Among Nines

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Among Nines, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Padma Rajendran. Rajendran is the recipient of the Ortega y Gasset Projects Summer Residency + Solo Exhibition Program. This exhibition is curated by the Co-Directors of Ortega y Gasset Projects, and opens concurrently with Jihyun Hong’s site-specific installation $1.99 Cat, Green Wendy in The Skirt. Among Nines is Rajendran’s debut solo exhibition in New York and presents work made as the artist-in-residence at Ortega y Gasset Projects. Working on fabric, Rajendran applies resist and dye to achieve both crisp edges that reflect her drawings and faded colors that infer atmospheric haze. Her diverse imagery includes food, domestic tools, architecture, landscape, and abstract patterning that all synthesize into a “story cloth”: a traditional mode of narrative through textile. Rajendran presents her fabric works in the context of ceramic pieces as installation that activate peripheral spaces and the floor of the gallery. Rajendran’s work comes from an interior place of living two cultural lives and manifests from digging through the past of personal monuments and archived histories. Gathering these symbols authenticates the forgotten and resurrects it to be experienced again. It is a path to observe an alternate unfolding of events and offers a new ontology. Her imagery is talking to the ritualistic narratives specific to her shell and shelter. Recollecting these souvenirs and events, she embraces the idea of the woven to create images that instigate psychological elasticity yet are still bound by opposing threads. Padma Rajendran was born in Klang, Malaysia. She received her BA from Bryn Mawr College in 2007 and received her MFA in Printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design in 2015. She currently lives and works in New York, NY. She has exhibited at the International Print Center New York, Kleinert James Center for the Arts (Woodstock, NY), the Strohl Art Center (Chautauqua, NY), the Warwick Museum of Art (Warwick, RI), and recently at Whitespace Gallery (Atlanta, GA). --- The Skirt at Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce $1.99 Cat, Green Wendy, a site specific installation by Jihyun Hong. Hong was a finalist for the Ortega y Gasset Projects Summer Residency Program. In this exhibition, Hong combines objects, collage, sculpture, and paint in an installation which playfully examines daily life through a lens of experience and transformation. These joyful collections and creations of natural refuse, disposable objects of mass production, and other found materials are given new life through their assemblage. Familiar functional items are re-created with alternative materials, rendering their original purpose obsolete while enhancing a tactile and formal function within this new constructed world. Personal experience leads the narrative as materials, color, and text are juxtaposed in order to conjure sensations which become more complex than the sum of their parts. Jihyun Hong was born in Seoul, Korea in 1985 and presently lives and works in New York City. She received a BFA from School of Visual Arts and an MFA from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her works had been in various solo and group exhibitions. Her work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic and ArtFCity. Hong was an artist-in-residence at Yaddo and The Wassaic Project in 2016.