Falling Through ‘n’ Going After
Katya Grokhovsky, Sarah Nicole Snow Fuhrman, Sarah Lee, Aisling Hamrogue, Izabela Gola
Panel discussion at closing reception on April 26, 7:00PM
Participants: Katya Grokhovsky, Sarah Nicole Snow Fuhrman, Sarah Lee, Aisling Hamrogue, Izabela Gola, moderated by Coco Dolle
CO- | 1639 Centre Street, Brooklyn, NY 11385
Falling Through ‘n’ Going After redefines the relation between a landscape and the figure with a new eye on the grotesque and the surreal as methods. As witnessed in the works of Katya Grokhovsky, Sarah Nicole Fuhrman, Aisling Hamrogue, Sarah Lee, and Izabela Gola, the figure or its implied absence, rather than being a passive and submissive abject prop to the vastness of dominating overwhelming landscape, arrives as a contingency to the status quo, where the body redefines the monopoly of the accepted familiar, and inverts the direction of the gaze linking the subject and the object.
The exhibit is choreographed into two mirroring spaces which signify the dialectical relation between the observed outside landscape- the object of the gaze, and the inward psychological space which in the show narrative unfolds itself from the inside out.
Through performance, sculpture, painting, and video, the work of Katya Grokhovsky, what is defined as politically correct patriarchal constructs of contemporary womanhood is being disrupted by actions that evoke the vulnerable, emotional, passionate, humorous, and the hysterical. Bad Woman is the embodiment of an oversaturated clichés, embraced by grotesque fusion of washed out tropes, whose silenced collective voice becomes the screamed out loud manifesto.
Remapping the familiar and exposing the darker undertones of the suburban domesticity, the new painting series by Sarah Nicole Snow Fuhrman destabilize gravity and recalibrates the body-landscape relation. The figure transgresses the antiquated signifiers, that attempt to justify and locate it within the coordinates of the normative middle-class collective saturated by popular visual culture landscape of desire.
In Sarah Lee’s abstractions evoking ambiguously familiar yet surreal landscapes, the recent appearance of a figure infuses her canvases with organic life. Lee shapes her figures to be genderless evoking the identity of virtual reality characters. The figure yields to the space’s formal composition, yet permeates it with the subtle yet sublime breath of organic life, anticipating the dystopian post- technological era.
Aisling Hamrogue oil paintings seduce with aesthetics and illusion by using modes of representation quoted from popular culture, often echoing a horror illustration. The Blue Drape evokes of a theatrical space by revealing a void of black stage awaiting a dramatic action. Its suggestive of an amalgamation of theatrical gestures yet to come.
In the new porcelain series by Izabela Gola, the sequence of presented landscapes render places from the artist’s biography charged with memory. The representation of a landscape is simultaneously blocked and multiplied by mirror reflections. The presence of a figure is pushed out from the frame with visible animalistic traces of its existence remaining, the outward projections of memory narratives.
Falling through the old paradise- the traditional modes of landscape and figure representation- and going after the old status quo, the works presented offer a new kind of sublime.
The figure overcomes the status quo of the old convention, re-claims the horizon, and brings in the paradigm shift, becoming the maverick that inverts the landscape from the interior psychological space outward. Reconfiguring the proportions of the inside and the outside, the landscape then wrinkles and shivers like thin skin. The curious body folds into it like into warm leather pocket to then devour it from the inside out.
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Katya Grokhovsky’s practice encompasses several mediums, including installation, performance, sculpture, video, and painting, exploring gender and migrant identity construction, alienation, labor and the self. Through research and autobiographical experience, Katya constructs characters, underscoring study of stereotypes, assumptions, oppression, prejudices and injustice. Whilst enacting the bodies of the historically oppressed, in relation to the preconceived landscape of the conventional social order, Katya reclaims the body through pleasure, chaos and refusal. In result, via radical and humorous actions, personas and costume, Katya explores politics of defiance to the prescribed societal idea of femininity and gender roles, discrediting politically correct capitalist and oppressive patriarchal construct of contemporary womanhood through the feminist lens.
