NXTHVN 2020-2021 Studio Fellows: Un/Common Proximity

Gallery Exhibition at 48 Walker St | 12 JUNE - 13 AUGUST 2021

  • Allana Clarke

    Alisa Sikelianos-Carter

    Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack

    Esteban Ramón Pérez

    Jeffrey Meris

    Ilana Savdie

    Vincent Valdez

     

    Un/Common Proximity refers to the artists’ unprecedented experience of living and working in close proximity with one another during a year punctuated by a landmark U.S. election, global pandemic, and national reckoning of systemic racial injustice. This exhibition highlights both individual discoveries as well as communal responses tackling themes of protection, healing, redemption, and intuitive processing that permeated throughout the studio walls.

     

    The exhibition is curated by 2020-2021 NXTHVN Curatorial Fellow, Claire Kim.

  • With grace, humor, and a little help from the camaraderie of our makeshift quarantine pod, these artists’ works share personal and communal experiences that offer a roadmap to finding healing and protective guidance to navigate a rapidly changed and changing world.

     

    - Claire Kim, NXTHVN 2020-2021 Curatorial Fellow¹

  • Vincent Valdez uses his artistic practice to critique and combat white supremacist norms in American society. His drawings and monumental...

    Vincent Valdez uses his artistic practice to critique and combat white supremacist norms in American society. His drawings and monumental paintings act as haunting mirrors that reflect on 21st-century America’s cursed compulsion to repeat and propagate violent patterns of racism, classism, and xenophobia—prodding viewers to question the various distorted myths and realities of capitalism and the American dream. 

     

  • Esteban Ramón Pérez’s practice points to his SoCal Chicano roots through sculpture and sculptural paintings. These works, boasting Ramón Pérez’s...

    ESTEBAN RAMON PEREZ, EL GALLO NEGRO (13 WINS - 0 LOSES), 2021

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    Esteban Ramón Pérez’s practice points to his SoCal Chicano roots through sculpture and sculptural paintings. These works, boasting Ramón Pérez’s signature combination of brute technical skill with hyper-specific translations and reimaginations of Mexican folklore and familial history, speak to the subjectivities of the Mexican American community. 

  • In Como la Flor, Esteban Ramón Pérez uses a tattoo gun, sans ink, to etch a distorted image of the Mexican coat of arms onto the surface; this method of scratching and puncturing the first layer of leather necessitates two to three rounds of mark-making to depict the chosen image. The combination of the detailed and delicate treatment of the leather with the undeniably tough and punk method of painting manifests into awe-striking works of powerfully honest representations of identity and dissent.

  • Jeffrey Meris’s hanging sculptures, reminiscent of chandeliers, are made of aluminium piping, ceramic vessels, and spider plants. These materials, along...

    Jeffrey Meris’s hanging sculptures, reminiscent of chandeliers, are made of aluminium piping, ceramic vessels, and spider plants. These materials, along with Meris’s shift from working with steel and iron to aluminum, a lighter, and, as Meris says, a more “intimate” metal—often found in domestic spaces for plumbing—can be seen as a metaphor for the shift in the artist’s practice, once centered around conversations of racialized trauma, to one focused on a steadfast devotion to healing, cleansing, and rituals of care.

  • Meris’s paintings are made by stretching and joining the rust-stained rags that were strewn about his studio—each cloth dyed in...

    Meris’s paintings are made by stretching and joining the rust-stained rags that were strewn about his studio—each cloth dyed in a unique pattern finds new life as a larger ‘skin,’ resembling animal hides, all the while holding a history and memory of his past works and traumas.

     

  • Allana Clarke’s practice exposes the power of materiality, as she brings new life to materials that have held personal and/or historical ties to anti-Black sentiment, often related to society’s violent adherence to Western standards of beauty. By repurposing materials such as hair bonding glue and cocoa butter, Clarke rejects such pressures, subverting the narratives of these products to create works that offer a path to transcendence and healing. In both processes, the artist relies on time—waiting for the materials to coagulate before next steps are taken—a condition that coincidentally, or tellingly, embodies the wait and patience needed to attain transcendence.

  • Notions of protest and opposition are shared in a more indirect manner in Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack’s artistic practice. His performance...
    DANIEL T. GAITOR-LOMACK, 
    KING'S BLUE (I'LL BE SEEING YOU), 2020
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    Notions of protest and opposition are shared in a more indirect manner in Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack’s artistic practice. His performance and assemblage works hone in on the historical and metaphysical energies related to space, some existing on Earth and others accessed spiritually and/or subconsciously. During his time at NXTHVN, Gaitor-Lomack used materials found in the surrounding Dixwell neighborhood, combining and layering discarded materials to create new forms. Made from a series of intuitive gestures and connections, his sculptural works become windows, transporting viewers into and through the many lives that each object has lived and met.

  • Ilana Savdie’s large-scale paintings, using electrifying color palettes and thick layers of textured beeswax, seesaw between representation and abstraction. From...

    Ilana Savdie’s large-scale paintings, using electrifying color palettes and thick layers of textured beeswax, seesaw between representation and abstraction. From this intermediate space, Savdie zooms in and out of the human body and psyche—layered and leaking figures become real estate for other organisms all the way down to microscopic life forms. 

  • Savdie’s works pose larger questions about the boundaries between foreign and familiar; how to trace home, history, and heritage as an “inconvenient body”; and how to assert and find redemptive outlets against oppressive structures, authorities, and regimes.

  • Alisa Sikelianos-Carter’s works showcase figures that don afros or collages of Black hairstyles—hand-cut images of braids, cornrows, and twists are...

    Alisa Sikelianos-Carter’s works showcase figures that don afros or collages of Black hairstyles—hand-cut images of braids, cornrows, and twists are layered to create suggestive new shapes—which the artist refers to as “crowns.” The glitter, shimmering and refracting on the surface, provides a layer of unpredictability and movement to the works

     

  • The artist's mixed media paintings and collages offer protective healing by inviting viewers into a hushed other-worldly realm that features environments reminiscent of the ocean floor, outerspace, and swamplands. In her large-scale paintings, these imagined spaces are inhabited by powerful and divine beings donning Black hairstyles. Sikelianos-Carter refers to these figures as “galactic portraits of Black ancestors.”

  • Checklist

  • About NXTHVN

    Co-Founded by Titus Kaphar and Jason Price, NXTHVN is a new national arts model that empowers emerging artists and curators through education and access, while also accelerating professional careers in the arts. NXTHVN’s Curatorial and Studio Fellowships are made possible, in part, by support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the TOY family in memory of Yves (1988–2011).

     

    Read accompanying essay by Claire Kim →

     

    Click here to learn more about NXTHVN →

     

     

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    ¹Claire Kim, "NXTHVN: Un/Common Proximity," 2021, essay to accompany the exhibition. All text in the viewing room is extracted from this essay.