Delaware Art Shows- “Reclaim/ Reframe: Challenging the Algorithmic Gaze” at The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film, Wilmington
Dec 182025
 

Portraits by Carrie Ann Baade

Reclaim | Reframe: Datasets and Cultural Visibility, is one of three exhibitions that make up The Delaware Contemporary’s 2025 Biennial- Art + AI. The timely show features work by Carrie Ann Baade, Tyanna Buie, Blažo Kovačević, and Tara Youngborg.

From the museum–

Through AI and computational technologies, artists Carrie Ann Baade, Tyanna Buie, Blažo Kovačević, and Tara Youngborg construct layered narratives that reclaim overlooked and marginalized histories. In doing so, these artists unsettle dominant cultural and media frameworks that have long erased, distorted, or commodified lived experience. Exploring themes of identity, ancestry, and displacement, they use generative tools as critical instruments to question, expose, and reconfigure the archival and institutional biases embedded in history, culture, and the environment. From ancestral reclamation and speculative futures to immersive storytelling and data-driven environmental translations, their work advances a reimagining of social justice through the lens of artificial intelligence.

Together, these artists offer a complex portrait of making in the age of AI, revealing how tools shaped by those in power can both perpetuate bias and enable resistance. Their work asks: Who shapes the cultural record? When an AI model “remembers,” whose truth is it repeating? How can we reclaim agency within these systems (built on our collective labor)?

The images at the beginning of this post are from Carrie Anne Baade’s series, Birthplace. Her mixed media portraits of her ancestors, created with the help of AI, present a fascinating look at the stories of several women from early in American history.

From Baade’s statement about the work-

Birthplace is a visual exploration of personal ancestry, delving into the lives of women from colonial Louisiana between 1690 and 1750. Through oil painting, collage, and Al-generated imagery, I reconstruct the presence of these women-figures shaped by French colonial rule, Indigenous displacement, and Romani migration-whose stories have been largely absent from recorded history. Employing a methodology that blends archival research with imaginative storytelling, I create portraits that serve as visual hypotheses-acts of artistic and ancestral repair. The compositions incorporate antique lace, colonial maps, domestic fabrics, and found objects, mirroring the intertwined textures of lineage, migration, and identity. Al-generated image blending aids in synthesizing historically plausible references, speculating on the appearance and presence of women who were never visually recorded.

This project is not about one family, but a shared American inheritance. It reveals the complexity of identity in a land shaped by colonization, migration, and erasure. In rematriating these women to history, Birthplace offers viewers a visual counter-history-one rooted in survival, interconnection, and the enduring power of maternal lineage.

Pictured below are works from the other artists in the exhibition along with information provided by the museum.

Tara Youngborg examines how institutional data and machine learning shape our understanding of land and environment. Using field research, environmental archives, and US Geological Survey datasets, her datastream translates waterflow data and topographic maps into immersive video installations that highlight the limitations of digital representation. By transforming statistics into layered, shifting media, Youngborg portrays landscapes as dynamic terrains of knowledge. Glitches and ruptures in the work expose gaps between digital abstraction and lived experience, prompting questions about algorithmic authority and what is lost when place is reduced to data.

Tara Youngborg’s installation

Tara Youngborg’s installation (detail)

In AR (Argumentative Reality) and Truck for Three Illegal Passengers, Blažo Kovačević uses augmented reality, 3D modeling, and game engine software to confront invasive state surveillance and the dehumanization of migrants. Using digitally enhanced X-ray images from European Border Patrol inspections, he reconstructs a 2015 tragedy in Serbia where 54 undocumented passengers died in a van crash. His works shift between detached aerial views and intimate interior scans, altering typical media frames into ethical engagement. Kovačević warns how AI-driven technologies can perpetuate oppression through automated surveillance, data collection, and erasure, urging reflection on the politics of visibility and mediated violence.

