“Alberto Ayala”, acrylic on wood; Portrait of Roberto Lugo’s grandfather; and “Potpourri Boat”, Ceramic sculpture
Art history, American history, and personal history mix in Roberto Lugo‘s exhibition, American Crib: What’s Happening?, currently on view at The Clay Studio. Wandering around the installation you’ll find portraits of Nikki Giovanni and Lugo’s grandfather, Billie Holiday and The Roots on ceramic sculptures, and plenty of places to sit and take it all in – including a graffitied train car.
From The Clay Studio’s website:
Roberto Lugo welcomes visitors into an imagined living space celebrating his Philadelphia roots and cultural heritage. This deeply personal reflection on America’s socio-political landscape celebrates the power of art to communicate. Lugo mixes historical pottery traditions with pop culture, humor, and critical clarity to address complex issues, including cultural identity, mental health, social justice, and the resilience of underrepresented communities.
This exhibition is a part of Radical Americana. A larger multi-location project that brings together art and culture institutions around Philadelphia. Learn more about Radical Americana here.
More than just a retrospective of Lugo’s career so far, “American Crib: What’s Happening?” will be a deeply personal and poignant reflection on America’s socio-economic and political landscape.
And the Lugo’s statement about his work:
My work is intended to be a biographical narrative that tells the many stories of my life. The objects I create speak of personal subjects – my experiences with obesity, racism, and class division. I use the associations with ceramic material and forms of pottery, such as elite fine china and porcelain, to discuss these issues with humor and irony. My strongest concepts are influenced from the juxtaposition of cultural elements in the form of mass media and current events. Using historical ideology within pottery as a vehicle to introduce a modern theme is of great importance because it allows me to add more dimensions to my artwork.
In the video below, also from The Clay Studio’s website, Lugo discusses the work, some of his inspirations, and the installation.
The sculptures pictured above are part of Zoe Elwood‘s installation.
Information from the museum about the artist:
Zoe Elwood (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist from central Utah, currently based in Newark, DE, as they pursue an MFA in sculpture at the University of Delaware (UD). A self-proclaimed “sculpture convert,” the thesis exhibition for their BFA in painting & drawing (Utah Valley University, 2023) featured numerous assemblages of found objects, and one painting. The language of their practice continues to involve all things patinated, favoring the strange familiarity of those that remind of the home. Through such materials Elwood interrogates heteronormative notions of domesticity and discusses queer identity formation within intimate, intolerant spaces. Elwood is a current DELPHI Fellow at UD’s Center for Material Culture Studies and has been the recipient of several other honors, including the Dianne Komminsk Scholarship.
Below are more works from the exhibition and some information provided by the artists and the museum.
Paintings by Nasir Young
Nasir Young (B.1995, Philadelphia,Pa) received his BFA from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art in 2021; and is currently a MFA candidate at the University of Delaware(2026). Young is currently represented by Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia and had his first two solo shows at the gallery. He has had a multitude of group shows along the east coast. Awards he has received range from was The Raymond D. & Estelle Rubens Travel Scholarship; two illuminate arts grants; an Elizabeth Greenshields grant; and was the second-place winner of the Philadelphia Sketch Club 158th exhibition of small oils. Young was an artist in residence at Davinci Art Alliance Resident; Delaware Contemporary and upland Vermont. Nasir’s primary source of imagery is the everyday scenes of urban inner city life influenced by the shared visual language between places.
Photo Collage work by Ryan Dittmar
Ryan Dittmar is a photographer currently collaging images onto metal forms. His work focuses on memory and what happens to it when it is lost. Dittmar first started with photography in his undergraduate studies at SUNY Oneonta. He examines the ties that photographs have to memory, examining what happens over time when memory fades but the image remains.
Through the process of photography and collage, I collect memories with the camera and re-work the memories with my exacto knife. Steel sheets become the settings for these new scenes to exist. They represent a place in my mind, an open area in which memories are allowed to be reconstructed on. At its most simplest ingredients it is steel, and photopaper. Together these forms create the liminal space that is what I call the void. The place in between presence and memory.
