Ortega y Gasset
Gowanus, Brooklyn, NY
363 3rd Ave, Brooklyn
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Exhibitions
On view
Shadow + SubstanceReuben Telushkin
Jun 12 – Jul 20
Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG) is proud to present Shadow + Substance, a solo exhibition in the Main Gallery by Reuben Telushkin, curated by OyG co-director and artist, Adam Liam Rose. Shadow + Substance features a new series of kinetic sculptures that explores how feedback loops, encryption, and iteration in Black cultural production foreshadows formal elements of programming, digital culture, electronics and computing. Unveiling and (re)covering the past in its present, the exhibition situates quilted textiles in conversation with the moving image, to blur the line between energy and matter, human and machine. Large-scale wood joinery and metal frames loom above the viewer while electronic motors charge 3D-printed synthetic gears with perpetual motion. The gears push looping vertical blocks of quilted codes into a circular flow — each quilt a sequence of encrypted code, constructed through block-printed, embroidered, and sewn components that repeat a hand-rendered character alphabet algorithm at random. The exhibition borrows its title from Sojourner Truth's words at the base of her iconic postcard portrait: "I sell the shadow to support the substance." In an era where the physical toll of information is ever-present, the materiality of data must be confronted. Textiles invite us to contemplate the oscillatory and cyclical nature of time; how old becomes new, obsolete becomes relevant, and output is patched back in as input. Inspired by Truth's journey from Northampton, MA to Detroit, MI — a journey mirrored in Telushkin's own trajectory — Shadow + Substance honors what Truth has long known: to affect power, messages must travel. Reuben Telushkin (b. 1988, Holyoke, MA) is a transdisciplinary artist based in Detroit, MI. He graduated with a BA in Studio Art from Hampshire College in 2012, and an MFA in 4D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2024. Telushkin’s practice moves between digital fabrication and traditional craft as a way to negotiate the increasingly destabilized boundary between virtual and tangible realities. He has exhibited at the Brecht Forum in New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and has produced public commissions for Library Street Collective in Detroit. He has been awarded residencies at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, ME, ACRE Residency in Steuben, WI, Surf Point in York, ME and the Interactive Electronic Arts residency in Alfred, NY. He will be teaching Interactive Art at Wayne State University in Fall 2025.
- Hole Folds
Anna Ialeggio
Jun 12 – Aug 17
The Skirt Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Hole Folds, a site-responsive solo installation in The Skirt by artist Anna Ialeggio, co-curated by Annamariah Knox and Leeza Meksin. Hole Folds is composed of mediated image sculptures, ceramic objects, and sound. It brings together pieces from three distinct series of work which take contrasting approaches to intimately related subjects and themes: exploration of the personal archive of Ursula K Le Guin (with permission from Le Guin’s estate); long-term involvement in sites of prairie and meadow rehabilitation; the aesthetics and politics of repair as a framework for art-making. Vesper Meadow in Ashland, Oregon was over-grazed by cattle, clearcut, and drastically eroded along the banks of its streams for many years. Opportunist grass species, most of which were introduced in North America for, or as a direct result of, agricultural purposes, fill the meadows. These grasses (for example, cheatgrass - Bromus tectorum) form thick rhizomatic root mats through which native species have difficulty reaching to the soil below. Even when the grasses have been burned or smothered to begin anew, the root mats remain; other plants cannot thrive there without intervention. One restoration method involves cutting openings down through these dense grassbeds to plant plugs of native grasses. It is a small intervention in the face of a very large problem. Ialeggio begins with photographs of these intervention sites—fields marked by holes puncturing the invasive growth, taken in a meadow in Oregon. Ialeggio uses an unorthodox combination of printing processes to transform the original image, ultimately fusing them onto fine silk as image-objects mounted on bleached-pine brackets. The series plays with the idea of resolution while maintaining a sense of extreme care, changing images that were once very clear into evanescent, drifting forms. Other forms in the gallery drift and ground in turn. A ghostly sonic duet with a beloved, deceased author emerges from a monument made from clay-heavy soils. Transformed through heat into a speculative soil horizon, this ceramic monument is intended as its own cut tunnel, through which the viewer might descend down through the accumulated clutter. Perhaps something can grow down there. Hole Folds Proposes a politics of repair that is both optimistic and ambiguous, evoking various idiosyncratic attempts to imagine, excavate, and rehabilitate intimate connection with fragile lands. Born by the ocean and raised in the mountains, Anna Ialeggio is an educator and interdisciplinary artist living in Downeast Maine. Their work takes a winding path through sculpture, performance and image to consider our collectively fuzzy perception of change. Ialeggio has recently supported by Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (2026), The Puffin Foundation (2022), Cornell Council on the Arts (2025), Stone Quarry Hill Art Park (2022), Redcat Theater (2020), and the Ursula K Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship (2022). While unsuccessful in their audition bid for a salaried role as a charismatic prehistoric quadruped at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, they nonetheless earned an MFA in Sculpture from the University of California, Irvine. Ialeggio serves as Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME) and works from afar with The Soil Factory, a communitarian art & sustainability project in Ithaca NY. They feel most alive in their practice when they are working on multiple registers, in multiple modalities, at various levels of formality, and on at least several boats.
PastI Happen to Be RockMay 8 – Jun 1
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present I Happen to Be Rock, a group exhibition by the 2026 Cornell MFA candidates in Creative Visual Arts. I Happen to be Rock is a culminating exhibition featuring the work of Marissa Cote, Michael Morgan, Sheila Novak, Onome Olotu, Faye Pamintuan, Carla Rangel García, and Yun Hsiang Wang. Across painting, sculpture, printmaking, installation, writing, and expanded material practices, the exhibition gathers seven artists whose work insists on persistence, relation, transformation, and becoming. The title suggests contingency and endurance; something accidental and elemental, arrived at and borne through. It evokes a condition of having taken form under pressure, of becoming matter, presence, witness. Featuring works by graduating artists in Cornell University’s M.F.A. in Creative Visual Arts, I Happen to Be Rock brings together distinct practices that remain in dynamic conversation with one another. Material curiosity and conceptual range shape the exhibition, as the artists move through questions of identity, collectivity, visibility, repair, queer construction, memory, and the horizon of what might still be possible. The exhibition is funded in part by Cornell Council for the Arts.
PastThe Skirt: The Fourth WallMinjung Lee
Mar 7 – Apr 27
The Skirt Ortega y Gasset Projects is thrilled to present The Fourth Wall, a solo exhibition of work by artist Minjung Lee presented in the OyG Skirt and curated by co-director Annamariah Knox. The Fourth Wall depicts the back sides of domestic furniture with spectacular, hand-drawn, lifelike accuracy. Made from densely-drawn color pencil and paper, these sculptural pieces bear an uncanny likeness to real objects. We see the backboards of an enormous cabinet with uneven screws, the uncovered battery on the back of a wall clock, and the white label residue on a dresser—all hand drawn with stunning realism. Lee transforms The Skirt into a peripheral walkway around a room we can only look into from outside, viewing the backs of each furniture piece as we maneuver the space. Informed by her experiences as a foreigner, artist, and mother, Lee’s work makes visible that experience of marginal alienation from the comfort of a home—a place of belonging. The pieces themselves are vibrantly textured and remarkable for their attendance to detail. Enormous backing boards of large furniture fill the space; the hand-drawn wood grains and size convey a sense of immediacy. Layers of dense pencil strokes create all of these surfaces, serving not only as a faithful rendering of texture but also as a bearing witness to the time spent living in this liminal zone, looking in. These meticulous depictions of texture, rendered by countless pencil strokes, reveal a life lived in an uncertain periphery. Lee simultaneously transforms The Skirt into both a negated auxiliary space, and also into its own domestic interior, lending a deeply empathic view of the experience of living on the outside. Minjung Lee is a South Korean artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She creates theatrical trompe l'œil sculptures to examine the blurred boundary between the physical world and the realm of the mind, and the idea of narrative levels intersecting and sometimes dissolving into one another. She earned her BFA in sculpture from Seoul National University, Seoul, and her MFA in sculpture from Slade School of Fine Art, London. She has had solo exhibitions at Brooklyn Art Cluster, New York and Alternative Space Noon, Suwon, Korea. She attended Joshua Tree Highlands Residency. Her work has been exhibited in Massachusetts, New Jersey, London, and Seoul, and was featured in Maake Magazine, Sand Journal, and Manifest International Drawing Annual. Annamariah Knox (b. New York City, NY), is an interdisciplinary artist working across textiles, soft sculpture, movement, and video. Her current work integrates videos of body gestures with fabric sculptures to explore the connection to one’s spirit, as it is accessed through the physical body. She received a B.A. in Art History and Theater from Bowdoin College, and a Masters in Fine Art from Cornell University. Recent exhibitions have been at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY, and at the Soil Factory, in Ithaca, NY. Her show at Ortega y Gasset Projects was listed as a Must See in Artforum. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Soil Factory, Anderson Ranch, and Arrowmont School of Craft. She is currently based in New York City.
PastPenumbra: Beyond the Uncanny ValleyMar 7 – Apr 27
Penumbra: Beyond the Uncanny Valley is an intergenerational exhibition of works by artists creating simulacra of both the human form and domicile—doll and dollhouse. The artists included, while uniquely varied in perspective and approach, all make similar choices in terms of scale, form, and media. The exhibition title references the 1970 musical sexploitation film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls—the official-turned-unofficial surrealist sequel-turned-parody of the iconic 1967 film, The Valley of the Dolls, as well as the penumbra–an astronomical term referring to the partially shaded outer region of a shadow cast by an opaque object. Artist Mike Kelley was interested in plushies as “the adult’s perfect model of a child,” a characterization echoed by psychologist Ernst Jentsch in his writings on dolls and their roles as vehicles for our collective hopes and anxieties, fears and bizarre emotional projections. Jentsch’s essay The Uncanny was foundational for roboticist Masahiro Mori—who argues that the psychological affinity of humans for inanimate objects which look like them turns to disgust as the resemblance becomes closer. Some artists included in the exhibition appropriate the human form directly—Janet Olivia Henry and Laurie Simmons, works by the majority of the artists featured are notable for their complete absence of the human form. They instead focus on the associated effects of humanity, like empty homes and disembodied apparel. Charles LeDray, Greer Lankton, and Christopher Gambino use clothing, either with a complete absence or an abstracted suggestion of the human form. Greg Carideo, Beverly Buchanan, Robert Gober, Alec Snow, and faith**** use found objects to create sculptures that reference domesticity, while carefully calling attention to the lack of any explicit human presence. The penumbra—the visible light surrounding a partial eclipse—aptly characterizes objects associated with but not directly representative of humans. For the purposes of the exhibition’s thesis, this term, typically used in astronomy, posits humanity as an opaque object casting a shadow across the works on display. The vacant contours left behind are open for viewer interpretation and projection. The objects are extensions of the human form, reflecting our bodies but abstracted through layers of reference and recreation–a distance echoed through the exhibition title, between Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and its unofficial namesake. Jentsch describes the uncanny as “the unsettling ambiguity between the animate and the inanimate.” The exhibition approaches this definition from an alternate angle. How does the suggestion of human form, rather than something that is directly anthropomorphic, expand or even explode this notion? When viewing the unoccupied effects and structures deeply tied to our experience as human beings, do viewers actually encounter the uncanny? The exhibition asks visitors to draw their own conclusions. Are they in Mori’s Uncanny Valley—the Valley of the Dolls—or have they ventured somewhere beyond? Peter Kelly is an independent curator, writer, and self-taught artist based in New York City. His focus is on contemporary art–in particular craft traditions, post-minimalism, installation, new media, and spirituality. Austin Johnson is a musician and independent curator originally from Chicago now based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He received a B.A. in Art History from Yale where his scholarship and curatorial work focused on interrogations of colonial practices of the British Empire and Afromodernism. His experience with jazz and electronic music heavily influences his interests in curatorial practices and histories that underscore the contributions of performance art to postmodernism and contemporary decolonizing curatorial practices.
PastThe MatchboxLibby Rosa
Jan 10 – Mar 1
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present The Matchbox, a solo installation by artist Libby Rosa, in our Main Space, and curated by Zahar Vaks. The Matchbox is a solo installation featuring new paintings and sculptures by Libby Rosa that explores desire, containment, and impermanence. The gallery transforms into a matchbox filled with more than matches: an embedded, barred window, enlarged sewing pins (bent, twisted, and unused), and flame-shaped panel paintings. The space is set ablaze with large-scale flame paintings made from irregularly-shaped wood panels, acrylic, and pastel. The flames, in warm reds, yellows, and cool blues, dance along the walls, emitting sparks, and are pierced with pins. Rosa’s flames signify the coexistence of fear and beauty, as attraction and danger. The flames evoke vulnerability, making the gallery feel permeable, as an evocation of the fragility of our environment amid climate change, natural disasters, and human destruction. A focal point in The Matchbox is the barred, flame-shaped window cut through the wall, that highlights Rosa’s interest in manipulating her environment. This cutout pays homage to Robert Gober’s 1992 installation Untitled at Glenstone Museum. Through the window, a used match sculpture is visible, and the gallery’s columns are transformed into striking surfaces with marks and abrasions from previous strikes, serving as evidence of the gallery’s conflagration. The other two oversized match sculptures in the show refer to different stages of change and (dis)functionality; the red match is unused, and the blue one is broken. Oversized sewing pins (to scale with the matches) are stuck into some of the flame paintings, while others poke and weave through the walls. These sharpened aluminum pins, combined with the flames, comment on human attempts to control uncontrollable forces and reflect a desire to preserve fleeting moments—like butterflies pinned in shadow boxes. Many of the sculptures show damage or wear, such as bending or breakage. These imperfect tools reveal a fragility and humorously remind viewers of the delicate objects we rely on daily. The Matchbox’s symbolic flames and damaged objects highlight the delicate balance between destruction and beauty, and human efforts to master uncontrollable forces. These works prompt reflection on our vulnerable environment and the fleeting moments we seek to preserve. Libby Rosa (b. 1993, Pittsburgh, PA) is an artist, curator, and teacher working in Philadelphia, PA. Rosa creates paintings, sculptures, and site-specific installations featuring shape-shifting and embedded imagery that challenge the limitations of walls and framing devices, pushing the boundaries of built environments. She received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2015) and her MFA from Cornell University (2019). She’s been featured in Whitehot Magazine, Canvas Rebel, Artblog, David Zwirner’s Platform Interview: One Day, New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, and Inertia. She founded Peep Project in 2020, a nomadic gallery in Philadelphia, curates public art along the Philadelphia Waterfront with DRWC and teaches at Fordham University. Zahar Vaks, (b. 1983, Tashkent, Uzbekistan) Is a visual artist based in New York. He earned his BFA from Tyler School of Art, and his MFA from The Ohio State University. He has shown in New York, Philadelphia, Columbus, Las Vegas, Houston, Vienna, and on the island of Svalbard in Norway. In 2018 Zahar was invited to participate in the Rauschenberg Residency. He attended the Galveston Artist Residency from 2012-2013. He was recently awarded the Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant. Currently he is a co-director of Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG), and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
PastPolychromyAnya Klepikov
Jan 10 – Mar 1
The Skirt Ortega y Gasset Projects is thrilled to present Polychromy, a site-specific installation by the artist and scenic designer, Anya Klepikov, curated by OyG co-director Leeza Meksin in The Skirt, OyG’s exhibition space dedicated to site-specific art. Polychromy centers the site of the Old American Can Factory itself as the main story and impulse for reflection about our industrial (ever-present) past. The installation summons the ghost of the original Somers Brothers Tinware Factory, captured in the architectural palimpsest of the building. Klepikov builds on top of existing architectural features of the space with paint, gold leaf, printed fabric, and sculpted elements to create optical illusions and reverse the whitewashing of time and use. Normally, paint falls away from objects over time, distancing us from the original context and intent, but here, new paint brings traces of past life to the forefront of a contemporary space. Covering two walls of the Skirt with mirror, Klepikov invites the viewer to look beyond the literal walls of the space into the past, as well as into parallel realities. The original arched brick windows on one of the walls have been filled in with cinderblock as the building shifted from manufacturing to its current artistic production. Klepikov rearticulates these bricks with rolled-on paint, resurrecting the red brick beneath the layers of white paint, a process similar to a tombstone rubbing. Adding a reflection of this wall, she doubles the painted brick arches into a kind of arcade that frames the vestibule of the Skirt. The mirror not only expands the space but creates a new space, a corridor to a world gone by. Polychromy also manifests the presence of water, which has been a feature of this site since before colonial times and is still a force to reckon with in this building and neighborhood. Like many factories during the industrial period, the original Somers Brothers Tinware Factory relied on the transportational capacity of the Gowanus Canal. It is also easy to imagine that the byproducts of the Somers’ novel printing process contributed to the canal’s pollution long before the nearby 5th Street Basin of the canal was filled in during the mid-century. Trained as a scenic and costume designer, Anya Klepikov is accustomed to looking at venues closely for the opportunities they present. In this project she brings the approach of a scenic designer to the visual arts context in order to explore the story embedded in the architecture of the Old American Can Factory. Anya’s work in theater, opera and dance has been seen Off Broadway, at Baltimore Center Stage, the Yale Repertory Theater, Chicago Opera Theater, Fort Worth Opera, Glimmerglass Festival, Saratoga Opera, Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth, Florida Grand Opera, Gloucester Stage Company and North Carolina’s Triad Stage among others. Anya was a guest artist at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts on fourteen productions. For Miami City Ballet she designed the scenery and costumes for the acclaimed new production of Stravinsky and Balanchine’s Firebird ballet, now part of their repertory since 2020. Starting in the Summer of 2020 Anya began her exploration of design driven original work in collaboration with her students at UMass Amherst: Monuments of the Future (2021) and Flamingo Murmuration (2022). Her award-winning and interactive “An Instrument of Introspection: the Nun’s Bed” was installed at the I-Park Foundation in 2023. She is currently working on the You-Cube, an experimental outside performance space. Anya’s original work invites viewers into dramatic environments and casts them as performers of their own experience. Anya holds a BA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Design from the Yale School of Drama. She has taught design and color practice at Princeton, Brown, Colgate, UMass Amherst, and currently at Williams College. In working on this installation Anya is particularly indebted to the theatrical collaborators from whom she learned about research-based storytelling: Tea Alagic, Leese Walker, Steven Bogart, Amanda Palmer, Tei Blow, Laurel Atwell, and Diana Oh. The installation is dedicated to the memory of Diana Oh. Special thanks to Melissa Goldman, Jennifer Bolstad, Zoe Spring, Yael Rice, and Nathan Elbogen for insight and inspiration. Leeza Meksin is a New York based interdisciplinary artist, curator and educator. Her work investigates parallels between conventions of painting, architecture and our bodies. She teaches art at Cornell University, and is a founding co-director of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery in Brooklyn, NY.
Past
The Chicago ShowOct 18 – Dec 17
Lynn Basa, Leslie Baum, Phyllis Bramson, Jason Branscum, Judith Brotman, Robert Burnier, Dee Clements, William Conger, Laura Davis, Ese Ametri Gagoh, Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Steve Husby, Sam Jaffe, Kelly Kaczynski, Michael Kaysen, Anna Kunz, Olivia Schreiner, Joe Scott, Edra Soto, Shonna Pryor, Tony Tasset, Ann Toebbe, Selina Trepp, Nathan Vernau, Christine Wallers, Justin Witte Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present The Chicago Show, a group exhibition featuring artists from Chicago, curated by OyG Co-director Clare Britt. Chicago’s artists, who have relocated from all over the world, experience the city as an industrial and vibrant landscape, and carry with them the weight of its history and the pulse of experimentation. Grown from harsh topographies of prairie and factory, the city gives birth to unique artistic voices that thrive in ambiguity while delicately balancing a coexistence of nature and technology. In this tension, we find a dialogue not just between forms, but between ideologies: the rigid structures of the city versus the infinite openness of nature. The "otherworldliness" inherent in this show is also a product of Chicago’s unique geography. The city, positioned on the edge of the prairie, with the lake stretching endlessly to the east, offers a peculiar kind of atmospheric space—both dreamlike and grounded in reality. This exhibition invites viewers to consider the evolution of abstraction through a distinctly Chicagoan lens, one infused with an irreverence toward tradition and a deep connection to place. It is an invitation to think about abstraction not just as a visual form, but as a metaphor for the ongoing exploration of our relationship to the world, to nature, and to each other.
Past
Still PointSep 6 – Oct 13
Larissa Bates, Amy Brener, Rachelle Bussières, Langdon Graves, Olivia Jia, Carolina Jiménez, Abigail Lucien, Heidi Norton, Sahana Ramakrishnan, Jonathan Ryan, Tracy Thomason "At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time." —T.S. Eliot Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Still Point, a group exhibition featuring eleven artists who challenge conventional perceptions of time, co-curated by Caitlin Monachino and Gretchen Kraus. The exhibition takes its title from a line in T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton (1936), the first of his renowned Four Quartets: “At the still point of the turning world.” In the poem, Eliot meditates on the paradoxes of time—its brevity and boundlessness, inertia and momentum, permanence and constant transition. Influenced by early twentieth-century movements such as existentialism and phenomenology, Eliot suggests that spiritual insight emerges through a release from linear time. In this state—often described as the “Eternal Now”—past, present, and future are experienced as an integrated whole, where the present holds both echoes of the past and anticipation of the future. Through material, memory, and mythology, the artists in Still Point open portals into layered temporalities, where reflection and possibility converge. In this suspended space, the limits of chronology dissolve, allowing for a deeper reckoning with change, continuity, and presence. The exhibition unfolds across three thematic frameworks: Time as Medium and Form—works that engage with time through process, structure, and temporal markers; Time as Cultural Memory and Legacy—works that explore time through identity, generational knowledge, and familial histories; and Time as Myth and Narrative—works that draw on storytelling, speculative worlds, and reimagined cosmologies. With its conceptual foundation grounded in poetry, the exhibition is accompanied by a reading library that offers visitors additional pathways into the work on view. The curators invited each participating artist to recommend one or two books that resonate with their practice or with the show's central ideas. Spanning genres from science fiction and memoir to short stories and experimental fiction, these selections form a collective bibliography that has informed, inspired, and supported the artists’ thinking, extending the exhibition’s scope beyond the gallery. Still Point is curated by Caitlin Monachino and Gretchen Kraus, recipients of the 2025 Curatorial Open Call.
Past
SelvedgeJun 21 – Aug 17
Robin Crookall, Brynda Glazier, Miriam Jonas, Lauren Klenow, MaryKate Maher, Caroline Sebilleau, Erin Shirreff, Alina Tenser, Allyce Wood Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents our first curatorial open call exhibition Selvedge, a group show curated by Lauren Klenow. Selvedge explores the imagery of portals and pathways across a collection of abstract sculpture, photography, and two dimensional works. The illusory spaces in these artworks recall the environments that are real and can be inhabited. They also imagine spaces yet to be visited. This allows for visual intersections of time, memory, and materiality. Each artist in Selvedge approaches spatial perspective through a distinct lens, yet their works resonate through a shared visual language. This includes reciprocal patterns, structural echoes, layered surfaces, and shifts in color and contrast. Materials range from black and white photography, rigid forms of metal and concrete to soft inherited linen, ribbon and reflected fluorescent light. These are shaped into ambiguous entryways and sculptural corridors, where bound forms suggest the uncertainty of safe passage. Concentric circles ripple across paintings, photographs, and sculptures, creating a dialogue of light and form across mediums. The works in Selvedge embrace organic textures and spontaneous boundaries. Torn paper edges and coiled threads become portals into imagined realms shaped by invisible walls, double visions, and warped dimensions. Materials are cut, bent, folded, woven, and fired in ways that reflect the layered, often contradictory nature of time—simultaneously fragmented and continuous, bounded and open. Just as the fixtures of a room quietly suggest its purpose, the works in Selvedge offer subtle cues for orientation. Interlacing material and imagination to guide viewers through unfamiliar terrain. Like the selvedge edge of fabric that prevents fraying, these artworks hold together the abstract threads of our inner worlds, gently stitching boundaries that steady us amid the shifting contours of past, present, and possible futures. Robin Crookall is New York based artist whose work blends sculpture and photography. With a collage of elements, she creates scenes consisting of part fact and part aspect. She constructs architectural models which she photographs, and prints. The experience results in the viewer questioning the preexisting notions of reality, memory, and place. Crookall finds that photography is the ideal pedestal for these concepts, for its singular capacity for both depiction and deception. In 2024 Crookall completed an exhibition at Catskills Art Space in Livingston Manor, NY, a residency at Light Work in Syracuse, NY, a Fellowship at Lighthouse Works on Fishers Island, NY, and a solo show at Morris Adjmi Architects, in NY. Crookall is a 2021 finalist in The Print Centers, 95th Annual International Competition. In April 2021 she had a solo exhibition at Real Art Ways in Hartford CT. Fall 2020 she completed a residency and solo exhibition at Penumbra Foundation in New York City. Crookall is a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in photography from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Crookall has participated in exhibitions at Field Projects in New York, Candela Gallery in Virginia, Art Basel in Miami, Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Gallery 4Culture in Seattle, and Friesen Gallery in Seattle. Publications featuring her work include Artsin Square (2022), Musée Magazine (2021), Vast Magazine (2021), Real Art Ways Zine (2021), Indiefoto (2016), and The Seattle Times (2012). Crookall currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Brynda J. Glazier is an artist and writer from Huntingdon PA, and Sheffield, UK whose work acts as an encoded journal of buried information, illumination through struggle, and the power of connection, conscious embodiment, and mutual vibration. Though rooted in ceramic sculpture and installation, her work ranges from painting to drawing, collage, photography, video, performance, light, and sound. Glazier received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute where she was granted the Dennis Patrick Gallagher Award for Excellence in Ceramic Sculpture. Her work was selected for Cream from the Top: The Best of Bay Area’s Emerging Artists and she was invited to present at SFMoMA’s Open Space Living Room Series. Glazier is also a published write and has presented her short stories throughout the Bay Area. She has exhibited andperformed nationally and internationally at galleries, museums, art fairs, and alternative spaces including The Center of Contemporary Art in Seattle, WA; Tacoma Art Museum iWA; Stifle Fine Arts/Oglebay Institute, WV; the Material Art Fair in Mexico City, and in spaces throughout the San Francisco Bay Area including 2 nd Floor Projects, Center for New Music, Incline Gallery, The Performance Art Institute of San Francisco, SFMoMA, and the San Francisco Art Fair. Her Work has been reviewed in The Examiner, San Francisco Art Beat, SF Gate, East Bay Express, KQED Arts, and The Stranger (Seattle). Miriam Jonas is a Berlin-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, and object-based interventions. Her work explores the tension between discomfort and wellness, often challenging viewers' perceptions of the familiar. Utilizing a diverse range of materials and techniques, Jonas creates pieces that invite interaction, encouraging audiences to engage with the boundaries of their comfort zones. Her installations frequently incorporate elements that respond to movement or presence, blurring the lines between the artwork and the observer. Jonas received her Meisterbrief from Kunstakademie Münster and has taught there as a guest lecturer since 2017. She has exhibited internationally, with solo shows at Galerie Russi Klenner, Berlin, LWL Museum Münster, Kunstverein Greven, Skaftfell Art Center, Gocart Gallery Visby, Gotland, and Les Territoires, Montreal. Group exhibitions include Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Museé Regards de Provence, Marseille, and Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin. Her work has been supported by the Goethe-Institut Denmark, Neustart Kultur Scholarship, Kultur Rockt Prize, and recognized through nominations for the Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship and the NRW State Art Prize. Lauren Klenow is a sculptor, curator, and educator who uses balance and asymmetry to show how materials shape our perception of space. Through precise arrangements and tactile forms in states of tension or alignment, her work examines how structural logic can be both followed and disrupted. Dedicated to translating creative ideas into temporal experiences, she has managed exhibitions and public programs at the Arts Center at Governors Island, Gage Academy of Art, and currently at MoMA PS1.Klenow received her MFA from New York University and her BA at the University of Washington. Her work has been exhibited at Soil Gallery in Seattle, La Galerie de la Rotunde in Paris, Les Territoires in Montréal, and alternative art spaces in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. Klenow has been an artist-in-residence at the Karl Hofer Gesellschaft in Berlin and Centrum Artist Residency in Port Townsend, WA. Her work has been supported by the Queens Art Fund, Artist Trust, and the National Endowment for the Arts. MaryKate Maher was born in Philadelphia, PA. She received her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and her BFA from Arcadia University. She also studied at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. Maher has received fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Franconia Sculpture Park and Socrates Sculpture Park. Exhibitions have included Kaliner Gallery, NY; Hesse Flatow, NY; Gold/Scopophilia, NJ; JEFF, TX; MoCA Westport, CT; A.I.R. Gallery, NY; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, NY; The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; Triangle Arts Association, NY, with international exhibitions at Kunstwerk Carlshutte, Germany, Takt Berlin/Leipzig, Germany and CICA Museum, South Korea. Her work has been written about in Artsy, Brooklyn Magazine, Hyperallergic, L Magazine, BOMB, Art Zealous and Antemag. Maher lives in Brooklyn and is represented by Kaliner Gallery, NYC. Caroline Sebilleau defines herself as an art worker to make her different practices coexist without hierarchizing them. She works mainly collaboratively in different contexts, using printed matter as a way to give a dedicated shape to ephemeral encounters. She also campaigns alongside unions and collectives for better working conditions for artists and access to unemployment benefits. She lives in Nîmes, France Erin Shirreff’s diverse body of work, which includes photography, video, and sculpture, is united by her interest in the ways we experience three-dimensional forms in an age in which our perception is almost invariably mediated by still and moving images. Her work explores the gap between objects and their representations, and the materials (and materiality) of image-making. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Milwaukee Art Museum (2025); SITE Santa Fe (2024); Clark Art Institute, Williamstown (2021-22); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019); Kunsthalle Basel (2016); Buffalo AKG Art Museum (2016); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2015). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others. Shirreff earned an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2005. Alina Tenser is a Ukrainian born artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Working across sculpture, performance, and video, she makes propositions that elicit physical activation and play. Utilizing industrial and domestic materials and processes she reimagines taken-for-granted social and material relations; mining the entanglements of her experience as an immigrant and parent. Tenser is currently an Assistant Professor at Lehigh University. Tenser’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at KinoSaito in Verplanck, NY; Hesse Flatow and 17Essex Gallery in New York, NY; Konstepidemin in Gothenburg, SE; and Soloway Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been reviewed widely, with features in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bomb Magazine, Cultured Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Third Rail. She has participated in multiple artist residencies, including The Queens Museum Studio Program, Recess Activities, and Triangle Art. Recently, her work was included in the Phaidon survey Great Women Sculptors, a tribute to the contributions of 300 women sculptors from the Renaissance to today. Allyce Wood lives and works in Seattle. Through the use of digital and handmade processes, Wood makes installations, works on paper, and textiles with a focus on digital jacquard tapestries. To her, the loom acts as a mediator between traditional and computerized technologies, offering a unique way to combine online and offline experiences into images in cotton and wool.Wood is a collector of technologies and threads. In the studio, she creates textiles on her mid-century Bergman floor loom, a passed-down marudai, and a knitting machine from the 1960s that she restored piece by piece. Every process tells a story of a different code system. Punch cards and graph paper are as vital as the bleeding watercolors she paints with. This passion for systems, for breakable rules, stems from a lifelong curiosity of reason and rule-bending.