A still from Blažo Kovačević’s video

Tyanna Buie reconstructs erased family histories and reimagines Black identity through speculative Afro-Futurist frameworks. Using ChatGPT and DeepFake technology, she remixes images, sound, and text to create narratives where absence becomes presence. In The Guardians of Nyala, Buie overlays her own likeness onto eighteenth-century Dutch dignitary portraits, then collaborates with AI to imagine a family history untouched by colonization. Rooted in personal narrative and Black popular culture, her counter-archive elevates erased lives and transforms AI from a tool of replication into one of radical self-authorship.

Two of the portraits from Tyanna Buie’s “The Guardians of Nyala”

This exhibition closes 12/28/25.

Throwback- Delaware Art Shows- Nicole Parker at The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Delaware, Painting / Painters, Wilmington
Oct 232025
 

The paintings above by Nicole Parker were part of the exhibition, Phantasia, on view earlier this year at The Delaware Contemporary.

The artist’s statement about her work from her website-

I am a representational artist specializing in narrative and symbolic paintings and hand-pulled intaglio prints.  In my current body of work, I’m exploring the triangular relationship between my sense of self, my perception of what “home” means, and the physical spaces and environments that I’ve occupied throughout my life.  My imagery often involves structures, spaces and objects that represent a story or dream from a specific period in my life.  They are places and things that evoke strong emotions like love, loneliness, joy, or fear.  I’m often unable to physically visit or return to the things I’m rendering, so in the studio I work from memory and cobbled references.

Although memory is always unreliable and changing by nature, I’m interested in the potency of my own sensory memories, and the way that light, color and the smell of the air stick in my mind.  These concrete sensory ideas are always at the core of my practice.

Delaware Art Shows- “Bricolage: Artists & Accumulation” at The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Glasswork, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
Aug 212025
 

Painting by Kelly Irvine

Installation of sculptures by Allison Hudson

Work by Anna Guarneri

Each of the five artists in Bricolage: Artists and Accumulation, currently on view at The Delaware Contemporary, use their materials to express meaning through a layering process.

From the curators, Kasia J. Bunofsky and Leah Triplett-

“I have a very simple theory. I have always pretended that objects themselves formed a self-composition. My composition consisted of allowing them to compose themselves.” – Armand Pierre Fernandez (Arman) (November 17, 1928 – October 22, 2005)

When ‘assemblage’ first circulated as an art-historical term in the early twentieth century, it referred to the primarily formalist practice of joining tangible, often discarded or found, materials. Like a three-dimensional collage, assemblages made novel juxtapositions of individual components to create a whole artwork with its own impact. As the topography of the art world shifted mid-century, assemblage was often used to critique the post-war era’s burgeoning consumerism. Similarly, “accumulation” refers to a kind of assemblage that emphasizes materiality through the mass repetition of similar objects or forms. Accumulations lent themselves particularly well to expressing discontent with consumerism. They underscored the commodity’s necessity as a medium while maintaining the artist’s agency to reclaim meaning through the processes of recontextualization and repetition. As time persisted, assemblage continued to inspire and lend credibility to avant-garde contemporary movements. Even the new wave of ‘conceptual art’–a blatant rejection of materiality–was seen as an assemblage that forwent concrete objects to assemble ideas, language, or concepts. From installation art, to performance, to ‘relational aesthetics’, assemblage and accumulation helped pave the way for today’s contemporary art world and its many innovations.

Assemblage and accumulation emphasize the importance of each material element to the message of the completed work of art. This idea evokes a sense of collectivism; a metaphorical microcosm of material cooperation that might inspire a yearning to change our individualistic society, as art reminds us the whole cannot exist without the contributions of every one of its parts.

The artists and works featured in Bricolage: Artists and Accumulation reference the tradition of assemblage, accumulation, and their many corollaries; either through the performance held within their artistic process, their compilation of abstract concepts, or their passion to speak through material. They build, assemble, accumulate, gather, and collect. Using assemblage as both a method and technique, these artists engage assemblage as an action that is always in perpetual evolution of form. Be their medium drawing or sculpting, painting or installation-their material glass or found objects, acrylic or graphite- Anna Guarneri, Allison Hudson, Brynn Hurlstone, Kelly Irvine, and Emilio Maldonado, apply an iterative, intuitive approach to making, resulting in a bricolage.

This aesthetic- in which the whole is a sum of parts-demonstrates a depth of material knowledge. The works presented here require long looks to unfold and reveal their discrete components. Layering, stacking, blending, and amalgamating are processes and aesthetic devices that enable the viewer to experience the work in an instinctual way. Throughout these artists’ individual practices, an emphasis on transformation through collecting and comingling materials, media, and forms is paramount, with bricolage being a means for metamorphosis.

Below are additional works by the artists and information from the museum-

Allison Hudson

“My work explores the nature of cycles and the emergence of growth from decay. It’s tactile and fragile- a combination of unfired clay, wool, fabric, resin, and wax. Driven to manipulate raw materials into something new and unrecognizable, I enjoy the physicality of building, tearing apart, and mending together – striving to create work that is at once ethereal and visceral.”

Kelly Irvine

“My abstract color field paintings invite the viewer to step into a lush, translucent world of color. Drawn to the beauty of layered transparent hues from an early age, I use sheer color, overlapping forms, gestural brush work, organic forms, and repeating motifs that flow and intersect, resulting in delicious new hues and increased tonal depth. Contrast is important in my work as well; hard edges are in conversation with areas of soft gradation, while vibrant, neon hues pop against muted tints and natural, raw canvas.

I’m especially inspired by the canvas staining techniques and paintings of Helen Frankenthaler and Washington Color School artists Morris Louis and Kenneth Victor Young. I pair that inspiration with constant experimentation and manipulation of materials, developing new processes as a natural outcome.”

Anna Guarneri‘s work explores the possibilities of suggestive imagery and the devotional connotations of stained glass. She uses crude marks and associations to tap into early human experience, pulling from a range of sources – ancient art, architecture, dance history, and her own body. Colors in her work conjure poignant memories, turning drawn forms and glass structures into celebrations, memorials, or premonitions.

Guarneri’s latest body of work pulls from the visual world of postpartum life, incorporating imagery of bodily landscapes and interiors, and the various devices, accessories, and toys encountered during pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood.

Brynn Hurlstone

“In Time explores the process of healing from trauma, and the permanent transformation left behind once that process begins. Layers of broken safety glass are frozen within ice and slowly melt over a steel platform. The thaw allows for the release of contained breakage onto the foundation, where it rests in a slowly evaporating pool of water. Over time the water evaporates and the shattered glass may be swept away, but the foundational steel upon which the process took place will forever carry its traces.”

Emilio Maldonado

“I create art to explore personal narratives and navigate life through the material culture of capitalist America.
My work raises questions about social constructs, structural inequalities, and the dynamics of race and class. Through a multidisciplinary approach, I repurpose discarded objects as a means to reflect on memory, identity, and social conventions.”

This exhibition is on view until 8/24/25.

Delaware Art Shows- “Artist-In-Residence Cohort (ARC) 2025” at The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Design, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
Aug 212025
 

Work by Tracey Tse

The Delaware Contemporary currently has several shows on view for their summer series Radius. Several of these exhibitions include emerging artists including ARC 2025. The exhibition will close 8/24/25.

More from the museum-

The Artist-in-Residence Cohort (ARC) identifies and supports local emerging artists poised for careers as dedicated artists. This year, jurors Dr. Casey Smith and former ARC resident Shefon Taylor chose four regional artists: Geraldo Gonzalez, Oscar De Paz, Tracy Tse, and Lucy H. West. These artists have spent several months in intensive professional development seminars, formal and informal critiques, and one-on-one meetings with mentors to prepare for their culminating exhibition. This year, the ARC residents “came full circle” through mini-residencies at Art-O-Mat by the Wilmington Alliance. This extended their perspective on the creative needs and opportunities of Wilmington, Delaware. You are seeing the results of ten months of their experimentation, planning, and growth.

