dayton, OH) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. He received a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design, and MFA from California College of the Arts in 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include Fused Space in San Francisco, Littman Gallery at Portland State University, and Pt.2 in Oakland. Quinn has also collaborated with Acne Studios in, 2020 and in 2021, releasing a series of painted garments, bags, and an installation in their Hollywood Los Angeles location. Quinn’s upcoming exhibitions include Pt. 2 SF, and Stanley's L.A.
Middleland
Amanda Ba
9.23 — 12.09
Middleland is an exhibition consisting of a two-channel video and a series of four paintings that, together, explore the nuanced circumstances of East Asian diasporic migration in Middle America, and the resulting social and cultural transformation, diversity, and complexity. The title refers to both Middle America and a positing of one’s Chinese-American identity “in the middle” of China and America, something that scholar len Ang describes as a feeling of “in-between-ness.” The work does not celebrate this hybridity but rather ambivalently contemplates the violence that such a proximity to whiteness entails.
The body of work is centered around Ba’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio, a city that occupies a unique position in its mythologized and elusive reputation to urbanites (think of the snowballing online joke amongst Gen-Z-ers, “only in Ohio”). Recently emerging as a commerce, tech and banking hub in an otherwise decelerating post-industrial Midwest, Columbus presents itself as a sort of refuge of comfort on its way to becoming a cultural destination while still retaining a certain Midwestern humility. However, its status as a hotly contested swing state facing issues like police brutality, settlement upon Native land, abortion rights, an alienated working class, and a comfortable suburban middle class makes Ohio a ground zero for ideological tension.
This mix of qualities also helps to achieve a certain statistical American averageness and a sort of complacency that, for decades, has drawn in large immigrant populations to search for an antiquated notion of the American Dream. The tension between Ohio as a destination for multiculturalism and Ohio as an embodiment of the traditional suburban values of the Midwest is where Ba’s interest lies the figurative paintings that accompany the video work portray Asian female figures in environments that are drawn from personal memory and are distinctly White, distinctly Midwestern. She is also interested in a critique of multiculturalism as a neoliberal project, most palpable in her video work, ‘24 Hours in Middleland.’ As Jared Sexton writes, ” the principle political effects of multiracialism are neither a fundamental challenge to the living legacies of white supremacy… but rather the reinforcement of long standing tenets of antiblackness and the promotion of normative sexuality.” Middleland asks the question, how does white normativity undergird what we both celebrate and condemn about diasporic life in middle America?
Amanda Ba (b. 1998) is a painter who lives and works in New York City. She was born in Columbus, Ohio, but spent the first five years of her life with her grandparents in Hefei, China. Diasporic memory is central to her work—vivid paintings that combine personal memory with psychosexual fantasy, featuring figures that challenge a predominantly white Western canon of figural painting. Her interventions in the Cannon do not aim to solely celebrate her cultural identity and it’s inclusion, but to interrogate its formation.
Ba earned her B.A. in Visual Arts and History in 2020 from Columbia University, New York. She has exhibited internationally and held her first solo show at PM/AM Gallery, London. She has participated in group shows such as Real Corpororeal at Gladstone, New York City; Wonder Women at Jeffrey Deitch, New York City and Los Angeles; Eat Drink Man Woman at 180 Strand, London; and At The Table at Christie’s, New York City (2021).
Amanda’s upcoming projects include curating a group exhibition in which she will also be featured at James Fuentes in late Fall 2023 and a solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch, New York City, in 2024.