Install shot of Prick, Saccharine, Shatter at ClampArt Gallery, NY, NY. June 2019.
Excited to be one of the sixty-four applicants admitted to the Chico Review - a seven day, photography retreat focused on the photobook, founded to spark relationships between artists and industry professionals in an environment that fosters community and conversation. From March 21-27, I will be spending the week at Chico Hot Springs Resort, near Livingston, Montana, with twenty of the most influential and creative photographers, book makers, gallerists, museum curators, and photobook publishers in the industry. Reviews and speakers include: Mimi Plumb, Rahim Fortune, Sabiha Çimen, Mona Kuhn, and Bryan Schutmaat.
Black Jack, Silver Gelatin Print, 2020.
I am honored to be a part of a group exhibition, Darkest Before Dawn: Art in A Time of Uncertainty, at Ethan Cohen Gallery KuBe in Beacon, NY, curated by Raul Zamudio and Ethan Cohen. The exhibition’s duration is November 1, 2020 - January 30, 2021.
What do Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda Project (1994-98), Teresa Serrano’s Amapola (2017), and Yoko Ono’s Dream Together (2020) have in common? They individually focus on traumatic events such as, respectively, the bombing of a Spanish city, genocide in Rwanda, drug wars and femicide in a Mexican city that borders the USA, and the current Covid-19, global pandemic. Each work cited, of which there are many more in the history of art with similar themes, is characterized by a unique aesthetic that doesn’t diminish any of its content but rather impacts the viewer in direct or oblique ways. It can be, however, ostensibly problematic to ponder these works as art because of the very nature of their subject matter; and this is not unlike Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) and its thesis of art’s innate difficulty in addressing catastrophe to those who do not directly experience it.
Darkest Before Dawn: Art in a Time of Uncertainty is an exhibition of international artists that work in diverse media including painting, sculpture, photography, video, sound art and performance that explores a myriad of topical subject matter in a world of uncertainty. And similar to the exhibition’s title culled from the eponymous aphorism of a 17th century theologian, the exhibited artworks equally offer hope and, akin to an enlightening dawn, to break through one of the darkest moments we currently find ourselves in our collective, human history.