Paintings by Rebecca Giles
Rebecca Giles is a painter who earned her BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her paintings focus on photosynthesis and plant cellular structures. She is especially interested in artificial photosynthetic systems. Giles is inspired by microscopic plant life. She has a light microscope in her art studio, and she paints pictures of what she sees through her microscope. She uses her microscope as an art tool to investigate light and color. Giles wants viewers to experience a feeling of overwhelming awe at the incredible vastness of the miniature worlds found within nature. She calls this feeling of awe the microscopic sublime.
Sculptures by Tim Carr
Tim Carr earned his BFA with a concentration in ceramics from Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in 2024. He is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Delaware. Much of his practice centers on utilitarian ware, which he expands to engage with personal and conceptual themes, using clay as a metaphor for culture, folklore, and narrative storytelling. Throughout a decade of working with ceramics, his artistic journey began in the communal studios of the Chester County Art Association, where he first developed foundational skills in the medium. His early years at Alfred University deepened his fascination with functional tableware and refined his approach to utilitarian ceramics, with a particular focus on mastering wheel throwing.
Paintings by Alyssa Pirolli
Alyssa Pirolli is a visual artist from New Jersey and is currently an MFA Candidate at the University of Delaware. She attended private art lessons with artist Rebecca Tait at the Studio of Glenn Gables in Laurel Springs, NJ before continuing her training in Philadelphia. Pirolli received her BA from Chestnut Hill College and a Certificate from the Advanced Fine Art Program at Studio Incamminati. Her work is focused on exploring ‘the self’ and the human condition, primarily through portraiture. Community, especially the one she has come to know while pursuing her studies in Delaware, has become a driving force in her current body of work.
Sculpture by Arizol Mendoza
Arizol Mendoza (she/her/hers) is a Mexican-American sculptural ceramic artist born in New Jersey, USA. She obtained her B.A. in Art in 2018 from Rutgers University with a Minor in Psychology and is a current MFA candidate at the University of Delaware (2026). Mendoza began her ceramics career in 2015 while studying at Raritan Valley Community College (Branchburg, NJ). Originally concentrating in Graphic Design, she discovered that the plasticity and physicality of clay— combined with her existing interest in abstract forms opened a door to exploring ceramics as a medium for translating her visions into tactile, three-dimensional forms. Her earlier works explored personal narratives and storytelling through organic forms.
Constellations of Belonging unfolds within a moment shaped by surveillance, bodily regulation, and persistent demands that Black women be legible, visible and consumable. The body is monitored, narrated, disciplined, and asked to explain its own presence.
This exhibition considers how artists tend to their inner world under these conditions. Interiority is approached as a political and ethical practice—a site of care, imagination, and endurance beyond public demand. The exhibition takes its structure from constellations: provisional patterns drawn across distance. Belonging, here, is composed across difference, pressure,and time.
Within the gallery, this idea appears through light and weight. Darker works, anchored at a concentrated point within the gallery, function as repositories—holding what has become too heavy, too charged, or too historically burdened to remain invisible. In doing so, they allow other forms within the space to move with greater restraint and quiet, unencumbered by what has already been borne.
This distribution frames fragmentation as strategy. The body, like a constellation, is extended across multiple sites as a means of protection and care. What is held in one place reshapes what becomes possible in another.
Constellations of Belonging invites viewers to consider belonging as a continual practice –made and remade in relation, sustained through imagination, and carried collectively rather than alone.
Work by Mel Rosen (sculpture) and Stass Shpanin (mural, video, and paintings)
Detail from Stass Shpanin’s “Dance of Birth” animated video
Ceramic sculptures by Mel Rosen
Paintings by Stass Shpanin
The Delaware Contemporary is currently showing three exhibitions as part of its 2025 Biennial Art + AI programming. This post covers two of them, the third is here.
In an age when reality itself feels unstable—filtered through algorithms, fragmented by digital archives, and refracted through competing narratives—artists are increasingly turning to the tools of fiction and speculation not to obscure the truth, but to question how we construct it. Construct | Disrupt brings together the work of Mel Rosen, Sol Kim, Stass Shpanin, and Mark Burchick, four artists who use artificial intelligence, language, and archival material to explore the porous boundaries between perception, memory, and belief.
Across diverse practices—from ceramics, drawing, and painting to video, installation, and text—these artists engage with AI not as a replacement for the hand, but as a provocateur, a co-conspirator, and a mirror to the human imagination. Rather than seeking resolution or certainty, their works open up space for doubt, complexity, and contradiction.