This year’s cohort pushed the envelope to develop their skills beyond what they came to the museum doing. Lucy H. West has incorporated sophisticated video editing, performance, and sculpture into a tracing of sensory experience. Oscar De Paz has refined his political commentary in his painting practice, deeply rooted in social revolution iconography. Geraldo Gonzalez increased his scale and output, documenting the legacy and daily role DART plays in his life. And Tracy Tse, with the help of a new loom, weaves plastic nets and tapestries. These artists grew through a new partnership with Wilmington Alliance, where they each spent one month in the Art-O-Mat studio space. Their time working with a view to mid-center city grounded their work in an even deeper Wilmington context.

Below are additional selections and the artists’ bios from the museum-

Tracy Tse– “I like this little life of mine. It’s not something amazing, and it’s not a tragedy. However, every day doing art is enough in my world.

I’m a first generation Chinese American who grew up in a family tailoring business. Like many family-run businesses, I started helping out at a young age where I picked up skills in mending and tailoring. Over the years I’m grown into the career as a contemporary artist, where I used my skills interconnectively to express myself.

In my current work, I have been incorporating plarn (yarn made from plastic) to construct large-scale sculptures that protrude from the wall. Each piece is completed through labor-intensive repetition of sewing, knitting, crocheting, weaving, braiding, and knotting techniques to sculpt. The use of a variety of techniques is then adopted and shaped to form a specific look that is derived from family, tradition, heritage, history, and childhood.

Manufactured goods go through many hands and iterations before becoming the final product. Every hand played a role by putting blood, sweat, and tears into the production. Honoring and paying homage to the human touch and the sentiments that are overlooked during the production process is important. My collection of depicts efforts laborers and craftsmen. Convey the message of what human touch means.”

Geraldo Gonzalez

“I am, first and foremost, a transit artist. I began working as an artist in the early 2000s. I first started taking photos for a homework assignment in middle school, which inspired me to start taking photographs of local transit systems. Public transit has always been an interest of mine. I regularly took the bus as a teenager going to and from school, then went out and got to know other transit routes within the greater Delaware valley, like SEPTA, PATCO, AMTRAK, MTA, NJT, and DTC. My passion for public transportation has led me to make thousands of artworks to encourage people to use and find the beauty in these local transportation systems. I am a self-taught multimedia artist, working in colored pencil, acrylic paint, oil paint, watercolor, photography, video and sculpture. My process is to project images that I take and find online and translate them into my artwork through tracing, then going back and adding color.

Issues surrounding transportation like road rage and gas inflation have inspired me to spread my message about public transportation. Outside of transit-related art, I also create self portraits that express my identity and feelings. My Puerto Rican culture influences my art, in my self portraits and expressive use of color.”

Oscar Eduardo De Paz

“My drawings, paintings, and books tie together the threads of my personal experiences and sociopolitical issues. I reflect on my personal experiences of poverty, discrimination, homelessness, immigration, and disruptions in my family and education to explore how these experiences engage with their historical and sociopolitical expressions and contexts, and shape who I am. My intent is to stimulate reflection, discussion, and examination of the impacts of sociopolitical institutions and systems on individuals, specifically vulnerable populations. My artistic process begins with writing personal narratives and poetry that become sources for me to interpret or amend into visual representations. Historical, sociological, and visual research provide further inspiration in the process of creating my work. Subjects and elements in my work often function as symbolic representations of the idea and emotions evoked by my written pieces. The writing is rarely literately translated into a visual representation, but instead through a process of association translated into figurative and metaphorical representations that contain subjects and elements laden with personal, cultural, spiritual, and mythological meanings.

Sometimes, the work stands alone visually. At other times, the work stands with the written text in a unity. It is the space between the text and image where the audience, both as viewer and reader, is invited to experience the themes of my work, and to contribute their insights.”

Lucy H. West investigates intimacy, mindfulness, incorporeal inner experiences, and understanding of the worlds we inhabit and cohabit. Using painting, installation, and most recently multi-sensory media, West seeks to push the boundaries between the artist and spectator by inviting the viewers to be involved in her work, transforming them into active collaborators.

Through participatory art projects, she is interested in eliciting social consciousness, playfulness, curiosity, experimentation, and introspection from her collaborators, creating avenues for her work to evolve and be defined by the community who engages.

West is a Philadelphia-based artist from Tokyo, Japan. She has exhibited and had works acquired in Philadelphia, New York, Tokyo, Rome, and Madrid. Her artwork has also been selected and acquired by the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Medicine.

Delaware Art Shows- Guise / Trickery- Ashley Suszczynski and Brian Richmond at The Delaware Contemporary

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Delaware, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
Aug 132025
 

The Delaware Contemporary currently has several exhibitions on view for their summer series Radius. Guise/Trickery, a two person exhibition curated by Erica Loustau and Moriah Berrouet, features a photographic series by Ashley Suszczynski (Guise), pictured above, and hyper-realistic recreations of discarded fast food packaging created by Brian Richmond (Trickery), pictured below.

From the museum about the Suszczynski-

Ashley Suszczynski is an award-winning photographer focused on capturing ancient traditions in the modern day. The photographs on exhibit include work from her series, Ancient Tradition in the Modern Day, which is an ongoing discovery of ancient pagan roots of masked traditions throughout the villages of the Iberian Peninsula. Ashley documents costumed villagers, unearthing the various cultural traditions and winter rites of the region. The masked festivals are designed to ward away evil spirits and welcome a fresh and healthy new year. Elaborate handmade costumes allow participants to step outside their everyday identities and engage in imaginative storytelling.  Whether the suits are made from silky goat hair, fur, mirrors, or feathers, the wearing of masks and costumes fosters a sense of liberation and communal celebration. The concept of guise plays a vital role in masked folk traditions and festivals, serving as a powerful tool for transformation. Ultimately, the guise in these traditions invites reflection on the nature of identity itself and challenges participants to explore the boundaries between reality and fantasy.

Ashley’s work has been seen in National Geographic, Photo District News, All About Photo and more. Her most recent exhibition, “Ancient Tradition in the Modern Day: Iberian Folklore and Maskarades” headlined the 2022 Barcelona Foto Biennale along with the 7th Biennial of Fine Art and Documentary Photography. The exhibit took the grand prize in the worldwide Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers.

About Brian Richmond and his work from the museum-

Brian Richmond creates hyper-realistic renditions of mass-produced packaging.  Adept in paper modelling and painting, Brian tricks the viewer into seeing “trash”.  His work addresses the pervasiveness of single-use packaging and the “highly manufactured refuse that permeates our daily lives and environments in such a powerful way that we hardly notice it anymore”. By blurring the lines between illusion and actuality, Brian exploits trickery to enrich the viewer’s experience, encouraging them to explore layers of meaning beyond the surface.  Each unique artwork deceives the eye and makes us question its reason for being in a museum context.  The trickery has drawn us in only to remind us that the trick is actually on us.  We are the ones creating the real debris that litters our cities and towns.

Brian William Richmond is a visual artist from Pennsylvania who makes three-dimensional paintings of trash. Brian graduated from the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design with a BFA in 2001. In 2008, he was awarded the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship. In 2012, he was awarded the West Collects acquisition prize. He previously exhibited at Pulse Art Fair, Miami in 2012 as part of The West Collection’s “THIS END UP” installation. In 2013, Richmond was one of five artists who were selected by Jonathan Ferrara Gallery to participate in a group exhibition entitled “Philadelphia”, where Richmond’s mass-produced packaging series was exhibited. In 2016, he was awarded the Fleisher Wind Challenge from Fleisher Art Memorial. Brian has also been a songwriter/composer for many years now, and his current project with his long-term collaborator Nick Hardy is the Bell Harmers. Brian is currently working on his next collection of paintings, which he plans to release in the fall of 2024. Brian works and resides in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

This exhibition closes 8/24/25.

