Sao Tanaka. *Untitled*, 42 x 231 inches, 2024

Maybe—map(ping) dissonance

Curated by NARS Curatorial Fellow

Dylan Seh-Jin Kim

Season IV 2024 International Residency Exhibition

November 22 - December 11, 2024

Opening Reception: Friday, November 22, 6-8pm

NARS Main Gallery

Featuring works by Jen Aitken, Sheyda Azar, Philippe Caron Lefebvre, Béatrice Côté, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Ian Ha, Ali Kaeini, Woojae Kim, Jung Won Lee, Jieun Lim, Letizia Scarpello, Sao Tanaka and Jeehee Yoo.

NARS Foundation is pleased to present Maybe—map(ping) dissonance, an exhibition featuring the Season IV 2024 International Residency Artists, curated by NARS Curatorial Fellow Dylan Seh-Jin Kim.

The artists in the exhibition react to the conflicted noises of today and employ the process of map(ping) to contemplate on our global dissonance, historical and present conflict, transitory presence, landscape ideology, and material form. They point to the unharmonious chords that layer our everyday life and occur when we resist openness and too quickly embrace finality, purity, and enclosure.

Rather than suggesting total rigidity over the works in constellation, the residency exhibition goes against its fixed conditions—of residency, of gallery, and of final curatorial determination—to open up space for the works to exist in multiplicity, in complexity, and in a perpetual process of becoming.

Over the period of the exhibition, works in Maybe—map(ping) dissonance are displayed serially through several installations, which is made visible by the installation traces and markings in the gallery. By resisting a final categorization and embracing multiple forms, the exhibition allows the works to exist in a polyrhythm and the public to bear witness to the exhibition’s process of becoming, and simultaneously, multiplicity. Two interventions take place when the works are moved from one installation to another.

The first installation of works occurs from November 22, 2024 to November 28, 2024.

The second occurs from November 29, 2024 to December 5, 2024.

And, the third occurs from December 6, 2024 to December 11, 2024.

Read the press release here.

About the Curatorial Fellow:

Dylan Seh-Jin Kim currently serves as the Institutional Giving Coordinator at Independent Curators International, the Curatorial Fellow at NARS Foundation, a participant in the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program (IATP), a Bandung Resident at Asian American Arts Alliance & MoCADA. He has organized and worked on exhibitions and programs at MoMA PS1, Protocinema, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Unclebrother, Tutu Gallery, NARS Foundation, Columbia University, brownstones, restaurants, and elsewhere. He received a B.A. in Philosophy and Film and Media Studies from Columbia University.

About the artists:

Jen Aitken is based in Toronto, Canada. She makes sculptures that combine perceptual ambiguity with structural clarity. She uses common industrial materials to create unidentifiable forms about intimacy, syntax, and bodily space. Aitken completed her MFA in 2014 at the University of Guelph, Ontario, and her BFA in 2010 at Emily Carr University, Vancouver. Aitken was featured in the 2020 Women to Watch exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. She presented her first institutional solo show at The Power Plant, Toronto in 2023, titled The Same Thing Looks Different, which was accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. Her first large-scale public sculpture was installed at the new headquarters of the National Bank of Canada, Montreal, in 2023. Aitken’s work is in public collections across Canada, including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Sheyda Azar (Persian: شیدا آذر, she/they) is a NY-based cross-disciplinary artist who materializes the interplay between bodily autonomy and control across sculpture, performance, and installation. They explore ideas of resistance, power dynamics, and transformation through a visual language grounded in ritualism and BDSM. By creating immersive, sensorial, and process-driven scenarios and experiences, Sheyda subverts male-oriented practices and targets the systemic violence long-imposed on womxn and marginalized bodies. Sheyda holds a BFA in painting and has earned MFAs in Studio Arts from UNC Chapel Hill in 2021 and Sculpture and Dimensional Studies from Alfred University in 2023. They have shown work in galleries, artist-run spaces, and non-profit institutions internationally. Sheyda has received several fellowships and residencies, including the Vermont Studio Center and NARS Foundation.

Philippe Caron Lefebvre (b. 1986, Canada) is a French Canadian multidisciplinary visual artist. He spent his youth in the dense forests of the Laurentian Mountains, north of Montreal, Canada. Drawn by nature's mysteries and the impact of humans on wildlife, he has connected deeply to his roots while dreaming of alternative lifestyles. Initially apprenticed to a ceramist, he then completed his undergraduate degree at UQÀM, followed by a Master's degree in sculpture from Concordia University. He has participated in various artist residencies, including Atelierhaus Salzamt (Austria, 2022), Fondation La Napoule (France, 2022), Art OMI (USA, NY, 2019), and Banff Centre (Canada, 2018). His work has been exhibited in Japan, Italy, Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

Béatrice Côté (Montreal, Canada) is a painter and ceramicist whose work draws from the play of color in her daily life. She captures incidental moments and overlooked urban spaces—front yards, gardens, balconies. Through detailed and blurred gestures, Côté explores traces of human presence within nature and architecture, reflecting a call for preserving environmental and cultural heritage.

Lafina Eptaminitaki is a visual artist, architect, and poet from Crete, Greece, based in New York. She holds an MDes (with Distinction) from Harvard University, an MA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and an MArch (Summa Cum Laude) from the University of Thessaly. Professionally, she has collaborated with the Guggenheim Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and MOS Architects, contributing to various exhibitions, installations, objects, and publications. Lafina has received several grants, awards, and residencies, and has exhibited internationally, including at New York Live Arts, Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, 11th and 10th Biennale in Athens, 6th Architecture Triennale, AIA Architecture Conference in Las Vegas, Milan Furniture Fair, et al. Currently, she teaches at Syracuse University.

