Chengtao Yi, A kind of transition, 2023 Artificial lotus flower, artificial lotus bud, artificial venus flytrap, cast iron meat grinder, 4.5 x 8 x 24 in.
Forging / Foraging
June 2 - 21
2023 Season II International Residency
Opening Reception with Open Studios: June 2, 6-9pm
NARS Main Gallery
NARS Foundation is pleased to present Forging / Foraging a group exhibition featuring the work of Season II 2023 International Residency artists- Robin Alysha Clemens, Emily DiCarlo, Laura Gauch, Cristóbal Gracia, Coral Saucedo Lomelí, Umico Niwa, Jeffrey Poirier, Matilde Søes Rasmussen, Jie Shao, Sato Sugamoto, Lauren Murao Walkiewicz, Chengtao Yi, and Zindzi Zwietering.
Through varying strategies, the artists in this exhibition examine their relationship to location and community, acting as both collectors and builders. For many of the artists, collaboration acts as an essential tool in their making, allowing for narratives to be shaped and remolded through collective experiences. Unseen structures and spaces in states of in-between are excavated, proposing new sites of possibilities.
About the artists:
Robin Alysha Clemens (1992) is an Amsterdam based artist. Their photography and video projects revolve around identity and a sense of community. Through portraits, cinematographic visualisations and storytelling they examine (sub)cultures, traditions and the associated symbolism. In previous projects they have explored different international anarchist subcultures, lived in a homeless community in Ukraine, worked with Dutch youth on identity and their self-image and photographed and interviewed Mexican people about their spirituality and religion.
Emily DiCarlo is an artist, researcher, and writer whose interdisciplinary practice considers site, temporality and collaboration as the foundational principles for meaning-making. Evidenced through video, installation, text and performance, her work connects the infrastructure of time with the intimacy of duration. She writes about the sociopolitical implications of predominate time structures in contrast to alternative temporalities through feminist phenomenology, queer time theory and more-than-human ontologies. Her practice has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). She serves on council for the International Society for the Study of Time, co-editing a journal issue of KronoScope “Anthropocenic Temporalities” and contributed her chapter, “Transcending Temporal Variance: Time Specificity, Long Distance Performance and the Intersubjective Site,” to the current volume of The Study of Time (Brill Publishing). She lives and works in Tkarón:to/Toronto, Canada.
Laura Gauch is a visual artist focusing on photography and film. Through the exploration of her Chilean roots, Laura began surveying topics of migration, diaspora and transgenerational trauma that comes with it. This then became an integral part of her work. Through her art, she encourages viewers to reflect on the complexities of identity and the impact of the past on individuals and society.
Cristóbal Gracia: My practice reshapes historical milestones and social and cultural phenomena through the investigation, connection and reconstruction of official chronicles, microhistories and urban myths. Using tools such as humor, fiction, violence, desire and failure, my work aims to build baroque systems of disbelief and ostranenie in order to create the space and means of production needed for culturing different subjectivities. In my process of work I involve diverse creative agents, every participation, collaboration and context of production gives a unique specificity to each project. I tend to search for the tensions that art can create when working with dichotomies and contradictions belonging to different fields of knowledge, in this dialectical process lies the opportunity to reshape and interpret life under another light.
Coral Saucedo Lomelí, a sculptor born in Mexico City, recontextualizes overlooked objects and processes into poetic moments. Her work explores material relationships, labor, and collapsing systems, drawing inspiration from domestic objects, the urban landscape, poetry, and craft. Saucedo Lomelí completed her undergraduate studies at ArtCenter College of Design and an MFA at Yale University. She has done residencies in various locations, including Yaddo (New York), RUINA (Oaxaca), The Lighthouse Works (New York), SOMA (Mexico City), at a construction site in San Borja #928 (Mexico City), and with the AA School of Architecture (Xilitla). She was awarded the Provost Grant and the San Marino Art League Scholarship as well as a Fonca/Conacyt Grant which made possible her studies at Yale University.
Umico Niwa’s practice explores the way Western notions of personhood subsume human life into constructs of sexuality and gender, overlooking the various other modes of unbridled existence: plant, microbial. fungal, animal, celestial bodies. Her speculative medical papers propose novel forms of body modification to combat gender dysphoria as well as playfully explore the possible efficacy of including fecal matter transplants as part of hormone replacement therapy for transgender individuals.
Jeffrey Poirier: Born in Fontenay-Le-Comte (France) in 1986, Jeffrey Poirier is a visual artist and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, living and working in Quebec City, Canada. He has presented his work in solo exhibitions in Canada (Winnipeg, Montreal, Laval, Moncton, Quebec City), in France (Nantes) as well as in Japan (Tokyo). A recipient of grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts, he holds a master’s degree in visual arts from Laval University (Quebec City, Canada). These last years he has presented public art installations such as the work Echo for which he won in November 2020 the Videre Art Prize (exhibition of the year) at Quebec City Awards of Excellence in Arts and Culture.
Matilde Søes Rasmussen is a Danish-Swedish visual artist and poet whose work moves freely between photography, filmmaking and writing. For a decade she has documented her work as a fashion model in text and image, critically examining topics related to the body and its relation to being sold. In 2021 she published her debut book Unprofessional, and was shortlisted for a Photo-Text Book Award at the Rencontres D’Arles. She holds a BFA in Fine Art Photography from Gothenburg, Sweden.
Jie Shao: From specific events to broad climate, seeing life experience as an approach and medium rather than a result, Jie Shao's work involves the transition of individual's body, memory, and language experience under different systems of culture and political power. To retrace the tangible feelings and materials that underlie the transitions, his practice embraces the past and present of various materials, encompassing both physical and handmade work, with sculpture and installation as foundational elements.
Sato Sugamoto is an artist based in Tokyo. Her works express the diversity of human thoughts and emotions. She attempts to visualize the terrain of our minds. Fiber mediums allow her to showcase the duality of our conscious lives and subconscious impulses, and the ways in which our thoughts layer and intertwine.
Lauren Murao Walkiewicz’s work fantasizes about a future evolution of humanity that is in harmony with nature after the climate apocalypse. Our environmental consumption has left us with a debt that will be paid to the gods in blood, floods, and fire. After the reckoning, what will a balanced relationship with nature look like? Using acrylic paint on intricately cut pic panel, Walkiewicz imagines this new world: creatures make homes from discarded trash, while humanoids spawn and run from predatory chickens. This utopia is not the humancentric Garden of Eden, but a place where pleasures are balanced equally with the pain of survival.
Chengtao Yi is a Chinese interdisciplinary artist currently based in New York. Yi observes the world’s cultural and spiritual condition through the lenses of man-made objects. His practice focuses on exploring the criticality of production and consumption, function, and dysfunction. He investigates and confronts the ontology of ordinary objects, both physical and virtual, alongside the economical, technological, and cultural backgrounds that conceive them. In his current practice, Yi uses various media such as sculpture, installation, photography, video, and digital media to construct specific narratives for the arguments and speculation to manifest.
Zindzi Zwietering (1992, Amsterdam) is an artist working from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She holds a BA in photography from the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. Photography is the starting point of her work, but often she uses paint, silkscreen, image transfers and drawings. Zwietering received the Mondriaan Stipend for Emerging Artist and exhibited her work at the Foam, de Lakenhal Museum, Art Rotterdam, Unfair, Unseen and Dutch Design Week. Recently, she published a book with publisher the Eriskay Connection.
NARS Foundation Galleries are open to the public from 12pm - 5pm, Monday - Friday. Please contact info@narsfoundation.org with any other inquires.
Support for this exhibition is generously provided by:
Support for the Season II Residency generously provided in part by:
