between and within
Link: www.projectspace-efanyc.org/between-and-within
Role: Curator
Dates: June 25, 2022 – July 30, 2022
Artists: Mitsuko Brooks, Lionel Cruet, Zatara McIntyre, Emily Shanahan, Sara Shaoul, Jevijoe Vitug
between and within is a group exhibition featuring new works by the 2022 SHIFT Artists-in-Residence. The title of the exhibition refers to the ways that each of the six artists use methods of layering and compression in their practices to unveil new ways of understanding various histories, narratives, and personal stakes.
Using different approaches to layering, Brooks and McIntyre re-create visual representations of connection and communal healing in their large-scale paintings. Brooks paints enlarged versions of her own mail art—a personal and long-standing practice of sending handmade postcards to friends and family. While McIntyre paints nude femme figures who dance, sway, and touch in worlds celebrating tender self-acceptance and exploring the subjectivity of Black womanhood.
Shanahan and Cruet extract information from sources ranging from phone apps that track personal data to public images of global weather patterns. In a series of new abstract drawings, Shanahan reinterprets, flattens, and distills records from apps that track her own screen time, reproductive cycles, finances, and health. Cruet excavates a different kind of information, stacking aerial thermal images of earth's oceans to reveal rising temperatures and CO2 levels, ultimately emphasizing the dangerous effects of climate catastrophe.
In their installations, Shaoul and Vitug blur the boundaries of real and fake, destabilizing visitors via the partial or forgotten truths that their works present. Shaoul displays ephemera and set materials from the makings of an Italian film from the 1970’s—the particular glitches in materials pushing viewers to question the truth of this film’s existence. In a similar fashion Vitug’s paintings and sculptures share often-erased histories of Filipino-Americans, from the cannery workers of Seattle to the human zoos in Coney Island. The installation of these objects further reference the opposing ways that artifacts are exhibited in comparison to artworks.
between and within hones in on the nuanced methods used by the artists to digest and re-route information. Through varying methods of layering, this cohort creates new and expanded ways of looking, understanding, and depicting the often-slippery nature of truths and unfathomable realities. The six artists have shown immense grace and tenacity while continuing their practices in the context of an on-going pandemic and their works speak to the triumphs against such adversities.