Past
Even the Phrase Each OtherMay 10 – Jun 1
Adrian Aguilera Elina Ansary Andy Nicholas Li Hyunjin Park Sopheak "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, There is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, The world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, /even the phrase each other/ Doesn't make any sense." —Jalaladdin Rumi, Interpreted by Coleman Barks, 1995 Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Even the Phrase Each Other, a group exhibition in the main gallery by artists from the Cornell MFA in Creative Visual Arts program. Examining intersecting themes of death, consciousness, destruction, and desire, these five artists draw on the cultural contexts that shape them. Working across interdisciplinary boundaries, their practices span painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Adrian Aguilera, born in Monterrey, Mexico, researches the intrinsic essence that resides in objects, often through dissection or corruption of common phrases. Andy Nicholas Li, a Cantonese-Midwestern artist from Chicago, conjures contradictions of identity and intimacy to uncover the queer and sticky construction of a person. Hyunjin Park is a Korean interdisciplinary artist whose work examines how the affective power of non-human beings unsettles the boundary between the modern and the pre-modern. Elina Ansary combines auspicious materials with painted images to build cohesive wholes out of contradictory parts, reflecting the discomfort and wonder of her experience as a Jewish-Muslim-Afghan-American. Sopheak Sam pieces together fragmentary memories of war, tracing the afterlives and afterimages of Cambodian refugees to remap the intersection of Buddhist, queer, and diasporic subjectivities. Even The Phrase Each Other is itself a fragmented phrase. The ‘translator,’ Coleman Barks, does not speak Farsi. This remnant of ancient poetry was translated and retranslated through a global game of telephone. In a similar way, these five artists, whose lineages spring from opposite corners of the earth, have found themselves flung together, by chance and synchronicity, at Cornell University’s MFA program. Together these five artists reach across borders, of geography and artistic discipline, to create a new collective intimacy. Adrian Aguilera was born in Mexico's industrial capital of Monterrey. Aguilera immigrated as a young adult to the U.S. where he settled in Austin, Texas in early 2010's. He received his BFA (2004) from The Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, and an MFA in Creative Visual Arts at Cornell (2025). Working with a variety of mediums that include sculpture, text-based work, print media, video, public art, and installations; he researches the intrinsic essence that resides in objects. With an interest in scientific observation, cultural history, and social issues, Aguilera's work aboard our relationship with the physical and cultural spaces in which we inhabit. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally at Artpace San Antonio, Johnson Museum, The State Silk Museum, Philbrook Museum, The Contemporary Austin, Fusebox Festival, Blanton Museum of Art, The George Washington Carver Museum, Alfred University and the Museum of Human Achievement. His work has been featured in a variety of publications, including ARTFORUM, Frieze, NYT, Vogue, and Glasstire. He currently lives and works in Ithaca, NY and Austin, TX. Elina Ansary was born and raised in San Francisco. Working primarily in painting and sculpture, her work explores time, consciousness, and perception through the narrative lens of her hybrid heritage. Ansary earned her BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in 2013, and completed the Scenic Painting Professional Apprenticeship at the Juilliard School in 2017. Ansary was an artist-in-residence at BigCi (Australia, 2017), Chautauqua Institution (USA, 2021), La Macina di San Cresci (Italy, 2022), and RaumArs (Finland, 2023). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Holter Museum (USA, 2024) UC Berkeley’s Worth Ryder Gallery (USA, 2023), and the Rauma Art Museum (Finland, 2023). She’s based in Brooklyn, where she is the cofounder of a DIY art space called Peach Pit Gallery. Andy Nicholas Li is an artist based in Chicago, IL and Ithaca, NY. Andy's work has appeared at Co-Prosperity, Hyde Park Art Center, ACRE Projects (Chicago), The Soil Factory (Ithaca), Midsumma Festival (Melbourne, Australia), and Granoff Center for the Creative Arts (Providence, RI), with collaborative projects at AS220 (Providence), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Singapore Art Book Fair. Andy has spent time at residencies and workshops at Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL), Acre (Steuben, WI), Hyde Park Art Center, Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, MI), GnarWare (Chicago), and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Andy’s work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and A-B Projects (Portland, OR). Hyunjin Park is a Korean interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in New York and Seoul, working across sculpture, installation, performance, and video. Raised in one of the world’s most fast-paced societies, she investigates how technology-driven capitalism reshapes traditions and reinforces boundaries between the old and new, human and non-human, and life and death. Park participated in residency programs at Domaine de Boisbuchet, Lessac, France (2024, sponsored by the Youngmin International Art Program), Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT (2024, fellowship), and Wassaic Project (2025), Wassaic, NY. Sopheak Sam was born in the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in Thailand after their family fled the Khmer Rouge genocide. Sam’s work has been exhibited at Kalm Village (Chiang Mai, Thailand), FT Gallery (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), the Minnesota Museum of American Art (St. Paul, MN), Denison Museum (Granville, OH), the Grace and Clark Fyfe Gallery (Glasgow, UK), and they have collaborated on projects with Boston CyberArts and Distillery Gallery (Boston, MA). They were a 2022 Fulbright Scholar in Thailand, and have held residencies at SLOWSPACE Studio (Phnom Penh, Cambodia) and the Chautauqua School of Art (Chautauqua, NY). Sam grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, and is a naturalized American citizen of ethnic Khmer descent.
Past
What Does It Feel Like to Be YouAmy Ritter
Mar 22 – Jun 1
The Skirt Ortega y Gasset Projects is proud to present Amy Ritter's new body of work, What Does It Feel Like to Be You, site responsive installation in our Skirt space. Curated by Co-Director Lauren Whearty, the exhibition constructs a deeply personal yet universally resonant portrait of the artist's father through layered depictions of his home and surroundings. Ritter's father has lived for more than 40 years in Lil' Wolf, a mobile home community in Orefield, Pennsylvania, where she was raised. Through layered depictions of his home—both its interior and the surrounding neighborhood—Ritter examines notions of memory, identity, and connection. The physicality of her materials like Xerox photographic prints, the texture of an early digital video, and the use of working-class materials like plywood and asphalt mirrors the tactile nature of recollection and care, bridging generational and ideological divides through deep observation and empathy. The creation of this work is itself an act of care, finding empathy and connection across barriers made from contrasting views and politics. Ritter reflects on the past and present by walking us through an environment that combines interior and exterior views of the home and its surrounding neighborhood. Old family photos are combined with recent documentation as Ritter forms her father's character with complexity and sensitivity. Viewers are invited to step into this world, yet they remain distanced—fragmented reflections in window panes obscure full access, mediating our perspective. The constant pace of a dripping faucet, left on to prevent the pipes from freezing, is an immersive element that makes us acutely aware of time's passing. The disrepair and staining of asphalt, sculptures of flies, and imagery of an untidy home are reminders of class and become metaphors for human struggles. One of the main images seen in the installation is two snapshots of a childhood pet. The benign and sentimental nature of the photo belies the darker memory held within. Ritter recalls, "The manicured lawn with the arborvitae acts as a fence to keep the neighbors invisible. The landscape has since changed enormously. This cat was my father's and he cared deeply for it. One day the cat was gone and she had been very sick so we were told she went to the vet and was put down. Probably a decade later we came to find out my dad had taken her out back of the shed and shot her in the head to put her out of her misery. He buried her behind the shed where many of our family's pets were laid to rest. They couldn't afford to take the pets to the vet." Through close observation, Ritter challenges us to push back against the divisive forces of political and social polarization. In a world that thrives on dehumanization, What Does It Feel Like to Be You asks us to see, to listen, and to recognize each other's full humanity—an act that, now more than ever, feels both radical and necessary. "All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it." —Miranda July, It Chooses You Amy Ritter (b. 1986, Orefield, PA) is a visual artist, educator, and fabricator living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Amy Ritter received a BFA from Tyler School of Art in 2009 and an MFA from The Ohio State University in 2014. For the past decade she's documented mobile home parks (over 50 sites in over 18 states), and interviewed residents. She's created and exhibited work influenced by these archives built on her own personal history growing up in a double-wide trailer. She's continuing to visit mobile home parks throughout the United States, systematically archiving with overarching questions around the American Dream, specifically the myth of social mobility and the stigma around manufactured housing. Ritter has shown her work nationally for over a decade. She's been awarded numerous residencies and fellowships; selected honors include Fine Arts Work Center, MA (2016), Skowhegan, ME (2016), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace Resident, NY (2017), a Fellowship at Yaddo, NY (2020), an Engaging Artist Fellowship at More Art, NY (2021), A Puffin Foundation Grant (2022), NYFA fellowship (2023), Anderson Ranch Resident (2024), and will be attending Sante Fe Art Institute for their Community & Practice Residency (June 2025). She has shown her public sculptures at MOCA Arlington, Socrates Sculpture Park, Franconia Sculpture Park, Loyola University, Upstate Arts Weekend, The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, The Old Stone House in Brooklyn, and The Porch Gallery and is continuing to find ways to share her work with the public outside of the traditional gallery spaces.
Past
As in a Mirror, DimlyJenny Fine
Mar 22 – Apr 28
Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents As in a Mirror, Dimly, Jenny Fine's inaugural New York solo exhibition in our main space, curated by Co-Director Lauren Whearty. Jenny Fine is an Alabama-based artist whose work explores personal and cultural memory, identity, and our ever-shifting relationship to the photograph. This body of work is shaped by the sudden and tragic loss of Fine's sister, Beth. Her death was a result of the failure of our broken healthcare system. In the wake of her sister's passing, Fine explores the unknowns surrounding her loss, the systems that failed her sister, the indifference of officials in power, and a family left without answers or peace. Her work looks inward as a meditation on care, grief, and the unseen forces that shape life and death. Photography, both artistically and spiritually, is a medium in this body of work. It is a sacred means of reaching toward what is gone. Images that once showed proof of one's existence now also define their absence. As in a Mirror, Dimly draws inspiration from the psychomanteum which is a mirror used as a device for spirit communication, from the ectoplasm photography of mediums generations ago and Victorian-era spiritualism. The works in this series merge photography with ritual and memory with material in a search for connection beyond the veil. Fine gives form and life to shapeshifting memories through her sculpture, installations, photography, and performance works. Family stories flicker on the theater screen of her mind. She uses what materials are at hand to map the unknown to take her sister on an epic journey through the afterlife, while she also attempts to solidify and preserve the ephemeral quality of her memories. The result immerses us in an intimate spiritual world that merges life and death. Objects and imagery found throughout the exhibit, like wishbones, evil eyes, and horseshoes, symbolize luck, ritual, and protection, as if to form an armor for navigating grief. This symbolism, and the rituals often attached to them in seances, religious ceremonies, and witchcraft, Fine looks at the many ways we try to undo death, bring power to the powerless, and attempt the impossible. These devotional practices fashion a tether line into the hereafter and grasp with determination for presence in the face of absence. Amy Ritter's new body of work, What Does it Feel Like to Be You, site responsive installation in our Skirt space. Curated by Co-Director Lauren Whearty, the exhibition constructs a deeply personal yet universally resonant portrait of the artist's father through layered depictions of his home and surroundings. Ritter's father has lived for more than 40 years in Lil' Wolf, a mobile home community in Orefield, Pennsylvania, where she was raised. Through layered depictions of his home—both its interior and the surrounding neighborhood—Ritter examines notions of memory, identity, and connection. The physicality of her materials like Xerox photographic prints, the texture of an early digital video, and the use of working-class materials like plywood and asphalt mirrors the tactile nature of recollection and care, bridging generational and ideological divides through deep observation and empathy. The creation of this work is itself an act of care, finding empathy and connection across barriers made from contrasting views and politics. Ritter reflects on the past and present by walking us through an environment that combines interior and exterior views of the home and its surrounding neighborhood. Old family photos are combined with recent documentation as Ritter forms her father's character with complexity and sensitivity. Viewers are invited to step into this world, yet they remain distanced—fragmented reflections in window panes obscure full access, mediating our perspective. The constant pace of a dripping faucet, left on to prevent the pipes from freezing, is an immersive element that makes us acutely aware of time's passing. The disrepair and staining of asphalt, sculptures of flies, and imagery of an untidy home are reminders of class and become metaphors for human struggles. Through close observation, Ritter challenges us to push back against the divisive forces of political and social polarization. In a world that thrives on dehumanization, What Does it Feel Like to Be You asks us to see, to listen, and to recognize each other's full humanity—an act that, now more than ever, feels both radical and necessary.
