Chi Zhang, Autumn Equinox No. 2190, 2023, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 14 x 11”
Mirror, Portal
November 17 - December 13
Season IV Residency Artists
Opening Reception: November 17, 6-8pm
NARS Main Gallery
Featuring works by wei, Ravi Avasti, Sue Beyer, Jake Couri, Pauline-Rose Dumas and Maxime Bagni, Juyon Lee, Lauren Pirie, Sophie Sabet, Tülay Schakir, Zhuyan Ye, and Chi Zhang.
NARS Foundation is pleased to present Mirror, Portal, an exhibition featuring the Season IV International Residency Artists. Through multi-disciplinary practices spanning performance, sculpture, painting, and digital media, these works recontextualize viewpoints through reflections both real and imagined, transforming observations through the act of recording, documenting, and collecting. These works invite viewers to consider exploration and openness as a means of creating unexpected pathways for new perspectives.
About the artists:
wei currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY., and Providence, RI. They received MFA in Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI., and BFA in New Media at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, CA. wei has shown in group exhibitions nationally and internationally. They have participated in numerous artist residencies and fellowships, including NARS Foundation, New York, NY; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, CO; Art Center Residency, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY; Haystack Mountain School of Craft, ME; University of California Santa Cruz, CA; Yerba Buena Center for the Art, CA; Edition/Basel, Basel, Switzerland, and more. Their works are collected by The Thomas J. Watson Library of The Metropolitan Museum, The Library of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, RISD Museum; The Wattis Institute, Kent State University, and MAPC. wei is a long-term collaborator of the Futurefarmers, a San Francisco-based International Artists Collective.
Ravi Avasti completed a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2018. He was selected as one of eleven artists to feature in the Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial 2022, was shortlisted for the 2019 Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship, and was awarded the 2018 Fiona Myer White Story Residency for his work in the Victorian College of the Arts Masters exhibition. His solo exhibition Little Fleas was held at Grau Projekt, Melbourne, 2019. His work has been included in a number of curatorial projects and group exhibitions. He has received commissions from the Sydney Opera House, and Victoria Police. Ravi lives and works in Kyneton, Victoria.
Australian interdisciplinary artist Sue Beyer has exhibited internationally, and received support through cultural agencies such as Australia Council, Creative Victoria, University of Melbourne and the Sidney Myer Fund & The Myer Foundation. She holds a BFA from Griffith University, an MFA from the University of Melbourne and is a Sessional Lecturer with the School of Design at RMIT in Melbourne. Beyer has received critical recognition through national prizes, and her work is part of numerous corporate and public collections including the Australian Government’s Artbank. This year Sue has also participated in the Autumn SPRING/BREAK Art Show and the Mark Rothko International Painting Symposium in Daugavpils, Latvia.
Jake Couri received his MFA in Fine Arts with honors from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA (2018). His work has been shown at Milan Machinima Festival in Milan, IT (2023), Green Kill in Kingston, NY (2023), Public Records in Brooklyn, New York (2020), and Superposition Gallery in Los Angeles, CA (2019). He completed an artist residency at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, Colorado (2019). He currently lives and works in New York City.
Maxime Bagni (1997, Paris) received his MA in Fine Arts with first class honors from ENSAD Paris (2022). Maxime Bagni links the making of a shelter and the making of the sculpture. His materials, such as glass, wood, or insulation wadding often come from the world of architecture. They are combined with healing materials like fleece blankets, soap, clay, or water. In his large-scale installations, he frequently incorporates states such as deterioration, and transience.
Pauline-Rose Dumas (1996, Paris) received her MA in Fine Arts with first class honors from Beaux- Arts Paris (2022) and her BA from UAL Chelsea (London, 2019) in textile design. Pauline-Rose Dumas’s work connects disparate elements from different working fields (crafts, textile, metal industry) into unified installations. Dumas's blacksmithing and drawing work symbolically mirror the continuity of a sewing thread within the space.
Juyon Lee is a South Korea-born artist based in the Greater Boston Area, Massachusetts and Brooklyn, New York. With her interest in limits and fluidity in perception of time and space, Lee makes multidimensional works composed of architectural elements, functional and nonfunctional objects with ethereal materials like light and air. Lee has exhibited widely, including New Bedford Art Museum, Tufts University Art Galleries, and Collar Works. Lee was an artist-in-residence at The Studios at MASS MoCA, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and more. She is the recipient of notable awards, including St. Botolph Club Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award and Wellesley College Alice C. Cole Studio Grant. Lee received her MFA from SMFA at Tufts University.
Spawned from ideas of desire and intimacy in relation to ecology—both as themes in her own artwork and through the process of collaboration—Lauren Pirie’s paintings, sculptures and installations illuminate both our inherent interdependence and a thirst for communion with the more-than-human. Her site-responsive installations have been exhibited in Nuit Blanche, DesignTO, and Lumière and as part of ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art. Pirie has exhibited and created public artworks in Canada, the U.S., Central and South America, and Europe. Recent gallery exhibitions include; Conversation at Mayten’s Contemporary in collaboration with Jah Grey, and Sacred Spit at Open Space Gallery (Toronto); Like A Devouring Fire, at Blah Blah Gallery, (Philadelphia); and Vibrant Matter at PADA (Portugal), where she was in residence in 2021.
Sophie Sabet is a visual artist working in video, film, sculpture and installation. Her work explores different microcosms as a way of understanding societal relationality and structures of dominance. She approaches sites of tension through intimate and nonlinear methodologies to offer new ways of being and thinking.
Tülay Schakir’s versatility as an artist is demonstrated through the diversity of her practice, which includes public art projects, lighting and set design for contemporary dance, and architecture. She received her MA from University of Arts, Helsinki and is currently a doctoral student.
Born in Zhejiang, China (1996) and living between China, Taiwan and US, Zhuyan Ye walks around the marginal spaces of the cities she has lived in. Ye received Master of Fine Arts in Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. She has been accepted in different residency programs: Ox-Bow's Longform Residency, CPS Lives 2022-2023 Artist Residency, Atlantic Center For The Arts and NARS International Residency Program.
Chi Zhang (b. 1988, Beijing, China) is a visual artist, art educator, and art professional formerly based in New York, who currently lives and works in Beijing and Shanghai, China. Zhang received her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York (2013) and her BA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University (2010). Her works have been exhibited in the United States and China. Zhang has been accepted into Pantocrator Gallery Summer Artist Residency, Shanghai, China; NARS Foundation International Artist Residency, Brooklyn, New York, US; and GlogauAIR Artist in Residence, Berlin, Germany. NARS Foundation Galleries are open to the public from 12pm - 5pm, Monday - Friday. Please contact info@narsfoundation.org with any other inquires.
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