Ian Ha was born in Norfolk, Virginia, grew up in Yong-in, South Korea, and currently has a studio practice in New York. Ha navigates on disjointed fragmented information processing and the dynamic neural networks of the post-internet generation, reflecting an intricate assemblage of personal narratives created from external stimuli. Ha works in painting and printmaking, mounted within non-traditional structures to stage multidimensional spatial illusions. Ha uses nested shapes such as the spherical wheel and the cutout book cover, and repurposed objects such as the piano hinge. Ha received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in 2024 and the TAKIFUJI Art Award in 2021. His exhibitions include "The Uncanny" (solo, 2022) at Rabbit & Tiger, Seoul, "Shifts and Echoes'' (duo, 2023) at Fragment Gallery, New York, and “Butterfly Dream" (group, 2024) at A-Lounge Gallery, Seoul.

Ali Kaeini earned his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2023. In 2024, he received the MacDowell Fellowship and was also a recipient of the VMFA Professional Award. In 2023, he was awarded the Hamiltonian Fellowship and the VCCA Artist of Color Fellowship. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2019. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows across the U.S. and the Middle East, including at DDDD in New York, Delgosha Gallery in Tehran, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (VMOCA). He currently lives and works in New York, NY.

Woojae Kim is a Korean artist and writer living on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, Canada). His works explore rituals of interdependency and listening to inaudible frequencies of relationships with non-humans and the land.

His work has recently been exhibited at Artspeak, Access Gallery in Vancouver, and Dreams Comma Delta in Ladner. His texts were published in the Canadian Art and the Capilano Review. Kim received an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award 2023.

Jung Won Lee (b. Seoul, Korea) is an artist based in Brooklyn and Seoul. She celebrates the poetics of vulnerability by creating ambiguous, unreliable objects. Primarily working in sculpture, installation, and drawing, her practice aims to build structures for care. Lee holds a BFA in General Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and a BA in Media Studies and Korean Language and Literature from Ewha Womans University. She has exhibited at Current Space, Gateway Gallery, Middendorf Gallery, and Sheila & Richard Riggs Gallery in Baltimore, MD.

Jieun Lim is a Korean artist based in Duesseldorf, Germany and Seoul, South Korea. She studied fine arts at the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf, where she received her diploma and Meisterschueler. In Korea she holds a BFA in painting from Hong-ik University in Seoul. Her works have been internationally exhibited including K21 Museum of Contemporary Art in Duesseldorf, Gallery Ermes-Ermes in Rome, IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art in Eupen, Belgium, Gallery LC Queisser in Tbilisi, Georgia, Museum of Art Solingen, Germany, Philara Collection in Düsseldorf, Shinhan Gallery, Seoul, Bangkok Biennale, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Studio in Chiangmai, and many others. Her works can be found in the collections of the IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art and the New collection of Academy Gallery, Duesseldorf.

Letizia Scarpello (Pescara, 1989) is a multidisciplinary artist. She was born in Italy, where she received her MFA in Set and Costume Design for Theatre from Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan (2015). The artist is interested in the fusion of fiction with reality, in representation as realisation, in a relationship of continuity with existing. This is why Letizia Scarpello often works for ephemeral installations, specifically conceived for a place in its historical moment, pursuing a vision that espouses ecology (understood as the reduction of dependence on matter) in artistic creation. She uses, however, a multifaceted language that in abstraction maintains a pictorial background, thanks to the manual technique that inherits its nobility from her family upholstery and weaving's history. Letizia Scarpello's awards include the Piero D'Amore Art Prize (Turin, 2022), the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art AIR Award promoted by the Italian Institute of Culture (Moscow, 2021), and the Santa Rita Prize promoted by Azienda Speciale PALAEXPO (Rome, 2021). Notable residencies include the NARS Foundation, New York (2024), the Highlights by The Blank Contemporary Art, Bergamo (2018), and the Via Farini AIR, Milan (2016). The artist has exhibited in galleries and institutions (such as A Pick Gallery, Turin in 2024, Labs Contemporary Gallery, Bologna in 2023, Monitor Gallery, Pereto in 2021, Sala Santa Rita, as part of PalaExpo, Rome in 2021, Triennale, Milan in 2016) and unusual locations (such as the Corralejo Waterpark, Fuerteventura in 2021, and Macao Social Center, Milan in 2018).

Sao Tanaka (b. Tokyo Japan) is based New York City. She hold a BFA in Japanese painting from Tama Art University, an MA in sociology and cultural anthropology from Hitotsubashi University, and studied at the School of Visual Arts. Her works have been internationally exhibited including at Mizuma & Kips Gallery in New York, Bunkamura Gallery in Tokyo , Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, in Hiroshima. Tanaka has received the Fellowship of the Pola Art Foundation Overseas Study Programme, the Hiraizumi Curator Jury Prize, SHIBUYA ART AWARDS 2019, Winning Selection Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art "Open Call for Art Project Ideas 2018”.

She explores landscape and identity, portraying inorganic materials in genesis scenes, inspired by myths that legitimize identity-region links.

Jeehee Yoo (b. Seoul, Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist in New York. She holds an MFA in Mount Royal School of Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art, a Post-Baccalaureate in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA in Korean Painting, and a double major in History of Art from Ewha Womans University in Seoul. Her diverse educational background, seamlessly merging Korean traditional elements with contemporary perspectives. Her work has been exhibited at various places, most recently in the Nars Foundation Residency Program. Her open studio has been reviewed by Isa Farfan in Hyperallergic and interviewed in the New Visionary Magazine.