MEMORY SPACE:

A Virtual Exhibition

PRESS RELEASE

Brooklyn, NY, Release: May 3, 2020. For Immediate Release.

A new exhibition curated by Riad Miah’s Professional Practice Collective: Sofia Baryshnikov, Taylor Bernstein, Santi Butler, Andrea Garcia, Eliana Goldberg, and Sarah Weiner. The show opens online on Wednesday, May 6 and will remain accessible via its online platform indefinitely. The exhibition features twelve works of multiple disciplines, including artists: Samuel Bassett, Anthony Cudahy, Lars Elling, Joshua Flint, Emma Kay, Mike Ryczek, Betye Saar, Doris Salcedo, Debbie Smith, Tshabalala Self, Marina Terauds, Svetoslav Stoyanov, and Uwe Wittwer.

Viewers should expect to enter the folds of conscious/unconscious narratives in the subtle, yet incredibly profound disciplines of our featured artists. This exhibition meditates on the complex narratives woven into our artists’ material languages, and calls attention to a material’s capability to be a vessel of memory and shared storytelling. While observing the various treatments and abstractions of chosen materials in space, viewers are encouraged to evaluate their proximity to the underlying narratives in the installed works. As one piece’s methodology informs the next, works from different backgrounds connect within a shared need to hold space for remembering, and re-imagining. We are honored to house a complex array of multi-disciplinary work that forms this web of interconnection.

Samuel Bassett, born 1982 in Cornwall, UK, studied in Bournemouth. He relocated to his hometown of St. Ives to focus on his art and he works in the prestigious Porthmeor Studios, where artists such as Francis Bacon and Ben Nicholson used to work. He is represented by Galerie Kornfeld, Berlin. His work is often inspired by everyday life, depicted with humor and a hint of pathos. The abstraction and combining of images is a language for his dreams and memories.

Anthony Cudahy, born 1989 in Florida, graduated from Pratt Institute in 2011, and will receive his MFA from Hunter College. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He often works from personal photographs, movie stills, and queer archival images, using these sources to deppict memories and thoughts for his own personal life. His works are emotionally complex, expressed through his use of color and choice of imagery.

Lars Elling is an artist and writer from Norway. Elling began painting at a young age but went into the military at first before he knew painting could be a career. He then went to Bergen National Academy of the Arts for education. His work has been shown in many private collections in Norway and abroad. Elling is currently residing in Oslo and is being represented in Norway by Galleri Brandstrup. Elling’s work is a “one act play” His figures are often painted dreamlike and abstracted. “His layers of imagery evoke memories of childhood, with the possible disturbance and trauma written between the lines. Family is the repetitive theme in Elling’s works; familiar moments infiltrated by surprising or unpleasant elements. The formalistic aspect of Lars Elling’s paintings is characterized by the erased and the broken.”

Joshua Flint is an American artist who received a BFA from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco circa 2002. He has since then exhibited at galleries such as Robert Lange Studios in Charleston, Sloane Merrill Gallery in Boston, and La Luz de Jesus Gallery in LA. Flint’s work is based on images selected from many sources such as digitized museum archives, vintage shops, and social media platforms. “The paintings fluctuate between the familiar and the unknown while simultaneously including the past and present.”

Emma Kay is a British artist born in 1961. She studied at Goldsmiths College in London, England from1980-83 and 1995-97 earning a BA and MA respectively. Worldview is one of her ‘memory’ texts exploring the theme of how memory functions and selective memory. In this piece she attempts to write the entire history of the world beginning with the ‘big bang’ and culminating in the apocalyptic visions made popular by the approaching millennium in 1999. The spaces between paragraphs represent forgotten material. Their size varies depending on Kay’s assessment of the amount of information that cannot be recalled. Kay designed both the typeface and the formatting of the text. This piece is part of the Tate collection and was purchased in 2000.

Mike Ryczek grew up in Wallingford, Connecticut. He attended the Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts and graduated in 2006 with a BFA in illustration. He currently lives in Dedham, Massachusetts and works as a painter and designer. He is represented by 13Forest Gallery in Arlington, Massachusetts. This piece is a part of a series from 2016 that focuses on nostalgia and the manner by which memory is stored. The sentimental and often abstract work was inspired by his own recollection and photos of time spent in Brooklyn, New York.

Betye Saar, born in 1926 (and still creating!), is a legend of the contemporary art world. Employing her chosen medium of mixed media assemblage, Saar explores the intersections of her identity as a Black woman in America. Saar reclaims ownership of found objects and re-imagines new narratives out of the old. A very special feature in ‘Nuances,’ is her piece House of Gris Gris, which is a collaborative work with her daughter and fellow artist, Alison Saar.

Doris Salcedo, born in 1958, is known for her profound sculpture and site-specific installations that deal directly with the specific narratives of victims of political violence in her country, Colombia. Salcedo’s quiet yet immensely visceral material language is her way of honoring lives lost, and making space for works in mourning.

Debbie Smith is a textile artist who began sewing with her mother at a young age. She studied Contemporary Textiles at the West Wales School of the Arts from 2005-2008. She uses illustration and photography to record events that are then reimagined into pieces of art. Her memories are often used as a basis for her work. In Full Swing is an installation displayed in a solo show at the Prema Art Center in Uley, England. The execution of this work involved the use of almost 500 grams of steel pins and more than 2000 staples. The work was influenced by the hexagonal shape of the gallery, the movement of light across the walls and the nostalgic appeal of spinning for no reason that struck her when she first entered the space.

Tshabalala Self is a thirty year old American artist from Harlem, New York. She is currently based in New Haven Connecticut as a painter who incorporates mixed media into her works such as fabric, discarded pieces from her previous works and other textiles. In 2012 she received her B.A. from Bard College and in 2015 she received her BFA from the Yale School of Art. Self describes her own work as a retaliation to the history of Black women’s bodies as they have been depicted in American, Western and global society. Her work speaks to the paradigm that has been voiced by the majority class in the real world as well as the art world.

Marina Terauds is a Latvian artist who is a printmaker, specializing in etching, and within that is a master at mezzotint, aquatint and dry etching. She received her MFA in printmaking from the Latvian Academy of arts as well as Art Pedology at Latvian State University. Her work focuses heavily on finding the right ways to display the beauty of spirituality and nature often with the two subjects being molded together as focal points in her work. With a very careful and finely etched lines with her craftsmanship, what she brings as an artist is a renewed conversation among its viewers about just how essential it is to stop and appreciate, as well as indulge in the fantasies that exist as our surroundings.

Svetoslav Stoyanov is a Bulgarian artist from Gabrovo. He was influenced early on to art by his uncle and painted loosely as a child. Stoyanov began his professional career in 1992, dividing his time between his love for rock and roll and art. He has exhibited in many countries including his home, Bulgaria and currently resides in London. His medium of choice is oil on canvas and his style is surrealist. Stoyanov is “trying to bring out the beauty and delicacy of the world around us, and the magnificence of the human mind.”

Uwe Wittwer is a Swiss artist, born in 1954 in Zurich. He still lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. He works in different mediums mostly painting in watercolors or oils, and working with ink-jet prints. Although he often works from images found on the internet, his way of handling the image provokes a sense of nostalgia, alluding to dreams or memories. The images resemble a photograph negative or a movie still and they reflect upon the difficult process of coming to terms with the past.

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Exploring Memory & the Subconscious