Past
Walls Wearing WorldsLeeza Meksin
Jan 18 – Mar 17
The Skirt Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Walls Wearing Worlds, a site-specific exhibition in The Skirt by OyG Co-Director and Co-Founder, the artist Leeza Meksin. Walls Wearing Worlds is a unique moment at OyG Projects because typically the organization does not feature solo exhibitions by its Co-Directors. For almost a dozen years, OyG Projects has provided artists in the wider creative community with a platform to experiment and test the possibilities of their medium. Meksin’s passion for site-specific work was at the root of creating The Skirts’ programming in addition to the main space gallery shows. Given her decade-long commitment to other artist’s site-specific exhibitions in the space, it feels appropriate to highlight Meksin’s own artistic practice at this time. Leeza Meksin’s work is characterized by an interest in the body: its shapes, sizes, and how it does (or does not) conform to the things it wears and the spaces it inhabits. In lieu of conventional figuration, Meksin alludes to the body by stretching yards of spandex mesh over the walls of The Skirt, in some cases, from floor to ceiling. This transformation of architecture into bodily evocations sets the stage for her painting (on canvas, wood panel, and neoprene), to appear on top of, behind, and in-between the transparent fabric. Meksin’s paintings offer further plot-twists of materiality and innovation, combining paper pulp, fabric, paint, found objects, sundry trimmings, and other (sometimes curious) incidentals. Like magnets for the flotsam of the world, Meksin’s paintings suck up the material richness of the consumerist landscape, re-rooting these potentially forgotten items into a new aesthetic and personal relevance. Meksin’s interest in painterly and architectural conventions - and a simultaneous desire to push past those conventions - are two pillars of her artistic sensibility. The tension between these two pillars permeates both her art practice (as in Walls Without Worlds) and her curatorial practice, as well. Painting Deconstructed (May 18 - August 24, 2024) was Meksin’s last curated exhibition, featuring artists who likewise stretch, reinvent and surpass painting's material possibilities. Leeza Meksin (born Moscow, Russia) is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, public art and multiples. Her work investigates parallels between conventions of painting, architecture and our bodies. Meksin has created site-specific installations for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, CLEA RSKY, NYC, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, National Academy of Design, NYC, The Uptown Triennial at The Lenfest Center for the Arts, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, The Kitchen, NYC, BRIC Media Arts, Regina Rex and Brandeis University. In 2015 Meksin received the emerging artist grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and in 2021 she was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA artist fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work. In 2019 Meksin was the artist in residence at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. Her work has been featured in Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and The Village Voice. In 2022, Turret Tops and Before, a book featuring 15 years of her artistic practice, was published by Space Sisters Press. In 2013 Meksin co-founded Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery that she continues to co-direct. Meksin’s curatorial projects have been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail and Two Coats of Paint. Her most recent curatorial project, Painting Deconstructed received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and was listed by Hyperallergic in Best of 2024 Exhibitions in NYC. In 2021 Meksin joined the faculty at Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) where she is currently the Director of the MFA program in Creative Visual Arts.
Past
The Pull: OyG Projects Flat File 2025Jan 18 – Mar 17
Taylor Absher, Emily Auchincloss, Clare Britt, Dan Cameron, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Erika Germain, Catherine Haggarty, Rachel Hellerich, Patrice Aphrodite Helmar, Hong Hong, Fritz Horstman, Will Hutnick, Alex Jovanovich, Jason Karolak, Xingze Li, Leeza Meksin, Tracy Miller, Kristine Moran, Pol Morton, John O'Connor, Mike Paré, Meghan Petras, Keisha Prioleau-Martin, Christian Rogers, Adam Liam Rose, Sarah Rushford, Andrew Schwartz, Pamela Sneed, Rachel Stern, Darryl DeAngelo Terrell, Ken Tisa, Zahar Vaks, Chuck Webster, Jenna Weiss, Lauren Whearty, Jack Arthur Wood “On a recent trip to Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, I discovered Rock Temple, a 1919 work on paper by Paul Klee. The work on paper is not displayed on the wall, but in a drawer that visitors can pull out themselves to view the work (such a set-up is possible in a small, intimate museum). Pulling the drawer reveals the work, matted, under a piece of Plexiglas held with a small metal lock. The work itself - an arrangement of clustered geometric shapes - has a simple visual power. It appears Klee diluted and wiped some of the watercolor away to reveal the paper underneath, and the effect is smokey. The strength of the work - and its visual potency - is contrasted by its material fragility. It’s just a thin piece of paper, over 100 years old, only a few inches wide. It’s a powerful whisper. The pull of the drawer - and the experience of seeing Klee’s work - inspired this show. Artworks that can be stored in a drawer hold a special intimacy. Works by the artists in this exhibition were chosen for tactility and the achievement of visual power on a small scale. As exhibition organizer, I worked from my taste and visual preferences, selecting artists whose work aroused my instinct”. Eric Hibit (born Rochester, NY) is a visual artist based in New York City. He attended the Corcoran College of Art + Design (BFA,1998) and Yale University School of Art (MFA, 2003). In New York, he has exhibited at Brooklyn Museum, Morgan Lehman Gallery, Dinner Gallery, Deanna Evans Projects, My Pet Ram, One River School of Art + Design, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Underdonk Gallery, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Zurcher Studio, C24 Gallery, Anna Kustera Gallery, Max Protetch Gallery, and elsewhere. He has exhibited nationally at Hexum Gallery in Montpelier, VT, Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, Wege Center for the Arts at Maharishi University in Fairfield, IA, Adds Donna in Chicago, Curator’s Office in Washington, DC, Geoffrey Young Gallery in Great Barrington, MA, The Cape Cod Museum of Art, Satellite Contemporary in Las Vegas, NV, The University of Vermont, Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, CA and internationally in Sweden, France and Norway. His work has been covered by the Washington Post, The Village Voice, Hyperallergic, Newsweek, New York Times and New York Post. Hibit has taught studio art at Cornell University, The Cooper Union, Drexel University, Suffolk County Community College, Tyler School of Art, NYU and Hunter College. Artist residencies include Terra Foundation in Giverny, France (2003), Unilever Residency in New York (2015), and Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts (2019) and Green Olives Arts in Tetouan, Morocco (2019). Publications include Dear Hollywood Writers, with poet Geoffrey Young (Suzy Solidor Editions, 2017) and Paintings and Fables with Wayne Koestenbaum, a limited edition artist’s book (2017), and Color Theory for Dummies, published by Wiley (2022). He is currently Co-Director of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery based in Brooklyn, where he has curated exhibitions since 2014.
Past
Sensory Riffs & Visceral Turns: From Syllable to Sound to PrintSandra Ruiz & Daniel Hughes Vernola
Dec 18 – Dec 23
Ortega y Gasset is pleased to present Sensory Riffs & Visceral Turns: From Syllable to Sound to Print, a commemoration of queer friendship, political solidarity, mourning, and the merging of forms through abstract art and experimental writing. This exhibition describes what it means to be viscerally touched and turned over by words. Following Sandra Ruiz's Left Turn in Brown Study's directive to turn into new anticolonial ways of study, abstract painter, Daniel Hughes Vernola, takes the poetry and poetics of Ruiz and riffs sensorially by crafting 51 mono-prints into visual scores. Each print is abstracted according to the embodiment of the spirit of each poem, lyrical essay, or vignette. Vernola engages intuitive listening, and then visually translates from a disordered but ordered sentimentality into performative mono-prints. The mono-prints and scores were created over months during an incubation session between writer and artist and in conversation with altars to the spirits of the poems assembled by curator Dusty Childers. On opening night, movement artist Estado Flotante activates the space, performing a sight-specific soundscape crafted by electronic composer Erica Gressman from the book's content. This exhibition and activation at Ortega y Gasset is funded and supported by the Minor Aesthetics Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and curated by Dusty Childers, an multi-hyphenate artist and performer who carries the torch of queer disruption into the gallery world, building a world that celebrates voices that must be amplified louder. Sensory Riffs & Visceral Turns: From Syllable to Sound to Print Sandra Ruiz & Daniel Hughes Vernola Opening Reception: Wednesday, December 18th 6-9 PM Performance & Talk 7:30 Exhibition open for one weekend Friday Dec 20th - Sunday 22, 2024 Join us for Sensory Riffs & Visceral Turns: From Syllable to Sound to Print, a commemoration of queer friendship, political solidarity, mourning, and the merging of forms through abstract art and experimental writing. This exhibition describes what it means to be viscerally touched and turned over by words. Following Sandra Ruiz’s Left Turn in Brown Study’s directive to turn into new anticolonial ways of study, abstract painter, Daniel Hughes Vernola, takes the poetry and poetics of Ruiz and riffs sensorially by crafting 51 mono-prints into visual scores. Each print is abstracted according to the embodiment of the spirit of each poem, lyrical essay, or vignette. Vernola engages intuitive listening, and then visually translates from a disordered but ordered sentimentality into performative mono-prints. The mono-prints and scores were created over months during an incubation session between writer and artist and in conversation with altars to the spirits of the poems assembled by curator Dusty Childers. On opening night, movement artist Estado Flotante will activate the space, performing a sight-specific soundscape crafted by electronic composer Erica Gressman from the book’s content. This exhibition and activation at Ortega y Gasset is funded and supported by the Minor Aesthetics Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and curated by Dusty Childers, an multi-hyphenate artist and performer who carries the torch of queer disruption into the gallery world, building a world that celebrates voices that must be amplified louder. Daniel Hughes Vernola is a painter who lives and works in New York City and Amagansett, Long Island. A state and city certified arts educator, he has taught PreKindergarten through 8th grade regular and special needs groups for 24 years. He is a member of the Art Students League and maintains a studio out east. Painting abstract, Vernola's work plays with a viewer's eye upon the surface through a language of pure form.Subject matter ranges predominantly from the experiences of light in Manhattan and the east end of Long Island- not for its representational aspect but as a theoretical point of departure-toward energy. He employs a traditional craft of oil painting in abstraction. Working in layered glazes which heighten hue, soften plane, and bring a viewer toward 'felt color',Vernola's work has an optically vibrant feel. Sandra Ruiz is a performance studies, minoritarian aesthetics, and relational ethnic studies scholar as well as a curator, producer, and poet, and currently serves as the Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies in Theatre and English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Ruiz is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance, Left Turns in Brown Study and Tears for Tears: Aesthetics in Grief Minor. A longtime collaborator across sites and projects, Ruiz is the co-author with Hypatia Vourloumis of Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of the World & The Alleys: Just Dropped in to see What Condition My Condition Was In and co-editor with Uri McMillan & Shane Vogel of the book series Minoritarian Aesthetics (NYU Press) and the creator and producer of La Estación Gallery, and the Minor Aesthetics Lab. Dusty Childers is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator who has worn the chapeaus of director, producer, dramaturgist, costumer, and stylist. Dusty’s body and body of work has graced the likes of The Guggenheim, St. Ann's, The Whitney, BAM, Parsons, Joe’s Pub, Pratt, Sundance, SXSW, Signature Theater, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Town Hall, Abrons Art Center, NY Live Arts, Wild Project, Dixon Place, Irving Plaza, SoHo Rep,Sony Music Hall, Bushwig, Judson Memorial Church. He has worked with Taylor Mac, Justin Vivian Bond, Ari Shapiro, Christeene, Penny Arcade, Machine Dazzle, Nayland Blake, Karen Finley & Miguel Gutierrez (among others). Estado Flotante is an artist based in Brooklyn whose practice ranges from dance/movement to music/sound, and video/visual composition consolidated through his pop music and live performance. Originally from Santiago de Chile where he became dancer, teaching artist and maker, he moves to New York City in 2012 where he has performed and collaborated with various Dance and performance artists like Antonio Ramos, Miguel Gutierrez, Daria Fain, Ishmael Houston Jones and John Kelly among others. Currently he has been releasing his first singles online, and producing his first EP to be released on all streaming platforms while cultivating his performance practice for more shows to come. Erica Gressman is a Miami-born, mixed Latinx queer artist working in Chicago who fuses sound art with performance. She received her BA from New College of Florida and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Performance in 2012. After Gressman received her MFA, she has worked as a Design Engineer and now has her own fabrication business, Rainbolt Productions, building architectural sculptures. These experiences have greatly influenced the heavy interactive structures that function as the sets for her compositions.