Grokhovsky was born in Ukraine raised in Australia and is based in NYC. She is an artist, independent curator, educator and a Founding Director of The Immigrant Artist Biennial (TIAB) and Feminist Urgent (FU). Katya holds an MFA form the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and is a recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including MAD - Museum of Art and Design Studios Program, Art and Law Fellowship, BRIC workspace Residency, Ox-BOW Residency, Wassaic Artist Residency, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Studios at MASS MoCA, NARS, Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, Watermill Center Residency, Brooklyn Arts Council Grant, NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship, ArtSlant 2017 Prize, Asylum Arts Grant, Australia Council for the Arts ArtStart Grant, NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, and others. Her work has been exhibited extensively. www.katyagrokhovsky.net
Sarah Nicole Snow Fuhrman paints generative fictions and abstractions that she constructs using elements of collage, landscape, and portraiture. Fuhrman transforms brightly colored bodies of poured paint, collaged mountains and dolloped, marbled, paint-rocks into paths that lead the viewer into a highly toxic wonderland, populated by botanical and louchely man-made structures that mingle in electric, bright atmospheres. Often residing over these quasi-territories are lame ducks of people, workhorse parents being dominated by their rattling children, or defiant actors and witchy caricatures. Fuhrman destabilizes any sense of gravity by creating abstractions of landscapes and light sources that metamorphose interconnectedness of ground, figure, and landscape into ethereal spaces.
Sarah was born in Albany, NY and is based in Brooklyn. Fuhrman has had Solo and two-person exhibitions at Slag Contemporary, in Brooklyn, NY, and has exhibited in group shows at Brooklyn Fireproof, September Gallery, in Hudson, New York, Select Art Fair with Füchs Project Space, in Chelsea, and with Debtfair Project of Occupy Museums for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, among others.
https://sarahnsfuhrman.weebly.com
Sarah Lee combines formal investigations of painting gesture with aesthetics of contemporary graphic contents such as 3D rendered objects, virtual landscapes in computer game, and animations. Traditional painting language such as gestural brush marks is often juxtaposed against a graphic style of mark making utilizing Photoshop marks, airbrushing, sanding, or masking. In her new body of work Sarah employs aesthetic elements of artificiality and digitally constructed images in pursuit of mechanical perfection. The appearance of enigmatic figure in the scene brings life into the perfected forms, and brings tension between the forms and the space around the figure suggesting ambiguously familiar yet surreal landscape.
Sarah exhibited at THE MISSION PROJECT, Chicago, IL and Gallery WON, Seoul, Korea, Julius Caesar, Chicago, IL, Artnutri, Taiwan, IL. EXPO Chicago and Art Taipei. Lee was featured in Knack magazine issue #52. Sarah was born in Seoul, Korea, and her practice is based in New York. www.sulhwalee.com
Aisling Hamrogue oil paintings examine belief systems surrounding emotional languages and explore contemporary relationship to sentimentality. Her current body of work investigates the territory that lies in-between disparate emotions and messy intersections of sincerity and irony, attraction and repulsion, the moments when the dramatic spills into the melodramatic referring to the “girly” dramatic, and romantic, as rendered by popular visual culture, using tropes such as roses, hearts, and candles. This representational painting style, drawn more strongly from book cover illustrations than from classical oil painting techniques, becomes an actor in the work, an underdog, simultaneously creating illusionary space and displaying the means of deception. Aisling’s selected group shows include: For Shelly, 326 Gallery, New York, NY, Serendipitous Synergy, The Kamakura Arts Center, Tokyo, Japan, Summer Show, Capricious Gallery, New York, NY, and Radio Love, Crystal Palace Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden.
Izabela Gola and works with multimedia narrative environments which explore ideas revolving around memory and identity displacement associated with a relationship between a figure and a landscape. The fragility of porcelain represents the ephemerality of remembering, making the object into a surrogate for memory, while the ideas of a sequence and repetition references its fluidity. The emerged memory maps are an enactment of desires and anxieties associated with events, characters, and landscapes, mediated through objects and narratives. Consequently, Izabela points toward an agonized, constantly negotiated representation, a container for memory, or its absence thereof—its vacuum or negation within the coordinates of time and space. Izabela is a Polish- American visual artist and an independent curator based in Brooklyn.
Izabela works for the Polish Cultural Institute New York as a curator of Visual Arts and Design programming. Izabela’s work was exhibited at MoMA, Screening, (2011), Hudson Valley MOCA, Bleeding Edge (2018), One Art Space, Behind Narrative (2017). www.izabelagola.com
Coco Dolle is a French-American artist and curator whose work explores themes of the body, identity and feminism. She is the founder of the "Legacy Fatale" performance art project and the program director of “TRANS-Ville” at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery. An avant-guard curator within the feminist conversations in New York, Miss Dolle has presented numerous concept exhibitions including at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show, The National Arts Club and The Untitled Space, while working with pioneer artists such as Betty Tompkins, Kembra Pfahler, Narcissister and the Guerrilla Girls. Her personal works have been exhibited and performed widely including at The Queens Museum, Czech Center (NYC), Miami Art Basel, Deitch Projects and Manchester Art Gallery (UK).