ARTISTS
Dolores Furtado is a sculptor who creates work that focuses on materiality. She uses technical research and experimentation to create forms that expose the unique qualities of her materials and views her sculptures as the documentation of process and action. Working with formlessness, the material is exposed in a raw naked way: matter becomes body. The works originate from basic shapes, roughly manipulated, so that their angles and edges disappear. The initial geometry is lost in an organic deformity. These sculptures highlight Furtado’s process, through tactile marks, scratches, and object-based prints.
Dolores Furtado (b.1977, Buenos Aires, Argentina) lives and works in New York. Recent shows include Ultimate Nature , The Clemente Soto Cultural Center, New York (2017); 4th AIM Biennial , Bronx Museum of the Arts (2017); “ City Limits: Inside, Above, Within”, El Barrio’s ArtSpace PS109, New York (2017); Sinister Feminism , A.I.R. Gallery Biennial , A.I.R Gallery, Brooklyn (2017); Epsilon, abstracciones descentradas, MACBA, Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires (2016); Governors Island Art Fair (2015 and 2016); Arcos de Conexión , Museum of Contemporary Art of Bahía Blanca, Argentina ( 2014); Una persistente forma de estar en el mundo, Casa de la Cultura del Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2014); among others.
Kris Grey is a State College based gender-queer artist whose cultural work includes curatorial projects, performance, writing, and studio production. The series of ceramics on view in Human Expectations II, use the casting process to multiply interchangeable parts from a mold. The cast and altered porcelain pieces are hybrid, sculptural, forms that reference body and organ, tool and toy. Interrogating the economy and connotations of gendered objects and the relationships between gender and power, these works produce an aesthetic of cultural critique and potential for play and joy, questioning why we use things, why we don’t use things, and how we act.
Grey is a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in the School of Visual Arts at Penn State. Grey earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Ohio University. They perform, teach, and exhibit work internationally. In addition to their individual practice, Grey collaborates with Maya Ciarrocchi under the moniker Gender/Power. Gender/Power has been awarded a Baryshnikov Art Center residency, a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency, a Franklin Furnace grant, and a MAP Fund Grant. Grey's writing has been published in print and on the web for Huffington Post and Original Plumbing. Their latest writing, Trans*feminism: fragmenting and re-reading the history of art through a trans* perspective, written in collaboration with Jennie Klein, was published in Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories.
O’Brien’s highly physical practice, while not categorized by any one artistic style or medium, is characterized by a kinetic use of the body and materials. Mimicking the spontaneous processes of the Surrealists or psychedelia, these energetic, vibrant shapes are the formal and conceptual starting point for all of his work. Connecting to a range of cultural references, his ceramics, which are formed and glazed with vivid, bold colors, look like ethnographic objects of the ancient past and “face-jugs” reminiscent of those of the Antebellum American South. Idiosyncratic and exuberant forms are born out of an improvised and intuitive studio practice, rich in material experimentation. Inspired by Modernism, as well as the history of material usage of Outsider Art, O’Brien’s multidisciplinary practice is a search for identity and genuine expression through material and process.
William J. O’Brien was born in 1975 in Eastlake, Ohio. He graduated from Loyola University Chicago in 1997 with a BA in Studio Art, continuing his education at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received his MFA in Fiber and Material Studies in 2005. The artist’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Clinic, Ohio; Miami Art Museum, Florida; and The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois. O’Brien has exhibited at The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago (2011) and The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas (2012). The artist’s first major survey exhibition, curated by Naomi Beckwith, was in January 2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The artist lives and works in Chicago.
Subtle set ups to jokes, storing potential “ha-has”, Paek’s poodles and figures are part of a practice that includes animation, illustration, and sculpture. From her series Unbecoming and Poodlings, these works are improvised and drawn in space with fresh, animate force. Like the storylines they may be part of, they are setup to perhaps cause a smirk, without any real action taking place. Paek uses this potential to construct narratives on the precipice of the familiar and strange; to explore grief and hope with humor.
Eun-Ha Paek was born in Seoul, Korea. She received a BFA in Film/Animation/Video from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her animated films have screened in the Guggenheim Museum, Sundance Film Festival, and venues internationally. Grants and awards include the Windgate Scholarship and Rudy Autio Grant from the Archie Bray Foundation, a Travel and Study Grant from The Jerome Foundation and the Anna Siok Award from Greenwich House Pottery. Her work has received mentions in The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly and G4 Tech TV. She has been a guest lecturer at Rhode Island School of Design, Fashion Institute of Technology, Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, Colorado State University and a visiting critic at Maryland Institute College of Art. She is currently part-time faculty at Parsons School of Design.
Cropped bodies, in respite, absent of parts yet simultaneously present, Zuckerman’s figurative works are an intimate scale- much smaller than actual size yet large enough to be held with two arms. Made as a response to grief, the artist calls forward memory to reconstruct what has passed. Using emotional and muscle recollection to piece together a still scene, their specificity, their personhood also holds an ambiguity. Self-portraits of the artist’s body, feet and extremities become elongated and exceedingly small as they trace away from the core of the torso. Expressing impacts of her mother’s Alzheimer’s on her, they consider where knowledge, feelings, and intentions locate, moving from the brain and head, heart and torso, to the gut and belly, to the legs and feet.
Lilly Zuckerman is originally from Pittsburgh and grew up in rural Greensburg, PA. Zuckerman completed her MFA in ceramics from the University of Colorado in 2017. In 2010, Zuckerman received her BFA in Ceramics with an Art History minor from The Pennsylvania State University. Zuckerman’s work has been made possible by residencies at The Archie Bray Foundation, The Anderson Ranch Arts Center, The Clay Studio of Missoula, and The Clay Studio in Philadelphia. She has exhibited nationally at Trax Gallery in California, The Clay Studio in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, The Archie Bray Foundation in Montana, The Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, The Clay Arts Center in New York, and in the ArtStream Nomadic Gallery. Zuckerman is an artist and art educator currently living in New Haven, Connecticut.