Past
Round Peg, Square HoleNatalie Beall & Scott Vander Veen
Oct 26 – Dec 16
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Round Peg, Square Hole, a two person show featuring works by Natalie Beall and Scott Vander Veen in the main gallery, curated by OyG co-directors, the artists Clare Britt and Leeza Meksin. Round Peg, Square Hole brings together the works of two Upstate New York artists: Natalie Beall and Scott Vander Veen, whose works form an exquisite conversation about utility, performance, gender and inventiveness, bringing to mind the philosophical ideas about the value and the queering of “use”, explored by the British-Australian theorist Sara Ahmed. Natalie Beall creates wall hanging objects which are both paintings and sculptures that investigate functionality, domesticity and fantasy. She also creates paper collages that are precise and symmetrical, incorporating attributes of usefulness such as grids, hooks and holes. Together they reference a world of seemingly utilitarian objects that are unable or unwilling to perform as intended, and instead engage in a delicate and playful masquerade. Through transforming source imagery associated with the domestic while humorously reconfiguring it, Beall embraces a lineage of traditionally feminine and often overlooked artifacts that hold a psychic and emotional charge. Scott Vander Veen’s multidisciplinary practice utilizes a wide array of materials such as wood, paper, clothing, latex, glue, grommets, plaster, rubber drain plugs, misappropriated text, zippers, and found photographs. For this show, the artist presents a series of screen-like, free-standing forms that eschew the conventional divide between decorative and useful. These materially omnivorous objects challenge our preconceived notions of how a painting or a sculpture might behave, suggesting that multivalence is not merely possible, but essential. Like Beall, Vander Veen is preoccupied with questions of utility in art, exploring how form directs function and how queering that function is an act of resistance and pleasure. Natalie Beall (b. 1981, Atlanta, GA) invents new forms containing traces of functionality and fantasy. She earned her BFA from the University of Georgia and her MFA from Columbia University. Her most recent solo exhibition, Pastimes, took place in 2023 at Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York. Beall has participated in exhibitions at Fridman Gallery, Good Naked Gallery, Standard Space, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, and the Wassaic Project, among other venues. Residencies include the Women’s Studio Workshop, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Lighthouse Works, the Cooper Union, and the Lower East Side Printshop. Beall is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts and a 2023 NYSCA Individual Artist Commission Awardee. She lives and works in Salt Point, New York. Scott Vander Veen is an artist whose work spans the disciplines of painting and sculpture. He received a BFA from Bard College and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. He has also spent time at Penland School of Craft as a Core Fellow, and at Ox-Bow School of Art as a Leroy-Neiman Fellow. His work was most recently shown at Stowaway in Los Angeles and has also been exhibited at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, the RISD Museum, Ortega Y Gasset, Andrew Reed Gallery, New York Studio School, Queens University Gallery, Finlandia University Gallery, and the Penland Gallery, among others. He lives and works in the Hudson Valley of New York. Clare Britt joined OyG Projects in 2013 as a founding co-director. She curated the first solo exhibition of photographic work with Chicago artist Kelly Kaczynski Yes; Or As If. She co curated the group exhibition Code Switch with co-director Lauren Whearty, curated the group show Shadow of the Gradient, and curated the exhibition entitled Apparitions with artist Alicia Smith, co curated Swallowed Into the Soft Underbelly with Tiffany Smith and artists Kat Ryals and Kate Stone, curated Time Isn't After Us with artist Shelley Smith, and Stillness is The Move by Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson. Clare has been instrumental in creating virtual content for the gallery including starting the YouTube Channel and creating content for the virtual space. She spearheaded Rendezvous, an interactive virtual experience that serves as a platform for creative exchange between artists with co-director Tiffany Smith. Clare started interviewing artists in the Flat File Program in a casual studio visit on Friday’s on OyG’s Instagram Live channel. Clare is a freelance photographer and lives in Chicago, IL and works all over the country creating art and telling visual stories of the people she encounters along the way. Leeza Meksin is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, public art and multiples. Her work investigates parallels between conventions of painting, architecture and our bodies. Meksin has created site-specific installations for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, Clea Rsky, NYC, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, National Academy of Design, NYC, The Uptown Triennial at The Lenfest Center for the Arts, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, The Kitchen, NYC, BRIC Media Arts, Regina Rex and Brandeis University. In 2015 Meksin received the emerging artist grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and in 2021 she was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA artist fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work. In 2019 Meksin was the artist in residence at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. Her work has been featured in Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and The Village Voice. In 2022, Turret Tops and Before, a book featuring 15 years of her artistic practice, was published by Space Sisters Press. In 2013 Meksin co-founded Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery that she continues to co-direct. Meksin’s curatorial projects have been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail and Two Coats of Paint. Meksin joined the faculty at Cornell University where she is currently the Director of the MFA program in Creative Visual Arts.
Past
Wooden GloveHannah Parrett
Sep 14 – Oct 14
Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents Hannah Parrett’s inaugural NY solo exhibit, Wooden Glove, in our main space, curated by Co-Director Lauren Whearty. Hannah Parrett’s sculptures and installation works explode and excavate forms of found domestic objects, while evoking architectural facades. Combining these objects with carved wood, insulation foam, and painted materials, she re-animates forms to create a visual language expressing personal narratives and mythologies. The symbolism found within Parrett’s abstractions and archetypes creates a tension between fostering an intimate relationship with a familiar interior world and the need to dissolve its boundaries. The reclamation and transformation of salvaged architectural elements is integral to Parrett’s process. Camp Washington, a Cincinnati neighborhood of 19th-century American homes and industrial sites, inspires themes of memory and transience in Parrett’s work. She collects discarded architectural remnants from this period, specifically pieces used for framing and decoration. Her objects include skeletons of chairs, tables, bed frames, banisters, mirrors, and mantle pieces. Parrett’s interest in the architecture of abandoned places stems from her experience. She grew up in Western South Dakota, surrounded by 1880s reenactment towns, where mines have become museums, and where mountains are monuments. Tourism and spectacle were strong economic pulls that became a facade for the landscape; a poster taped over a hole in the wall. At Ortega y Gasset Projects, Parrett’s installation hugs the corner of the gallery as she creates a movie-set-like room built of found parts, and adorned with carved and painted ornamentation. Parrett uses the softness of cast paper reliefs to subvert our expectations for architecture. These forms are ephemeral points of departure from the tile work that inspires them. Parrett incorporates subtle variations in color and texture to emphasize the transient nature of the decadent histories her work evokes. The scale and familiarity of the domestic components form a constructed environment that draws on our collective memories and experiences while re-forming those familiar elements into new historical allegories. Parrett's work transcends both painting and sculpture through her use of unconventional materials and techniques. Her works maintain the human scale and tactile essence of the found objects she incorporates into her work. Meticulous foam carvings evoke the decorative facades of Art Nouveau architecture, transforming utilitarian materials into adorned, fantastical worlds. Each process imbues the work with new meaning and narrative. These reliefs, layered with stylized organic forms, reference the past and gesture toward the cyclical nature of time and the layers of memory that accumulate over it. Hannah Parrett is an artist and educator based out of Cincinnati, OH whose work explores the malleable boundaries of perception through expanded painting practices. Raised in South Dakota, Hannah relocated to the Midwest in 2017 and has lived there for the past seven years. During her time in central and southern Ohio, she finished her master's degree at Ohio State University where she taught as a lecturer from 2020-2022 and co-founded Dream Clinic Project Space, an artist-run gallery that operates out of a shared studio collective in Columbus, OH. She was the recipient of the Greater Columbus Arts Council Fellowship in 2021 and has exhibited locally and nationally at galleries that include the Pizzuti Collection through the Columbus Museum of Art, the Louise Underwood Hopkins Center for Contemporary Art, Lubbock TX, and The Neon Heater, Findlay OH. She has attended residencies at the Hambidge Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Acre, and was the artist in residence at Visible Records in Charlottesville VA. She has an upcoming solo show at Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati in 2025. Lauren Whearty is a painter, educator, and curator based in Philadelphia and has been a Co-Director at OyG Projects since 2017. She has recently exhibited at Gross McCleaf Gallery, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, Deanna Evans Projects, Artport Kingston, Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery, and was recently commissioned to create a painting for Philadelphia Museum of Art and Mural Arts in response to “Matisse in the 1930s”. Lauren has attended Yale’s Summer School of Art, Vermont Studio Center, Soaring Gardens, and Golden Foundation residencies. She has recently received grants from Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, Joseph Roberts Foundation, and a Grant for Creative Research and Innovation from University of the Arts. She received her MFA from The Ohio State University, and BFA from Tyler School of Art.
Past
The Inside Matches the OutsideAnnamariah Knox
Sep 14 – Dec 15
The Skirt Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present The Inside Matches the Outside, the inaugural NY solo exhibition of Annamariah Knox, in our Skirt Space. Knox presents soft-sculpture and video installation of human gestures and large-scale fabric pieces. The exhibition is curated by OyG co-director Adam Liam Rose. The Inside Matches the Outside consists of a multimedia sculptural and video installation of gesticulating hands and feet projected onto fabric forms. Large abstract shapes of bleached, dyed, and patched fabric evoke the elements, boulders, and the forces that erode, shape, and transform a landscape. Hands and feet move across fabric boulders, engage in movement modalities that include semaphore, sign language, clowning, and mime. As the projected limbs dance across fabric backgrounds, they spark associations: a fabric plinth—when stepped on—becomes a hole, a pool, a stage. Together, video and sculpture create an immersive passage. The boundaries of the human body and its surroundings blur, the forces moving through a body are evoked. Everything is alive; energy is visible. The installation engages the viewer directly, integrating body, architecture, and image. Installed in the Skirt, viewers move through a passageway. Awareness is evoked of the shapes a body creates in space, the external lines of the body, the internal impulse of movement, the energy transmitted, and the porosity of these distinctions; the inside matches the outside. Annamariah Knox is an interdisciplinary artist from New York City. Knox’s work uses soft sculpture and video of moving bodies to explore the connection to internal awareness accessed through the physical body, the locus of response to the world. In 2023, Annamariah Knox received an MFA from Cornell University, where she was the recipient of the Cornell Council of the Arts Grant. She holds a BA in Art History and Theater from Bowdoin College. Knox has been awarded several art residencies including Anderson Ranch (Snowmass, CO), The Soil Factory (Ithaca, NY), and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (Gatlinburg, TN). Her work has been exhibited at the Millenium Film Workshop (Brooklyn, NY), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), and The Soil Factory, (Ithaca, NY). She is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Adam Liam Rose (Brooklyn, NY) is a Brooklyn-based curator and interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, video and drawing. Rose was a fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts' AIM Program, The Drawing Center’s Viewing Program, and the Art & Law Program. He was awarded artist residencies at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), Fire Island Artist Residency, Triangle Arts Association, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ox-Bow School of Art, A-Z West: Institute of Investigative Living, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Chicago Artists Coalition's Hatch Residency. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago ('12) and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts (‘17). Rose joined OyG as a co-director in 2019. He curated the exhibitions “The Displaced Image,” featuring the works of Anthony Peyton Young, Felipe Baeza, Ilana Harris-Babou, Joeun Kim Aatchim, Peter LaBier, Phoebe Osborne and Tommy Coleman (2021); “The Mother of Sighs,” a solo exhibition by Robert Hickerson (2021); “Take Root in the Air,” a solo exhibition by Darryl DeAngelo Terrell (2023); and “Study for a Scene,” a solo exhibition by Sara Stern (2024).
Past
Painting DeconstructedMay 18 – Aug 25
Sónia Almeida, Polly Apfelbaum, Lisha Bai, Yevgeniya Baras, Gina Beavers, Hannah Beerman, Chris Bogia, Rosanna Bruno, Susan Carr, Kari Cholnoky, Liz Collins, Mark Joshua Epstein, Ada Friedman, Hilary Harnischfeger, Jen P. Harris, Jodi Hays, Valerie Hegarty, Eric Hibit, Morgan Hobbs, Cate Holt, Sacha Ingber, Erin Lee Jones, Lucy Kim, Wayne Koestenbaum, Saskia Krafft, Julia Kunin, Dianna Molzan, Pol Morton, Dona Nelson, Howardena Pindell, Nickola Pottinger, Erika Ranee, Jean Rim, Mariah Robertson, Rita Scheer, Gyan and Kathleen Shrosbree, Kianja Strobert, Emily Tatro, Denise Treizman, Kevin Umaña, Zahar Vaks, Lee Vanderpool, Scott Vander Veen, Rachel Eulena Williams Ortega y Gasset Projects is proud to present Painting Deconstructed, a group exhibition curated by OyG co-founder and co-director the artist Leeza Meksin. The show takes over the main gallery, the project space, The Skirt, and a bonus gallery, creating a single largest exhibit at Ortega y Gasset Projects since the gallery's inception in 2013. Painting Deconstructed explores ideas and motivations behind the concept of deconstructed painting, and the vital role that women, immigrants, LGBTQA artists and POC artists play in questioning, rethinking and restructuring what painting can be, what counts for painting. Working across sculpture, photography, ceramics, painting and installation, while employing fiber, paint, ceramics, film, paper pulp, fur, plaster, hydrocal and many other materials, the artists in this show examine and transgress the various conventions of painting such as the rectilinear shape of the support, flatness, continuity, framing, verticality, the use of only paint and having an individual maker for each painting. Although not all artists in this show insist on being painters their practices and strategies are often in reference to, inspired by, or painting-adjacent, exhibiting the tremendous elasticity of painting and the sheer ingenuity with which contemporary artists are testing its limits. Painting Deconstructed received support from The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and The Andy Warhol Foundation. A catalog designed by Gretchen Kraus of Space Sisters Press will accompany the exhibition, to be launched at the closing event in August.
Past
Time Isn't After UsShelley Smith
Mar 23 – May 13
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Time Isn't After Us, an exhibition of new work by North Carolina-based artist Shelley Smith in the gallery’s main space. Time Isn't After Us, curated by OyG Co-Director Clare Britt, is the artist’s first solo exhibition outside the Southeastern US. "And I listened for a voice But my heart was all I heard" —Edna St. Vincent Millay "What weʼll always have Is something we lost" —Ocean Vuong Time Isnʼt After Us is an exhibition of new, large-scale works on cloth that overlap contemporary digital technologies with ancient textile techniques of hand embroidery and embellishment. Using original photography primarily taken during a residency at Jentel in rural Wyoming as a starting point, Time Isnʼt After Us presents a reflection on death, decay, preservation, and a future both created and lost. Shelley Smith is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in her hometown of Raleigh, NC. Works on cloth serve as the foundation of her practice, which overlaps contemporary digital technologies with ancient techniques of hand embroidery and fabric manipulation to produce otherworldly compositions from otherwise mundane, overlooked moments found in the natural world. Smith holds a Master of Art and Design with a concentration in Fibers and Surface Design from North Carolina State University (2016), and has exhibited work at various spaces in the Southeastern US. Since 2016, Shelley Smith has advocated for her local art community through her work at Anchorlight, where she is the Co-Founder and Director.