Together, the artists in Construct | Disrupt invite us to consider how we construct meaning in a world where the archive is no longer fixed and where the image can be endlessly generated. The work of these artists does not offer answers, but rather asks: What do we trust? What do we remember? And how do we decide what is worth believing?
About the two artists pictured above, from the museum-
Stass Shpanin engages history as a space of imaginative reconstruction. Working with visual fragments from American folk traditions and immigrant archives, he uses AI to distort and reconfigure the past, generating speculative images that blend glitch, myth, and memory. His paintings and drawings present broken, layered timelines where visual language is both preserved and interrupted. Rather than restoring a singular truth, Shpanin’s work embraces the possibility of many coexisting histories—ones shaped as much by fantasy as by fact, as much by the digital as the ancestral.
Mel Rosen’s practice draws from archaeology, natural history, and personal memory to create objects and images that feel both ancient and otherworldly. Her use of AI image generation allows her to iterate quickly, mutating prompts based on her own drawings and a mental library of organic and cultural references—from Pompeian frescoes and fossils to barnacles and talismans. The resulting images feed back into her ceramics and drawings, where mythic forms and geometric distortions coexist in a suspended cosmology. Rosen’s work suggests that artifacts—whether material or digital—are always evolving, reshaped by time, environment, and interpretation.
Still from the video “Person Enough” by Sol Kim
Sol Kim (video still above) approaches language as a material form, using words to subtly disrupt social and technological systems. Her works often begin with a textual prompt—an instruction, label, or survey—that gives rise to absurd, humorous, or quietly unsettling performances. In The Cookiest Cookie, cookies are judged and destroyed by AI based on their perceived “cookie-ness,” while in Person Enough?, performers attempt to become more legibly “human” to computer vision systems. Through these gestures, Kim reveals the tensions between human nuance and machine classification, exposing the strange logic that governs our interactions with technology—and with one another.
Mark Burchick Installation
Images from Mark Burchick’s “Felt Presence”
Mark Burchick’s Felt Presence explores the intersection of faith, media, and artificial intelligence through the lens of Catholic mysticism. Drawing on archival photographs from the 1917 “Miracle of the Sun” in Fatima, Portugal, Burchick trains AI models to generate photorealistic images of miracles that were never captured on film. Presented alongside historical documentation and witness testimony, these fabricated scenes invite viewers to question the boundaries between belief, evidence, and visual truth—highlighting the unseen technological, institutional, and spiritual forces that shape our perception of reality.
In NOO Icons, Burchick expands this inquiry through an immersive video installation framed like a reliquary. A five-minute rear-projected loop, trained on over 100 images of stained glass Rose Windows, morphs into abstract color fields via AI animation. At its center is a 3D-printed altar piece generated using DreamFusion, a text-to-3D tool prompted to create a “solar monstrance.” The resulting object—gold-finished, internally lit, and housing Lithium batteries—evokes both the Communion host and a technological relic. As Kate Crawford notes in Atlas of AI, Lithium is a sacred yet finite resource driving modern AI. By encasing it in plastic and low-res form, Burchick critiques the planned obsolescence and ecological cost of our AI-powered age, reframing divine presence through the lens of material decay.
The works covering this exhibition theme approach AI not as a neutral instrument, but as a complex cultural system—one that reflects, amplifies, and at times distorts the values of its makers. Through the intersecting strategies of critique, reimagination, and bias exposure, Danielle Glovin, Stephanie Dinkins, and Leah Modigliani probe the systems—algorithmic, archival, social—that dictate what is preserved, who is recognized, and how knowledge circulates.
Together, these artists ask urgent questions: Who trains the algorithm? Whose histories are encoded, and whose are left out? What does it mean to build an intelligence—and who is it built for? In doing so, they model a critical engagement with AI, one that challenges default narratives, centers marginalized perspectives, and opens up space for new possibilities. Their practices call us to reconsider what it means to know, to remember, and to be recognized in a world increasingly shaped by invisible systems of intelligence.