Flashback- Delaware Art Shows- Jennifer Small at the Delaware Contemporary and the Mezzanine Gallery in Wilmington

 Architecture, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Painting / Painters, Wilmington
Jul 182025
 

“Arches Symbolize Growth”, 2024, Acrylic and spray paint on canvas

“Pulse: Contemporary Meets Classical”, 2023, Acrylic and spray paint on canvas

Over this past winter Delaware artist Jennifer Small had two solo exhibitions in Wilmington- Walking in the City at The Delaware Division of the Arts’ Mezzanine Gallery and Facades and Rooftops at The Delaware Contemporary.

For Walking in the City, the paintings (pictured above) capture elements from a single day in Venice, Italy. In Facades and Rooftops, works on paper and laser cut wood panels (a selection of which are pictured below) are based on homes and businesses she observed and photographed on neighborhood walks.

The works in both of these shows capture the fleeting nature of memory and observation, and the fragments that linger- juxtaposing these elements in unique ways.

Here’s what she says in her Artist Statement about the work (from her website)-

My art, initially abstract in appearance, records a journey of a day in the life—a practice that starts with documentation through the lens of a camera. I see my experiences through special goggles with the ability to transform banal spaces and objects into engaging formal elements that are pulled out of their environment and placed into my painting compositions strictly for their aesthetic significance. The process of cataloging my everyday leads to the solidification of my memories in a specific time and place and constant access to a breadth of inspiration for my paintings. New inspiration comes out of each new environment I experience whether as a resident or a visitor allowing the work to be an ever-evolving documentation of my days.

The observations I collect are combined into compositions through a process of drawing and collage where I am selecting and joining bits of each sighting to build abstract structures in imagined worlds displaying a combination of shallow and deep space. The work demonstrates loose, painterly applications juxtaposed with more rigid, hard-edge areas of the acrylic paint and spray paint that I use. While the palette is imagined, each painting is an archive of a time and place connected to a personal experience.

I want to challenge the viewer to see the work as personal yet universal. A compilation of my experiences, but also as a way to connect with abstract painting in a tangible way. I want to elevate the humble from unnoticed and small to colorful and grand by putting a spotlight on the unrecognized poetry of daily routine.

For more information, Small also recently joined fellow artist Kat Collins to discuss her process on the podcast The Artist is In.

Delaware Art Shows- 2025 University of Delaware Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition at The Delaware Contemporary

 Animation, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Fiber Arts, Illustration, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film, Wilmington
May 232025
 

Moones Zeydabadi, “Curtain’s Tale”, 2025

The Delaware Contemporary is currently showing The 2025 University of Delaware Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition. It’s an excellent chance to see what recent students have been creating.

The artists included: Abigail Dudley, Anna Freeman, Arend Neyhouse, Candy Fordjour Frimpong, Emmanuel Aboagye, Fuku Ito, Mikhail Shulga, Moones Zeydabadi, Priya Dave, Shoshi Rosenstein, Taylor Gordon, and Yoosef Mohamadi

This exhibition will be on view until 5/25/25.

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.

Delaware Art Shows- Mia Fabrizio at The Delaware Contemporary

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Furniture, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
May 222025
 

For Mia Fabrizio’s installation in the lobby of The Delaware Contemporary, Pull Up A Chair, she has created several sculptures that use domestic objects to explore a variety of social issues. It is part of the museum’s Winter/Spring three-part exhibition, Dinner Table.

From the museum-

Mia Fabrizio is an interdisciplinary artist creating mixed media portraits, freestanding sculptures and installations composed of building materials and domestic items. She carves away, mends, and cobbles together assemblages from a domestic landscape that is both nostalgic and full of pathos.

In these works, Fabrizio explores the power structures and cultural paradigms associated with, “having a seat at the table.” Fabrizio reveals how furniture conventions can grant power to the user. It is the “power to be seen, power to be heard, and power to contribute to the framing of a society” that Fabrizio aims to scrutinize. The chair sculptures become vessels for memories with details that reference labor, gender, and cultural constructs. Her multilayered constructions toggle between tearing apart and memorializing her personal experience. The assembly and material choices subvert the basic understood function of a “seat” and reveal illusions of functional space. She asserts that, “these seats are invitations in name only, token representations.”