Past
Stillness is the MoveAnnie Blazejack & Geddes Levenson
Mar 23 – May 13
The Skirt Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Stillness is the Move, an exhibition of recent work by North Carolina-based artists Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson in the The Skirt. Stillness is the Move is curated by OyG Co-Director Clare Britt. Long time collaborators Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson paint fantastical ecofeminist narratives in Stillness is the Move. Their paintings conjure precarious choreographies between women and wilderness, perilous partnerships that only exist because they are frozen on the surface of the canvas. A spooky humor surprises viewers into playful reimaginings of human-nature relationships. Are the subjects in these paintings friend or foe? In harmony or conflict? The raw materials of these stories (a spider, a web, a rock, a snail, a woman, the moon...) combine and recombine. The paintings resist a singular interpretation of what happens next, encouraging spectators to remain open to multiple conflicting narratives. Fluorescent colors and crisp lines contrast with mushy grays and muted hues, highlighting the artificial stillness of the scenes. A stone skipper stands frozen mid-throw for so long that a spider builds its web in the crook of her arm. These paintings delight in their own immobility, poking fun at their ʻtimelessʼ medium, while also contemplating the relative longevity of a skipped stone, a spiderʼs web, a sunrise, a lifetime, and a rockʼs lifetime. Geddes Levenson and Annie Blazejack both grew up in Miami, FL. Their collaborative art practice grew organically from their childhood friendship. In 2013, while attending separate graduate schools, they formalized this collaboration and have been creating and showing work exclusively as a duo ever since. In their paintings and installations, they explore the relationship between humans and ecosystems as climate change becomes increasingly inevitable. Blazejack received her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine arts, Boston/ Tus University in 2013, and Levenson received her MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 2014. Notably, Blazejack and Levenson have installed solo shows at Lump Projects, Raleigh NC; Anchorlight, Raleigh, NC; The Carrack, Durham, NC; The Art and Culture Center, Hollywood, FL; Placeholder Gallery, Miami, FL; and The White Page Gallery, Minneapolis, MN. They have also shown at The National Liberty Museum, Philadelphia, PA; The Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; and Norte Maar Art Space, Brooklyn, NY. Clare Britt (She/her) joined OyG Projects in 2013 as a founding co-director. She lives and works in Chicago as a freelance photographer creating portraits and working with cultural institutions. She curated the first solo exhibition of photographic work with Chicago artist Kelly Kaczynski Yes; Or As If. She co curated the group exhibition Code Switch with co-director Lauren Whearty, curated the group show Shadow of the Gradient, and curated the exhibition entitled Apparitions with artist Alicia Smith. Clare has been instrumental in creating virtual content for the gallery including starting the YouTube Channel and creating content for the virtual space. She spearheaded Rendezvous, an interactive virtual experience that serves as a platform for creative exchange between artists.
Past
No TimeMichael Ambron
Feb 17 – Mar 18
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present No Time, an exhibition of recent work by New York-based artist Michael Ambron in the gallery’s main space. No Time, curated by OyG Co-Directors Zahar Vaks and Lauren Whearty, is the artist’s first solo show, including both recent works and paintings slowly developed over years. Ambron’s wildly experimental approaches to painting include working with found substrates, collaged fabrics and packaging materials, surprising additives to his handmade paints, and unconventional tools and applications of various media. Michael Ambron not only uses paint to achieve the mark of a color, but to investigate paint’s materiality and broad possibilities. Ambron describes his paintings as being, “dozens of layers deep and composed of hundreds of drawings. Their surfaces are compressed skins whose protruding contours reveal points of contact with once visible forms.” As a professional paint maker, Ambron is both an artist and a chemist, experimenting and playing within the confines of each material’s limits and properties. Colors bounce and vibrate off of one another on surfaces that vary from smooth matte paint to raw burlap, or paint thick with ground stone, soil, or diamond dust. Ambron’s varied and layered paintings are rich with crags, crevices and scrapes, yet they maintain an openness and lightness even as we recognize these textured, heavy, and collaged materials. Ambron’s use of “erasure, removal, and blocking out of various elements creates a tension between that which is familiar and present and that which is absent or past.” Ambron’s methods hone in on the overwhelming simultaneity of our time. Rigorous investigations of and curiosity about his own perceptions, dreams, and worries are made visual through gestures, symbols, and blips of imagery that unfold in a kind of floating and timeless space. Ambron’s paintings immerse the viewer in a loop of wild visions, cartoon violence, lived experiences, and catastrophic world events. They create a vibrating feeling of absurdity and urgency, yet their vibrant colors, repetitious gestures, and familiar looking cartoon hands and eyeballs are reminiscent of watching the world’s chaos by flipping through TV channels or scrolling through digital media. The buzz of this content and the presence of constant disruptions is made digestible with his ease of gesture - and moments of humor and levity that emanate from layer to layer. Michael Ambron (b. 1984) is a visual artist based in New York. He received his BFA from Tyler School of Art and his MFA from The Ohio State University. His work has been exhibited at Jeffrey Deitch in NYC, Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, The Ice Box in Philadelphia, The Wilber Mansion in Oneonta, NY, The Dublin Cultural Arts Council in Ohio, Work Gallery in Ann Arbor, MI, Memorial Hall Gallery at the Rhode Island School of Design, and has been featured in publications for Maake Magazine and ArtCritical. Michael has been a recipient of the The Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship, The Fergus Memorial Scholarship, The Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, and most recently the 2022 Dedalus Foundation Materials Grant. Ambron is the owner and operator of Paint Makers Notes LLC, an organization that offers paint making services, educational workshops, and professional consultation to artists and art based institutions working with raw materials. He currently lives and works in Long Island City, NY. Zahar Vaks (born Tashkent, Uzbekistan) has had exhibitions nationally and internationally. His solo show “Rap Painting” is currently up at Slag & RX Gallery in New York, NY. Vaks participated in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency; the Galveston Artist Residency; and most recently in the Artists in Residence (AIR) program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2021. He was recently awarded the Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant. Lauren Whearty is a painter, educator, & curator based in Philadelphia. She received her MFA from The Ohio State University, and BFA from Tyler School of Art. She has been a Co-Director at OyG Projects since 2017. Whearty has attended Yale’s Summer School of Art, Vermont Studio Center, Soaring Garden, and Golden Foundation residencies. She has recently received grants from Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and Joseph Roberts Foundation. Whearty currently teaches at The University of the Arts and Tyler School of Art & Architecture in Philadelphia.
Past
Wa(r)ning LightDanni O’Brien
Jan 13 – Mar 18
The Skirt Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents, Wa(r)ning Light, a solo show of works by Danni O’Brien in the Skirt, co-curated by OyG Co-Directors Zahar Vaks, and Lauren Whearty. O’Brien’s relief sculptures irreverently and humorously combine diagrams with a variety of found objects to create an intersection of machines, flesh, usefulness, and speculation. Early 20th century contraceptive device patents and schematics from a book titled “Contraception Naturally: A Comprehensive Self-Help Guide to Responsible Contraception From Your Kitchen” are abstracted– becoming glyphs on tablets made uncanny through their use of household objects like a dip’n’snack chip bowl, vintage humidifier, clamshell jewelry boxes, alabaster stone eggs, a star shaped jar opener, and light. O’Brien collects these historically gendered, mostly plastic, and visibly used items once they’ve been discarded. Their domiciliary nature and anthropomorphized and organic forms emulate crevices, cycles, and habitats, all of which point to the body and its systems. Illustrations of a diaphragm insertion or homemade barriers are drawn with pipe cleaners embedded in paper pulp slabs, evoking the earliest forms of language like carved stone petroglyphs, where bulbous forms emerge from organic rock formations. Others are articulations of early, intimate contraceptive aids and tools themselves, forming larger than life machine-like contraptions. In each speculative sculpture, O’Brien uses this scale shift, highlighting the urgency and importance of their content. This site responsive and intimate installation situates paper pulp membraned assemblages in response to the rhythm of the Skirt’s corridor, echoing the exposed architectural textures, like the foundation stone, pipes, and concrete. Lanky, coiling, twisting, and buckling electric cords dance and meander across the walls and floor, signifying connectivity and usefulness. Absurd in their scale and logic, these dysfunctional lighthouses softly glow, attracting, rather than repelling. Like many dichotomies present in O’Brien’s work, this installation draws on the mid-20th centuries futuristic imagination of a space age utilitarian world, while also presenting the failures of that imagined future, and our dystopian present. In The Temptation of the Diagram Matthew Ritchie says, “Diagrams not only describe reality but also in some sense enlarge it, simply by coming into being.” O’Brien’s immersive installation shows this monumentalizing quality in a physical way- each diagrammatic work has the attention-grabbing quality of billboards, inundating us with symbolic language that illustrates our past while warning us of the future. Just as elaborate as they are economic, O’Brien incorporates the precision of a computerized router with hand wrought and sculpted paper pulp to maintain the sense of the hand-made. This approach is evidenced in her bold use of color, surface, and texture. Through reimagining mundane, nostalgic found objects as beacons, O’Brien actively queers these materials, asking them to perform, pretend, and bend– transforming their original function, culminating into a new cross section of material culture and gendered bodies. The resulting reliefs function as absurdist nighlights and talismans beaming with hope for reproductive justice, and warning lights for what's at stake in this current moment of government mandated, waning bodily autonomy. Danni O’Brien (she/they), b. 1992 in Virginia, is a queer, interdisciplinary artist working between Baltimore, Maryland and Central Kansas. O’Brien received their BFA in Sculpture from James Madison University in 2014. Her work has been exhibited with Asya Geisberg Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, Belger Arts Center, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. She has been awarded residencies with PLOP (London, UK), Proyecto Ace (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Baltimore Clayworks, and Art Farm, among others. In 2023 they were a resident artist at Stove Works, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, and Wassaic Project. Her 2022 solo exhibition, Cross Sections, with Tephra ICA, was reviewed in the Washington Post. In February 2024, O’Brien will be the Artist in Residence at Furman University in Greenville, SC and is looking forward to an upcoming two person exhibition with Cleo Gallery in Savannah, GA.
Past
Study for a SceneSara Stern
Jan 13 – Feb 12
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Study for a Scene, a solo exhibition of new work by Sara Stern in our Main Gallery, curated by OyG co-director Adam Liam Rose. Stern presents a moving image installation filmed with cast glass, stop motion, and mime. "Many thought that it was a simple scene. That the blame was clearly on the glass, the window that played tricks on the bird, the glass who pretended to be the sky. But the window had, for a moment, been the bird, when the bird in the sky became the bird in the glass. The window felt shattered. A glass feather floated down and away and up and over the city. I'm the victim, said the window. And the people watched. They were in the theater. The glass was a scrim. And the glass was caught in a loop, the bird’s doppelgänger cemented there. A loop from mirror to water to mirror again. A loop because the glass was always moving. A loop because the glass was Janus." Sara Stern is an interdisciplinary artist from New York City. Her recent projects prod histories of urban development with animacy and speculative fiction. She has exhibited and screened her work in the US and internationally, at venues including Sculpture Center (Long Island City, NY), Anthology Film Archives (New York, NY), the Museum of the Moving Image (New York, NY), The Jewish Museum (New York, NY), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Stern received a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. She is the recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, the Fountainhead Fellowship in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, and several residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA: the Visual Arts Fellowship, an LGBTQ+ Returning Fellows Residency, and the Stephen & Palmina Pace Residency. In recent years, Stern has participated in the Fire Island Artist Residency (Cherry Grove, Fire Island, NY), the Oberhausen Seminar, the Art & Law Program, the Artist Residency at the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center (West Rutland, VT), and the Object Movement Residency at The Center at West Park (New York, NY).
Past
Untitled WallXingze Li
Dec 23 – Feb 12
Project Space OyG is pleased to present Untitled Wall, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn based artist, Xingze Li in our new Project space in OyG. Untitled Wall incorporates a body of work spanning photography and flat objects inspired by mostly blank walls in domestic and semi-public spaces. Each wall has its sense of time, passage of light, and history of marks. Since 2016, the artist has lived in Brooklyn and the observation of these neutral constructs surrounding him offered a momentary room for reverie and relief when he feels disconnected from his hometown Yan'an, China. Immersing himself in the ambiguity and richness of the surface textures, and with the desire to preserve those moments, Li uses his cellphone camera to take images, often of his home, studio, a doorway, or a hotel room. He then turns those cellphone-captured photos into flat sculptural installations that appear intimate and ancient. Each of the works fuses the perspective of the scene when the artist was in front of those walls and surfaces. It emphasizes the specific appearance when the color, shade, and light all come together and make that moment special and personal. Xingze Li (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Brooklyn. He has exhibited and curated in China, America, and Denmark. He has had solo and two-person exhibitions in New York City at venues including Sweet Lorraine Gallery, Tutu Gallery, and Hunter East Harlem Gallery. Recent group exhibitions have taken place at the Cathouse Proper and Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York City, Little Berlin in Philadelphia, and Carlsberg Byens Galleri & Kunstsalon in Copenhagen. He has curated shows including A Picnic State of Mind (2023), and F-1: Out Inside (2019) in Brooklyn, NY. Notable awards include the Marble House Project Residency, 77Art Residency, and Cope NYC Residency. Li earned his bachelor's degree in Oil Painting from Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts in 2015 and received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute in 2019.