Stephanie Dinkins’ interactive sculpture “Not The Only One (N’TOO)“
Stephanie Dinkins’ “Conversations with Bina48” (back wall) and Leah Modigliani’s AI generated letters for “Cultural Capital”
From Danielle Glovin’s series “Future Generations”
About the artists’ work pictured above-
Stephanie Dinkins’ Not The Only One (N’TOO) and Conversations with Bina48 extend this inquiry into the realm of relational AI, specifically that of minority groups in the tech sector. In N’TOO, an interactive sculpture gives voice to the oral histories of three generations of Black women, creating an AI entity intentionally designed, trained, and aligned with their values and lived experiences. It is a poignant reversal: instead of AI extracting meaning from biased data sets, Dinkins encodes her AI, reorienting the goals of intelligence design toward inclusivity and equal representation.
In Conversations with Bina48, Dinkins engages in an evolving dialogue with one of the world’s most advanced humanoid robots- probing the limits of kinship, consciousness, and identity. The recorded exchanges navigate tensions between human and machine, emotion and algorithm, intimacy and abstraction—underscoring the urgency of developing AI systems coded to reflect the full richness and diversity of human stories, cultures, and embodied experiences.
Leah Modigliani’s Cultural Capital offers a satirical yet incisive intervention into the circuits of artistic legitimacy. Through a fictional archive of AI-generated letters of recommendation and rejection—authored in the mimicked voices of historical critics and curators—Modigliani reveals how the rhetoric of value and genius in the art world is both constructed and recursively reinforced. The project uses generative tools to lay bare the biases embedded in cultural gatekeeping, drawing attention to the ways AI might amplify inherited hierarchies under the guise of neutrality.
Danielle Glovin’s Future Generations presents AI-generated reinterpretations of inherited family photographs, exposing the mechanics of machine vision and the flattening effects of automated classification. By transposing Midjourney text outputs onto her photographs, Glovin literalizes the collision between personal history and digital taxonomy. The result is a visual language at once familiar and estranged—where nostalgia meets simulation, and memory is rewritten through the aesthetics of machine learning.
Below are a selection of works from the artists and their statements about their work.
Moones Zeydabadi
Moones Zeydabadi
I make drawings and paintings depicting human and nonhuman figures in scenes of intimate encounter with each other and their environments. These narratives draw from deeply personal experiences which embody a more universal experience of being. I weave together fragments of recollection, imagined environments, and symbolic gestures to visually represent the complexity of identity and the way it shifts and fractures into new territories as one journeys through life.
My practice explores the liminal territory in which identity, memory and legacy seep through our collective subconsciousness. Through my interest in casting light on overlooked or forgotten stories, I infuse them with living qualities and complex non-linear narrative paths, I model a new, broader, and alternative space of belonging.
Foreground sculptures by Priya Dave
Detail from the interior of one sculpture by Priya Dave
Priya Dave
As an Indian, my art spectrum seeks to disrupt the cycle of disempowerment by integrating self-studied neuroscience research to explore the microbiology of the mind affected by culturally restrictive and arbitrary rules. The societal norms often resulted in mental health challenges, including depression and self-doubt, which left many struggling to trust their judgment or make decisions. Through my work, I strive to create immersive environments that map the brain’s physiological structure, fostering public engagement and raising awareness about mental health through a scientific and artistic lens.
My artistic practice encompasses various mediums, including painting, drawing, printmaking, immersive and video installations, and multi-sensorial experiences. Drawing from my Indian heritage, l often incorporate culturally and historically significant materials like kumkum, fabrics, and spices. These elements are deeply rooted in tradition and carry themes of memory, and identity. By transforming these materials into multisensory artworks, I reimagine their traditional meanings and bring them into contemporary conversations.
Through this fusion of culture and neuroscience, I create spaces that stimulate multiple senses, including sight, touch, sound, smell, and proprioception, encouraging deeper introspection. My work seeks to bridge the gap between personal experience and universal understanding, addressing the amalgamation of mental health, identity, and sensory perception. It is a reflection of my commitment to exploring how art can transcend cultural boundaries and inspire meaningful connections while fostering mental well- being and self-awareness.
Paintings by Abigail Dudley
Abigail Dudley
My paintings celebrate the singularity of perception and the way it entangles how one perceives the world. I am captivated by the slow build-up of forms and the subtle shifts in color that allow me to infuse a soft atmosphere of memory and temporal transitions into my paintings. My work is connected by my search for meaningful encounters with my surroundings through the act of painting, and a search to find surprising moments in life and painting.