Mama Liked the Roses links past to present by combining images and materials from Fabrizio family home with images collected from regions in Italy where her great grandparents had originated. The details within the piece reference labor, food, gender and religion.

And from the artist-

I am an interdisciplinary artist. Mixed media portraits, freestanding sculptures and installations are composed of building materials and domestic items. Multilayered concepts relating to identity and social constructs are presented through a variety of artistic mediums and processes. Consumed with hidden and exposed structure, my investigation of physical construction, cultural paradigms and their relationship, originates from the framework most familiar to me, the house in which I grew up. Contradictions within this space spark my desire to highlight the fluidity of perceived binaries, particularly those relating to feminine and masculine, public and private and modern and traditional.

Ascribing to the visual context of home as well as the ethos of homemade I paint, adhere, carve and chip away at plywood, drywall and paper. I vacillate between tearing apart and tenderly memorializing my personal experience, concurrently the work points outward to larger societal conversations around immigrant status, feminism, and queerness.

This exhibition closes 5/25/29.

Delaware Art Shows- “Take A Seat” at The Delaware Contemporary

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
May 222025
 

Work by Adam Ledford

Painting by Sierra Montoya Barela

Painting by Sierra Montoya Barela

Installation by Debra Broz

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.

This show is on view until 5/25/25.

 

Delaware Art Shows- Nicole Nikolich at The Delaware Contemporary

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Delaware, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
May 212025
 

The Delaware Contemporary is currently showing several exhibitions that reflect on the theme of the dinner table. In one room Nicole Nikolich has created the installation Can I Please Eat In The Computer Room Tonight? which includes an old Macintosh desktop computer surrounded by her colorful textile pieces. The work evokes the nostalgia of a childhood spent eager to be on the computer, even in its then limited capabilities.

From the museum about the installation-

The dinner table is a place of routine and tradition, the daily ritual of which can consist of eating, sharing, and storytelling. However, the dining room is not always the location for eating a meal. Food can be served on the sofa in front of the TV or outside under the stars, and in Nicole Nikolich’s experience, these special occasions were spent in her computer room. Seeking solace as a young teen, there was an excitement in experiencing space and time alone. Nikolich reclaims this memory, reflecting on nostalgic moments through her textile practice.

Nikolich’s artistic interests varied until she taught herself how to crochet; a medium that combined her intrinsic interest in color and texture. Based in Philadelphia, she was jointly inspired by street art and the ever-increasing yarn bombing movement and so took her developing techniques to her surroundings. These early experimentations eventually led to larger projects and commissions; enabling opportunities to further explore the medium on an increased scale. Her bright colors, varied textures, and whimsical designs explode on different surfaces and in all types of environments.

Can I Please Eat In The Computer Room Tonight? is a site-specific installation in response to Nikolich’s sensorial memories, her retelling of these early moments of youth. Combining both two and three-dimensional textiles, Nikolich inserts her audience into a youthful memory that is both individually personal and collectively reflective. The space is transformed by Nikolich’s signature experimental style and bold color, constructing a portal into a textile explosion. In doing so, the installation offers audiences an opportunity to reimagine their adolescent abandon; those remembrances in which routine breaks and adventure begins.

And from Nikolich-

Can I Please Eat In The Computer Room Tonight? explores the positive and transformative view of tech from a preteens perspective growing up in the early aughts. This installation is a memorial to this fever dream of a time period where you could only access the internet in a specifically designated computer room, often decorated in brown hues and overstuffed with knickknacks and office supplies. This space, an escape to another part of your life, often felt like an oasis to explore who you were becoming for the first time without the microscope and confinements of adults and societal expectations. Swapping sandboxes for CD-ROM games and mixed tapes. Inside jokes with friends in chat rooms and staying up until way too late messaging your crush in your own secret language. Taking selfies on the front facing camera and looking at yourself in a slightly different way for the first time. Learning about yourself and the world all from the glow of a little square box in the middle of a little square room.

This exhibition will close on 5/25/25.

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