Past
Tangential SplintersDec 9 – Dec 18
Lesley Bodzy, Ash Hagerstrand, Lydia Kern, Katie Kotler, Kasia Latos, Hodaya Louis, Lauren May, Duff Norris, Kate Skakel, Lauren Skelly Bailey Tangential Splinters is a group exhibition featuring artists participating in a year-long cohort (NYC Crit Club, Canopy Program led by Rose Nestler). The exhibition explores how individual practices have influenced and diverged during this entanglement. The works presented contemplate the transformation of objects through human and elemental intervention. Binding, weaving, washing, and firing imbue new narratives onto everyday items: mirrors are made of flesh, flowers are bound in embalming thread, and wagons become chariots. Each artist’s approach to transfiguration differs. Inanimate objects transform into figural forms, digital landscapes manifest into tangible space, and artifacts of performance become totems. Together, the body of work explores interwoven ideas about essence as material. The proximity of these tangential practices, tethered by a year-long dialogue, become conduits of emotional and energetic sensitivities. The Canopy Program is a year-long mentorship program, providing artists access to work exclusively with a Faculty Mentor and an intimate cohort of artist peers for three semesters. Cohorts are available virtually via Zoom for artists based across the world, in-person cohorts are available for artists living in the New York City area. Artists meet regularly throughout the program’s year for critiques, discussion and resource building in professional practices and art history lectures. Each cohort receives the opportunity to engage in special workshops, lectures and critique with Guest Speakers, Visiting Artists + Critics. Each cohort culminates in a pop-up group show with an opening reception in New York City at the end of the program.
Past
What's the Point of Precision?Oct 14 – Nov 20
Nathan Ethier, Jim Gaylord, Evan Halter, Rachel Hellerich, Sanou Oumar, Mark Sengbusch, Kelli Thompson, Ann Toebbe, Jonathan Wahl, Richard Whitten Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present What’s the Point of Precision?, a group exhibition curated by OyG Co-Director Eric Hibit. What's the Point of Precision? takes inspiration from Precisionism, an early 20th century American art movement characterized by hard edges and exacting measurements. The Precisionists' painterly style expressed how they saw American culture of their day: a landscape of industrial architecture and machine-made form. Among the most well-known Precisionists are: Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, and Georgia O’Keefe - to name a few. What's the Point of Precision? is inspired specifically by Charles Demuth’s iconic 1928 painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the work, Demuth distills the visual and auditory experience of a passing fire truck into a graphic masterpiece, filled with breathtaking movement and dynamism. What’s the Point of Precision? brings together artists who use exactitude to convey emotion and meaning through the use of abstraction and/or imagery in 2-D work. Nate Ethier’s work has been exhibited in galleries such as David Richard Gallery, NY; Auxier/Kline, NY; Danese/Corey, NY; LMAK gallery, NY; Minus Space, NY; Geoffery Young Gallery, MA; Nancy Margolis Gallery, NY; Morgan Lehman Gallery, NY; and at institutes including the Susquehanna Art Museum, PA; Boston University, MA; Georgia Southern University, GA. He is a recipient of a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Award and was a nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. His work has been reviewed in such publications as the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, the Boston Globe, and the Providence Journal. He is currently represented by David Richard Gallery; NY, where he will present a solo exhibition of new works in 2024. Ethier is originally from East Bay, Rhode Island, and currently lives and works in New York City. Jim Gaylord (b. 1974 in Washington, NC) is a painter and sculptor currently living and working in New York City. He earned his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Berkeley Art Museum. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Gaylord has completed residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. He is represented by Deanna Evans Projects, New York. Evan Halter combines imagery sourced from Renaissance paintings with an interest in the vocabularies of minimalism and abstraction. In 2013 he graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and received his MFA from Rutgers University in 2016. Solo exhibitions of Halter’s work include a presentation at Future Fair with Turley Gallery (2023); Vanitas, The Java Project, Brooklyn, NY (2018); and Partitions, Clay St Press, Cincinnati, OH (2018). His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, such as: Present in a Lonely Image, Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, NY (2023); Knowing When, Turley Gallery, Hudson, NY (2022); This is not Surrealism, Dinner Gallery, NY, NY (2022); Crafting Reverence, Carracci Art, NY, NY (2022); The New Iconographies, Spring/Break Art Show, New York, NY (2021); memoirs, Pablo’s Birthday, New York, NY (2020); The Hawt Show II, Rolando Anselmi Gallery, Atina, Italy (2020). Halter has completed residencies at The Lighthouse Works on Fishers Island, NY (2021), the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada (2016), The Advanced Painting Intensive, Columbia University School of the Arts, New York, NY (2013), and The New York Studio Program in New York, NY (2011). Rachel Hellerich received her Bachelor of Science from Southern Connecticut State University (2003) and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004). She has exhibited extensively in the NY region; her works are in several collections both in the US and abroad. Most recently her works have been on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT in her first museum show. During her time working at the Yale Center for British Art, she has curated and designed exhibitions based in the realm of furniture and design. Sanou Oumar (b. 1986; Burkina Faso, West Africa) lives in the Bronx and works in Harlem, New York. He graduated from the University of Ouagadougou in 2007 with a degree in English literature. In 2015, Oumar moved to the United States to seek asylum. Oumar has presented solo and two-person exhibitions at Gordon Robichaux, New York (2021, 2018); Herald Street, London (2021, 2019); and South Willard, Los Angeles (2019). Group shows include: Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; The Drawing Center, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; Karma, New York; Essex Flowers, New York; Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; Herald St, London; Gordon Robichaux, New York; Mormor Studio, New York; and Joost van den Bergh, London. A monograph dedicated to Oumar’s drawings was published by Pre-Echo Press in 2018. Oumar’s work is held in the collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota. He is represented by Gordon Robichaux, New York, and Herald St, London. Kelli Thompson (b. 1982, Monroe, LA) received her Masters in Fine Art from The School of the Museum of Fine Art Boston and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New Orleans. Thompson has been the subject of two solo exhibitions, the first at Good Children Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2009 and the second at Shelter Gallery in New York, New York in 2023. She has been included in many group exhibitions throughout the United States and been an artist-in-residence at The Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), and the DNA Residency (Provincetown, MA). Thompson’s work has been published in New American Paintings #86, Art Voices Magazine, and Art Maze Magazine. Ann Toebbe (b. 1974) is represented by Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC and Steven Zevitas Gallery in Boston. Recent exhibitions include a career survey, Midway, at The University of Illinois Springfield and a solo exhibition, Days of Our Lives, at Steven Zevitas Gallery. She has been the recipient of numerous grants including the IL Council for the Arts Fellowship in 2022. The primary focus of her paintings is domestic life. Toebbe’s process is labor intensive, employing freehand painting, flat geometry, geometric abstraction, and intricate patterning. Her paintings are often multi-media works with furniture and objects collaged on the surface cut from paper the artist paints in her studio. Toebbe lives with her husband and two daughters in Hyde Park on Chicago's southside. Jonathan Wahl works in drawing, sculpture, and decorative arts. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MFA Boston, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, The New York Historical Society and the Museum of Arts of Arts and Design in NYC. He has been featured or reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, Architectural Digest, Oprah Magazine, W Jewelry, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Metalsmith Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, the Aventurine and the Advocate, among others. Wahl has been awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (one for Craft and one for Drawing). Wahl’s work is exhibited both nationally and internationally. Richard Whitten grew up in Manhattan with Asian and American parents. Whitten earned a B.A. with Honors in Economics from Yale University and an M.F.A. in Painting from the University of California, Davis. He has had numerous exhibitions and is in the permanent collection of museums on both coasts. He is presently a Professor of Painting and has recently completed a term as Art Department Chairperson at Rhode Island College. The Fenimore Art Museum is presently mounting a two-person exhibition: “A Cabinet of Curious Matters: Nancy Callahan and Richard Whitten” (Sept 16-December 3, 2023) and the Morris Museum will present a solo exhibition of Whitten’s work: “Set in Motion: from the studio of Richard Whitten” (February-September 2024). He is also honored to be a recipient of a 2023 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
Past
A (Void) DanceRenana Neuman
Sep 9 – Dec 18
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present A (Void) Dance, a solo exhibition by 2023 Open Call Skirt Space recipient, Renana Neuman. A (Void) Dance is an animation and sound installation using the architecture of the narrow and descending stairwell of the Skirt as a dwelling place of shadows, reflections, and projections. The animations arise from those moments of urgency, when the need for change is vital and can not be ignored. In contrast, the cyclical nature of the artworks shows a demand for ongoing action and persistence to sustain “change”. They dance within, against and despite the instinct to avoid disrupting the existing order. You want to be post But you can’t see past So you just pass the time Feasting on the contradictions Fasting in the spaces between untethered possibilities Occupying none Renana Neuman is a Brooklyn-based visual artist, organiser, and educator born in Israel. Her installations utilise video, animation, projections, and sculpture, interacting with architecture and objects, conjuring spectres of possible pasts and futures. Her works invoke the ghosts of our cultures and invite them to haunt us, to tell us their stories, to play. Her work received support through residencies and awards including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Artist Residency Grant; Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Residency; LABA: Laboratory for Jewish Culture; Ox-Bow Faculty Residency and Winter Intensive; and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has recently been shown at The Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland; 14th Street Y, NYC; Kunstraum LLC, Brooklyn; Barbur Gallery, Jerusalem, Israel; The Immigrant Artist Biennial, NYC; and the RVK Feminist Film Festival, Reykjavík, Iceland among other venues. Renana received a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and an MFA from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts.
Past
LamentationsDalila Sanabria
Sep 9 – Oct 9
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Lamentations, a solo exhibition of work by 2023 Open Call Main Space recipient, Dalila Sanabria. Lamentations marks the first New York solo exhibition for Sanabria. A Chilean-Colombian artist from central Florida. The exhibition consists of a sculptural video installation featuring a Mormon baptismal font made of bahareque, a Colombian indigenous method of sustainable construction involving some of the most basic of earth materials: mud, straw, and bamboo sticks. As a stage of mediary dimension, Lamentations spotlights an imagined mythology centered on the brown self. Through a projected text-narrative exchange and a minimally composed acoustic soundtrack, a protagonist and antagonist converse through poetic dialogue. The architecture in the exhibition is adorned with figurative sculptures and ornamentation clad in mud, hybridizing the effects of both theater and cinema, temple and screen, and inviting viewers to enter its walls. The character of the moon falls at the forefront of Lamentations. Resting between the sun and stars, the moon holds a special relationship with her proximity to earth and susceptibility to cycles of change. As a harbinger of water and renewal, the moon is the closest bridge between the living and the dead, between existing and transcending. Dalila Sanabria (b. 1996) is a Chilean-Colombian artist, writer, and educator from central Florida. Working primarily with sculpture, video, and organic material, her work investigates sacred sites and architecture, asking questions of displacement, precarity, reverence, and belonging. Sanabria has received an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art, a BFA in Art, and a BA in Portuguese Studies from Brigham Young University. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions at Roman Susan Gallery in Chicago, IL, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, Quaid Gallery in Tampa, FL, the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, the Czong Institute of Contemporary Art Museum in South Korea, and the Rio Gallery in Salt Lake City, UT. She has been written about in Art in America, SaltLakeUnderGround Magazine, Terremoto Magazine, and Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. She is also the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, participating in residencies and workshops at the Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and ACRE (Artists’ Cooperate Residency & Exhibitions).
Past
Tightly Knit, Loose FitAug 12 – Aug 28
Anna Adler, Matthew Ballou, Ashlynn Browning, Rachel Burgess, Matthew Burrows, Barbara Campbell Thomas, Frank Chang, Madelaine Corbin, Oscar Rene Cornejo, Zachary Fabri, Debora Faccion Grodzki, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fidencio Fifield-Perez, Manuela Gonzalez, Katarina Janečková Walshe, Yasemin Kackar-Demirel, Judy Glanzman, Michele Landel, Graham Lister, Sharon Louden, Jorge Lucero, Leeza Meksin, Natalija Mijatovic, Tahila Mintz, Jean Gray Mohs, Sean Noonan, Helen O'Leary, Olivia von Pock, Erin Raedeke, Susanne Ring, Anne Schreiber, Angela Renee Shaffer, Mika Sperling, Maria Vargas Aguilar, Markus Vater, Rudy Vavra, Vuth Lyon, Lesley Wamsley Tightly Knit, Loose Fit is an exhibition exploring the dynamics of language and artmaking as interconnected aspects of praxis. The original term of praxis, as coined by Paulo Freire, describes the perpetual process of making and then making meaning. Its concept is fundamental to the mission of the Artist Praxis podcast, founded by the curators Debora Faccion Grodzki and Sarah Arriagada, and central to the conversations they conducted there with each of the exhibiting artists. The conversations gathered in the Artist Praxis podcast explore everything artists work with, from materials to thoughts, from dreams to gestures, from feelings to tools. The exhibition title, Tightly Knit, Loose Fit, alludes to the process of stringing, piecing, or weaving together thoughts, practices, and materials into cohesive entities, much like the exhibited artworks and published interviews are woven into this public exhibition. Tightly Knit, Loose Fit includes 38 artists from diverse backgrounds and artistic practices. Adding to the multicultural, multilingual, and multipersonal conversations in the podcast, the exhibition honors the sovereignty of human creativity by bringing together artworks that show the gaps and pitfalls of language as well as the pauses and discordances in artistic practices. Though based in the United States, Brazil, Cambodia, Germany, Scotland, England, and France, a majority of the exhibiting artists have their immediate roots elsewhere: in Russia, China, Ireland, Serbia, Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Turkey, Vietnam, Slovakia, Ukraine, the African diaspora, and the First Nations of these lands. Within this dense multicultural, multilingual, and multipersonal fabric, Tightly Knit, Loose Fit honors the sovereignty of the space in between the embodied and the materialized. With the option to use the podcast interviews with individual artists as audio guides, exhibition visitors become participants in the unfolding of praxis. This multisensory experience shines a light not only on the works on display, but also on what it means to make art today, and on the human dynamics involved in making sense of creativity as a global community.