My work focuses on the visual slippage between personal narrative and creating a space between harmony and contradictions of visual elements. Through this process, I tie together a space through intimate moments of perception. I aim to cultivate the idea of what it means to linger within a place and how that response can translate into a painting to act as a form of resistance to fast-looking in a culture that values a fast pace of life.
Work by Mikhail Shulga
Mikhail Shulga
My introspective nature is rooted in my identity as a Russian. Long winters and limited sunlight compel us to seek solace indoors, fostering a culture of deep spiritualism and reflection. Over generations, resilience has emerged from the hardships, shifting political regimes, and wars that define our history, further shaping this introspective tradition.
In my installations, I repurpose discarded electronics – objects imbued with nostalgia and unrealized promise. Once luxurious and cutting-edge, these items now lie abandoned on sidewalks. Many come from the ’90s and ’00s, my childhood years, when such technology symbolized hope for a better future. But that promise feels unfulfilled. While our lives have become more convenient, we are left grappling with existential questions: How does technology impact our sense of self and the meaning of human existence? Does the rapid advancement of technology amplify or diminish alienation, freedom, and authenticity? How do virtual spaces, social media, and digital communication shape our perceptions of reality, relationships, and identity? Perhaps the answers lie not in outside but in our own reflections. – “We don’t know what to do with other worlds. We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror.” Tarkovsky, A. (Director). (1972), Solaris [Film].
Work by Emmanuel Aboagye
Emmanuel Aboagye
My work uses the language of painting to explore ideas of visibility and invisibility as it relates to issues of identity, memory and belonging in a post-colonial context. I explore the complexities of identity, be it class, race and nationality. I give agency to memory not as a tool to investigate the past but a medium for evaluation in the present. I investigate the nuances and specificity of the idea of belonging.
Having been trained as a painter, I employ modern sensibilities in engaging the materials I work with, utilizing them as a lens to examine notions of liberation. I work with materials like, acrylic paint, oil paint, brush, linen, canvas, sequence, wrappers, frost sheet, junk mail flyers, patterned plastic bags and electric iron. I consider the histories and attitude of the materials I work with. They are not merely tools but collaborators in an emancipatory process.
I lean on improvisation as a radical approach for self-liberation in my practice. This allows for spontaneity, fluidity, and the unexpected, reflecting my commitment to embracing uncertainty and possibility.
Paintings by Arend Neyhouse
Arend Neyhouse
My work weaves historical notions of art into the tapestry of our contemporary world. Specifically, while dealing with elements of myth and fable, I tell stories in the space of suburban America. As a consumer of fiction, and spending the majority of my life in suburbia, I explore the synthesis of these elements. My work exists at the crossroads of fable and familiar.
With my figurative paintings, I continue to explore realist arts position in the contemporary art world. I think that through the exploration of the mundane parts of our daily lives lies a time capsule for posterity – a captivating exploration of quietude transformed into an everlasting narrative.
My images exist in the in between. Moments before or after a great change. I am not trying to tell the whole story, but merely a single page, or even a single line; leaving whole worlds both before and after each image. A testament to the sense of sonder as the world churns around us.
Creating epic scenes through my technical approach and unwavering craftsmanship; humanity is laid bare. Through my art, I aspire to create not just paintings, but windows into the soul of our shared existence.
Head to the next page to see more of the artists from the show.
Take A Seat, at The Delaware Contemporary, presents three artists whose work focuses on aspects of domestic life. The sculptures in Adam Ledford‘s installation, and Debra Broz’s porcelain creations both explore items found around the house and encourage viewers to take a longer look beyond the initial familiarity. Sierra Montoya Barela‘s still life paintings, with their bright colors and unique compositions, balance out the exhibition.
From the museum-
The dinner table recalls memories of cuisine, traditions, faces. Many of these memories are not clearly outlined but are rather assembled together through the periphery of our experiences. At the edge are small details such as decor or furniture, all of which complement the feeling and evoke emotion that registers our memories of the moments. The settings themselves often define the sensibility of the dinner table. Working within and beyond these domestic settings, Sierra Montoya Barela, Debra Broz, and Adam Ledford each contribute their distinct techniques to a larger place setting, inviting visitors to reminisce on tables past and present.
Sierra Montoya Barela is a painter of modern-day still life, capturing the spaces we exist in, but specifically the life that exists alongside us. Barela’s use of perspective composes a portal of access, one that feels like a peephole into the domestic items that capture our impression of a space. Each painting offers a scene that imbues surrealistic comfort. Plants that grow as we move around them, food that waits to be consumed, isolated hands or feet that are suggestively attached to a body. Barela’s spatial acuity combined with her use of color and pattern is multidimensional and lively, highlighting the surroundings that outline our lives.
Also questioning elements of space, Adam Ledford melds multiple mediums together to create installations that are dimensionally varied. The mixture of sparse line work directly applied on the wall with hand-crafted, two-dimensional ceramic vessels create a composite scene of domestic familiarity. Evocative of furniture found in our homes, the drawings support the elegant pots that rest on their implied surfaces. The nature of the entirely non-functional dioramas are deceivingly simple; their whimsical nature feeding into our sensibilities of space and depth, while subverting those perceptions into new spaces of disbelief.
Debra Broz also works within the composite. Broz alters found porcelain sculptures, seamlessly combining various pieces together to craft new creatures altogether. These small figurines are reminiscent of lovingly coveted trinkets that decorate our shelves and tables. Broz leans into our memories, appropriating the figurines’ normal representation and twisting them into something fantastical. As an actual conservator of porcelain goods, Broz’s technical skill leaves little room for error; enabling her audiences to jump into the sublime and become collectors of her newly constructed tchotchke.
ArtFields Community Mural by Jessica Diaz, Morgan Funkhouser, Olivia Cramer, Sam Ogden
Today’s flashback is to 2021 and a trip to Lake City, South Carolina to check out ArtFields. Started in 2013, the event is a wonderful example of how the arts can revitalize local economies.
So what is ArtFields? Every year for one week local businesses and galleries host works created by artists from the Southeastern United States for a competition with prizes totaling over $145,000. There are also two People’s Choice Awards which are determined by the attendees of the festival. The other awards are chosen by a panel of art professionals. Special events take place throughout the week and ArtFields Jr. offers a chance to see work by South Carolina students.
This year the event runs from April 25th to May 3rd, 2025. Even if you can’t make it, it’s worth taking a look here at this year’s artwork as well as from past years.
“There may be as few as only 7 red wolves remaining in the wild. These animals, like so many others, are disappearing in the shadows of our periphery. Their very existence depends on us, as did their extinction. Let us see them, acknowledge them, acknowledge that biodiversity and the balance of life matters. They are painted bright red in order to stand out and bring attention, no longer hidden away.”
Pictured above is The House on Church Street which in 2021 was used for several art installations including the two below. The first is New Histories: The Gadsden Farm Project by Michael Austin Diaz and Holly Hanessian.
About the installation-
New Histories: The Gadsden Farm Project is a socially engaged art project that explores the new history of the Gadsden County, FL. Once a thriving agriculturally center, the county is now the poorest in the state of Florida and the only county with a majority African American population. Working with a team from the State of Florida Archives, we were able to build relationships with over a dozen small farmers trying to address the area’s status as an economic and food desert. These farmers included first generation immigrants, fourth generation shade tobacco farmers, livestock farmers, and organic vegetable growers. The project is presented here through a dining table installation. Embedded speakers play a series of interviews with participating farmers, and each farmer is represented through an individually designed ceramic dinner. The table is set with live plants, seed bombs, and alfalfa hay.
The installation below, All Too Brief, was created by Gainesville, Florida artist Cindy Steiler.
From the ArtFields website about the installation-
All Too Brief was inspired by the movement of time and the unconscious process where our present moment is being continuously converted to memory. The elements comprising All Too Brief include a series of scrolls of cyanotype photographs and repurposed textiles wound on antique industrial weaving bobbins. Each scroll has a WW2-era laundry pin embossed with a number that corresponds to the written narrative of the images and textiles it holds. This piece is my attempt to document and archive people, places, and fleeting moments I hold dear. This piece became even more meaningful to me this year. My studio assistant at the time this piece was created has since passed.
Hillary Mushkin, “Groundwater”, 2024, Four-channel video installation, wall drawing, sound and “The River and the Grid”, 2024 Artist’s book: ink, watercolor, graphite, and glue on paper
Woven work by Sarah Rosalena
“Source”, 2023 by Lez Batz (Sandra de la Loza and Jess Gudiel)- Mixed media installation including seventy felt bat masks, baleen whale cardboard puppet, graphic mural and single- channel video
Currently on view at the Armory Center for the Arts is FromGround Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments. For the exhibition, part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the artists use a variety of materials, cultural practices, and traditions to explore aspects of our changing environment.
From the gallery-
What can seeds tell us about the future? Seeds and the plants that grow from them have provided us with food, clothing, shelter, and medicine for millennia. For just as long, humans have used sciences, technologies, myths, and art to peer into an imagined future. As we stare out toward our own future, one threatened by climate change and complicated by social unrest, the From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments exhibition looks to the seed—such as those seeds that lie at the bottom of the forest floor waiting for the cyclical fire season that promotes new growth and diversity to sprout—for inspiration and guidance on how to navigate current and coming hostile environments.
From the Ground Up presents works by 16 contemporary artists and artist teams who explore diverse technologies, histories of contested spaces, and traditional understandings of nature as they imagine alternative, sustainable futures. Organized for the Armory by curator Irene Georgia Tsatsos, the exhibition bridges familiar distinctions between art and science while exploring practices and traditions that predate contemporary understandings of those disciplines. In this exhibition, artworks, knowledge traditions, and histories converge in space and across time.
Below are a few additional selections and information on the work from the gallery-
Nikesha Breeze, “Stages of Tectonic Blackness: Blackdom”, 2021, Dual-channel video with sound
Nikesha Breeze (they/them) is a direct descendant of Blackdom, a homesteading community founded by thirteen African Americans near Roswell, New Mexico in 1903 that existed until about 1930. This video portrays a site-specific, collaborative dance ritual that honors the landscape and grieves the transgressions against Black and Indigenous communities at Blackdom.
Enid Baxter Ryce with Luis Camara, “Devil’s Half Acre Tarot”, 2024, Hand-processed botanical pigments on paper
Dried plants such as indigo and woad, handmade books and maps, tarot cards and runes, and glass jars of plant-based pigments are among many tools of early scientific exploration and pre-scientific divination. Enid Baxter Ryce (she/her) has assembled these elements of medieval science into a contemporary witch’s office, adorned with fabrics painted with inks and dyes made from plants she grew from seed.
In Future Kin, Aroussiak Gabriellian (she/her) connects a composting ritual to the life cycles of humans, the biome in our digestive tracts, and the bacterial, fungal, and animal life that emerges from decomposing organic matter. Undulating hands gently caress composted soil, suggesting human engagement, empathy, and awareness of ecological interconnectedness.
iris yirei hu, “mud song dream sequence”, 2024, Video and rammed earth; animation by Shoop Rozario
iris virei hu (she/her) uses diverse media to share her journeys with all living beings, whom she understands to be inextricably linked. Her practice is rooted in “collaborative optimism,” in which trauma can inform healing, solidarity, creativity, and liberating futures for folks who are Indigenous, Black, and people of color.
Indigenous cosmology recognizes trees as human relatives. Olivia Chumacero (Rarámuri, she/her) offers a portrait of an oak downed by wind and rain, yet alive with a lush canopy and deep roots. She compares the tree’s resilience to that of Indigenous peoples, whose lines of existence have been disrupted yet not destroyed. Following this exhibition, the piece – which is an offering to seeds – will be buried in the Sequoyah National Forest.
This exhibition closes Sunday, 2/23/25. The gallery is open Fridays 2-6 PM Saturdays and Sundays 1-5 PM.
“The real phenomenon of loss is both the inventory of what no longer exists and the impossible measure of what survives.” —Canisia Lubrin
What does the fugitive offer to sites of ruins? Is it a hum, a murmur, a cry, a shadow, a haunting, a poem, a memory, a scene, a loved one, a vessel, a movement, a gathering?
Fugitivity routes and unroutes our understanding of topographic terrains created through the unfolding of displacement, relocation, and exile. In the wake of migratory catastrophes, ruins are the aftermath of loss and devastation, leaving behind vestigial remnants and residuals. Reaching for traces, illegibility, and livability, the fugitive attempts to depict and texture multiple lifeworlds within ruins marked in loss and devastation. Gesturing towards the specter, how might placing what happens within sites of ruins —the permeable, usable, corporeal, and inhabitable—at the heart of our critiques and interventions enliven our imaginative possibilities?
Ruins present a set of spatial, material, visual, and psychic dimensions of un/being and becoming, as well as modes of fugitive resistance and expression. Tending to the juxtaposition of being unplaced, we are what we lose focuses on the provoking void that ruins leave behind and expresses spatial, narrative, and material practices actively and painstakingly situated in the hold of the catastrophes as means of reworlding and unworlding towards livable possibilities.
Partaking in worlding decomposition, Zalika Azim, Suneil Sanzgiri, Azza El Siddique, and Chau Nguyen present visual, narrative, and sonic performances that desire and action towards the otherly present meaning and aliveness by uncomposing time and working with the permeability of the artistic mediums. By engaging with the barely perceptible imaginations, unplaced yearnings, and tactile and vulnerable terrains, the artists orient toward spectral terrains that suture, resist, and refuse the knowability of the fugitive. Viewers will reflect on the histories of ruins haunting our contemporary sites and their capacity to mutate to make complicated ways of knowing, feeling, and seeing the world.
More information on Suneil Sanzgiri’s video installation, pictured above, from his website–
How do we live through and narrate moments of revolution and revolt, and how do we understand these experiences across time and distance? Using imaging technologies to meditate on what it means to witness from afar, Suneil Sanzgiri explores the complexities of anti-colonialism, nationalism, and diasporic identity. His work is inspired by his family’s legacy of resistance in Goa, India, an area under Portuguese occupation for over 450 years until its independence in 1961. Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?), the artist’s newest two-channel video installation, combines archival footage, animation, interviews, and a script written by poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem. The film tells the stories of the mutual struggle in India and Africa against Portuguese colonialism, highlighting the solidarity that developed between the two continents during the 1960s and 1970s.
Brian Rochefort’s ceramic sculptures for Staring at the Moon at Sean Kelly gallery are an incredible mix of textures and colors. Based on his travels to several natural environments around the world, the work combines the familiar with the unusual to form fascinating results.
From the gallery-
Brian Rochefort’s mixed-media sculptures incorporate a variety of different textures, surfaces and colors to create rich, otherworldly forms. Referencing his travels to some of the most remote parts of the planet, such as the Amazon Rainforest, the Galápagos Islands, and the Ngorongoro Crater, in Tanzania, he internalizes and translates his experiences in these secluded, ancient landscapes into potent sculptural forms.
Rochefort’s sculptures are built up in a unique process of layering, wherein the initial form undergoes multiple firings. Between each firing, he airbrushes the works and applies glazes, many of which he has developed himself through extensive experimentation. This process pushes the technical limits of ceramics in pursuit of evocative, otherworldly new forms. As he states, “Some of the most successful pieces that I’ve done in the past have been works that I’ve built up too fast… but somehow I’ve managed to save the form, and it turns into a different monster.” He works intuitively to build a composition, not unlike an abstract painter, and cites artists such as Albert Oehlen, Joan Mitchell, Franz West, and even photographer Aaron Siskind as influences for their daring deployment of color and texture. His virtuosic control of his medium is tempered by the element of chance inherent to the process of firing the sculpture. In this way, the completed works are the result of a dynamic interplay between his highly developed technique, the distinctive character of each sculpture, and ultimately chance.
Rochefort is equally inspired by his travels to remote and untouched ecosystems, such as barrier reefs and rainforests. A vital form of inspiration for him, the rare and vibrant natural forms found in such locations are apparent in the works. His intent, however, is not to directly represent the landscapes that he visits, a task he describes as “nearly impossible to do.” The sculptures take on the formal qualities of the landscapes through an almost volcanic layering of form upon form, color upon color, and texture upon texture, ultimately blooming into vivid, texturally sumptuous works. His larger freestanding works, which he refers to as Craters, evoke the fundamental quality of his sculptures: a powerful moment of contact with something deeply elemental and otherworldly.
The gallery also posted the video below where he discusses the work.