Past
Recovecos: De Dorado a SolAngélica Maria Millán Lozano
Jul 8 – Aug 7
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Recovecos: De Dorado a Sol, a solo exhibition in The Main Space by the New York-based artist Angélica Maria Millán Lozano curated by artist and OyG co-director Sabrina Haertig Gonzalez. Inspired by a 2001 photograph capturing the Millán Lozano family's arrival at Orlando's MCO Airport, Recovecos: De Dorado a Sol, meaning "Twists and turns from Dorado (Bogotá's airport El Dorado) to the sun (Florida)," serves as an autobiographical exploración of the artist's migrant journey, a state of perpetual arrival. Recovecos: De Dorado a Sol delves into fragmentos de la memoria embodied by the complication of image-transferred Google Earth screenshots and vintage photographs alongside a soundscape composed of family interviews, poetry, and era-specific songs. Through non-linear storytelling, slang, teen-age angst, familiarity, distancia, and cultural identity shaped by varying appetites for nostalgia- the artwork celebrates the profound musical influences de los 90s y early 2000s, including Shakira's 1998 album "Dónde Están los Ladrones?" Recovecos: De Dorado a Sol marks the inaugural installment of a comprehensive series that examines the artist's family history, as well as the cultural and political influencias that shaped their navigation through migración and displacement adentro y afuera a Colombia impacted by American imperialism. Angélica Maria Millán Lozano is an artist from Bogotá, Colombia, currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Using distressed fabrics, she creates abstract and figurative compositions that question the social injustices affecting migrant families. She focuses specifically on Latinas at home. In response to her home country’s political unrest, Millán Lozano uses her experiences to explore themes of familiarity, absurdity, foreignness, and fear. Millán Lozano chooses the fabrics for her work very carefully – opting for textiles that tell stories of resilience. The pre-worn fabrics reveal evidence of distress, wear and tear, deconstruction, and reconstruction. The artist emphasizes that these mediums can carry narratives of pain – which is fitting given that they often represent the bodies of suffering Latin American Women. Millán Lozano also selected fabric as her medium to return agency and meaning to a material often reduced to “women’s work” in Latinx households. Sabrina Haertig Gonzalez is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, scheme, and text. Her practice of augmenting and collapsing ontological divides between bodies, objects, and products through their materiality and consumption looks to locate perverse, absurd phenomena within the commercial economy. She hopes to encourage an imaginative capacity for post-colonial, post-apocalyptic reform by defamiliarizing our conditioned lexicon for exchange and foregrounding narratives of the extracted. As of late, she is experimenting with the potential of facilitating co-creation and physical activation through hybridized sculptural intervention around female and working-class labor. Could a work manifest sovereignty by heightening one’s awareness of the exhaustive economy through bodily implication?
Past
Walking and Falling at the Same TimeChantal Wnuk
Jun 17 – Jul 3
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Walking and Falling at the Same Time, a solo exhibition of paintings by Chantal Wnuk, curated by OyG Co-Directors Zahar Vaks and Lauren Whearty. Chantal’s large figurative paintings consist of solitary women, who powerfully dominate their landscapes across varying times of day and night, while expressing both physical and internal experiences and states of being. The figures in Chantal Wnuk's work embody fatigue, stress, gravity, nausea, stability, hope, and more. This wide-ranging, shifting, and often contradictory collection of sensations acts as a channel to share her personal experience of diagnosis and treatment of metastatic breast cancer. Through painting, she's searching for a place where hurting and healing overlap and pushing against simplified stereotypes of the sick female body. Chantal Wnuk is a painter currently living and working in Columbus, OH. She was born in Houston, TX, has her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and recently received her MFA from The Ohio State University. She uses her work to better understand and translate the experiences of pressure, weakness, and power resulting from diagnosis and lifelong treatment of metastatic breast cancer. Recent solo-exhibitions include Ahead and Above Water at Stop-Gap Projects in Columbia, MO; A Beach for Me (and maybe you) at Ignition Project Space in Chicago; and I Dreamt of a Perfect Ocean, I Dreamt of Stepping in a Hole at Best Practice in San Diego. Recent group-exhibitions include Being Here with You/ Estando aquí contigo at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and Big Cloud at Urban Arts Space in Columbus. Chantal has been awarded residencies at Acre, Bread & Salt, 1805 Gallery, and The San Diego Art Institute. She is attending Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture this summer. Zahar Vaks born Tashkent, Uzbekistan) has had exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Columbus, Las Vegas, Houston, Vienna, on the island of Svalbard in Norway, and, most recently, in Beijing, China. Zahar participated in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency; the Galveston Artist Residency; and most recently in the Artists in Residence (AIR) program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2021. Lauren Whearty is a painter, educator, & curator based in Philadelphia. She received her MFA from The Ohio State University, and BFA from Tyler School of Art. Lauren has been a Co-Director at OyG Projects since 2017. Lauren has attended Yale’s Summer School of Art, Vermont Studio Center, and Golden Foundation residencies. She has recently received grants from Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and Joseph Roberts Foundation. Lauren currently teaches at The University of the Arts and Tyler School of Art & Architecture in Philadelphia.
Past
I Thought I KnewJun 2 – Jun 12
David De Lira, Jason Eppink, Zherong Hu, Qianjin Men, Rumpelstiltskin Morgan, Wanda-Marie Rana, Daisy Jane Wiley, Qian Zhang, Mengru Zhou Curated by Rodrigo Guzman-Serrano Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present I Thought I Knew, a group exhibition in the main gallery by Syracuse University MFA artists. As we emerge from a period of drastic change and radical uncertainty, we begin to reexamine our intuitions and question our deeply held assumptions: How did I come to think this way? Why wasn’t I aware of that? The answers are almost never entirely satisfying. But while saying “I don’t know” feels like an admission of one’s own ignorance, “I thought I knew” offers an opportunity for self-reflection; a recognition that knowledge and ideas are constantly being produced and reproduced, formed and transformed. Although a statement in the past tense, the phrase is very much about the present. It points to an acknowledgement of the contingency of our comprehensions and apprehensions, our thoughts and wisdoms. The exhibition follows three main axes that cut across our understandings of the body, the world, and the future, posing questions about the paradoxical familiarity and strangeness of each. The works in the exhibition navigate familiar themes and concerns, but do so charily and subtly, threading the proverbial needle between conceptual exploration, material experimentation, personal histories, more-than-human connections, and the place of situated subjectivity in the world at large. The result is an array of works and projects that invite us to rethink our position in the world and to probe our most immutable enduring thoughts and beliefs.
Past
Rage FantasiesAika Akhmetova
May 6 – Aug 28
The Skirt Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Rage Fantasies, a solo project by the New York based artist Aika Akhmetova curated by artist and OyG co-director Leeza Meksin. For their site-specific project in The Skirt, Aika Akhmetova created Rage Fantasies – a video installation with sculptural elements exploring the taboo subject of rage within familial structures. The work is autobiographical as the space is set up to mimic the entrance area or in Russian “подъезд” of Akhmetova’s childhood apartment building. The artist states that “it’s a very typical “подъезд” that is no different from thousands of other “подъезд”s that were built during Soviet Union time in Kazakhstan. This liminal space in between the outside and inside acts as a playground for teens growing up in these apartment buildings, it’s a place of your first kiss, your first fight, a place where you hang around when you don’t want to go home just yet.” In the installation the viewer acts as an accidental spectator who overhears' conversations from family members that are not meant to be heard. There are videos masquerading as windows, false elevator doors and mailboxes that will never get any mail. The subterranean aspects of the Skirt are magnified and accentuated to bring the viewer into a psychologically and emotionally resonant space. Aika Akhmetova is an artist based between New York and Almaty. Akhmetova studied Painting at Rhode Island School of Design and holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. Their practice consists of installation, video, sculpture, and text-based work exploring intimate corners of being. Coming from a complex cultural background Akhmetova has absorbed the fading heritage of the Post Soviet generation along with processes followed by the expansion of late capitalism and secular education. Such contradicting ideologies allow Akhmetova to question the essence of political constructs through personal optics.They had a solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in 2021 and have exhibited in group shows across the US, Central Asia and Europe. Akhmetova was an AIM fellow at The Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2022 and currently an artist in residence at LMCC Arts Center on Governors Island. Leeza Meksin is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, public art and multiples. Born in the former Soviet Union, she immigrated to the United States with her family in 1989. Her work investigates parallels between conventions of painting, architecture and our bodies. Meksin has created site-specific installations for Clea(r)Sky (2021), The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2019-20), The Brooklyn Academy of Music (2018-19), National Academy of Design (2018), The Uptown Triennial at The Lenfest Center for the Arts (2017), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (2016), The Kitchen (2015), BRIC Media Arts (2015), Regina Rex (2014, 2010), Brandeis University (2014) and many others. In 2021 Meksin was awarded the NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work and in 2015 received the emerging artist grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation. In 2019 Meksin was an artist-in-residence at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. Her work has been featured in Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Chicago Tribune, and The Village Voice, among other publications. In 2013 Meksin co-founded Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery and curatorial collective in Brooklyn that she continues to co-direct. Meksin received a MFA from The Yale School of Art, a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA/MA in Comparative Literature from The University of Chicago.
Past
Clapping CornersMay 6 – May 29
Giselle Hobbs Shelby Johnson Annamariah Knox Bec Sommer Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Clapping Corners, a group exhibition in the main gallery by Cornell University MFA artists. For the past two years, the four artists in the show have worked together in an intimate graduate program in Ithaca, NY. Their works explore overlapping themes of the body’s relation to space and to inner states of being. Clapping Corners addresses the resonant energy that a space can hold and the ways it can impact bodies within, creating a reciprocal exchange. The works range across explorations of the body as an environment, the interface between mind and body, and the permeability and blurring of interiors and exteriors. Together, the show considers the nature of physicality, immateriality, the consolidation of self, and of collective action. Bec Sommer’s Sickroom and Sisterhood are two paintings that act as a couple and come from the Starvation Fantasy suite of works. They feature figures through overlapping marks and washes of watercolor, ink, and acrylic paint. Depicting interpersonal and internal conflict within spaces that transform themselves between the interior and the exterior, the privacy of a bedroom is also the exposure of a forest. His video, Michael Friedan, is a play on both the feminist concept of the problem without a name, from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the character of Michael Myers, who is named in the credits of the original Halloween as simply The Shape. This is a psychodrama in which a slasher villain experiences the sort of gendered and racialized emptiness that Friedan describes. Giselle Hobbs’ Brain Medusozoans are mycelium and wood sculptures from her recent body of work, Brain Storm. These works translate her brain into a functioning mycorrhizal network while creating an ecosystem that bridges neural, arboreal, and cosmic structures. Inspired by annual experiences of brain MRIs where she waited apprehensively for the results of her scans, these living sculptures probe the nature of the mind as an environment that has structural parallels with tree roots and galaxies bridged by strands of matter. Annamariah Knox’s Phase Change are gateways reflecting states of being. The screen print and stuffed fabric shapes explore the form of emotions as they relate to bodies within architectural structures. As viewers pass under them, the arches function as devices for passage as transformation, for passage as a state change. The printed images reference body scans, x-rays of limbs, and the soft tendril-like forms invoke certain vibrations inherent to emotional experiences. Shelby Johnson’s Seraphim Trinitas are three singers stuck in an eternal cycle of praising a God who will never accept them. The crocheted figures distort the human form. This work is a reflection on Johnson’s experience of growing up queer in the southern baptist church. They were outed and underwent an attempted exorcism by three women. The trio are simultaneously the women who tried to pray the gay away, the holy trinity, the three fates, and Johnson’s inner id, ego, and superego. Annamariah Knox (b. 1993, New York City, NY) received a BA in Art History and Theater from Bowdoin College (2015), and is currently a Masters in Fine Arts candidate in Sculpture at Cornel University. She is a multidisciplinary artist primarily working with textiles, soft sculpture, and movement. Annamariah has shown work at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN, in Ithaca, NY, Brunswick, ME, and in Brooklyn, NY. Bec Sommer (b. 1997, Saint Louis, MO) received his BFA in painting from KCAI in 2020 and his MFA from Cornell University in 2023. He is a painter and a videomaker who also works in the realms of screenwriting, sculpture, and sound design. Most recently, he has completed a two-part feature length video project that examines the pitfalls of moralizing desire, particularly how these moralizations get used by reactionaries and bad actors. Bec Sommer has shown at Leedy-Voulkos Art Center and Vulpes Bastille in Kansas City, Cornell University in Ithaca, and Ortega Y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY. He has also participated as a student in the SOMA Summer Program of 2022, entitled Avatars in Paradise. Shelby Johnson (b. 1996, Birmingham, AL) received their BFA in Art Education from Texas Christian University in 2018 and MFA in Creative Visual Arts from Cornell University in 2023. They create installations with soft sculpture and sound to re-imagine their past experiences. Johnson has shown in Fort Worth, TX, Dallas, TX, Ithaca, NY, and Brooklyn, NY. They also founded Plant Gallery in Dallas, TX in 2018. Giselle Hobbs received her MA in Art History from Syracuse University in 2020 and her MFA from Cornell University in 2023. She creates large-scale illusionistic paintings that probe the relationship between humans and the natural environment. Her work also includes photography, bio-art, and sculptural installation.
Past
10 Year Anniversary Fundraiser PreviewApr 22 – Apr 24
Come preview over 100 donated artworks installed salon-style at OyG Projects in advance of the fundraising event on Saturday, April 29th. Join us live and in-person on Saturday, April 29th, 6-9pm for the exhibition and raffle of generously donated artworks, the unveiling of a limited-edition collaborative artwork by OyG co-directors, open bar and snacks! Tickets are $250 each for the general public and $150 each for donating artists. To purchase tickets, please visit: bit.ly/3Ln7NFS Each ticket includes: your choice of one artwork in the raffle when your number is called art packing service so your artwork is READY TO TAKE AWAY on the night of the event one limited-edition collaborative artwork by OyG Co-Directors open bar and snacks at the event + 1 guest live entertainment with legendary NYC drag icon Linda Simpson 👠👠 Reaching 10 years would not have been possible without the support of our beloved community. Through thick and thin, you’ve been there for us, and we thank you! We hope you can join us for this once-in-a-lifetime occasion.
Past
Imagined ConversationsTatiana Florival
Mar 4 – Apr 3
The Skirt Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents a solo show by Tatiana Florival: Imagined Conversations, curated by OyG Co-director Nickola Pottinger. Tatiana Florival's first New York solo exhibition, Imagined Conversations, is an audio visual installation that incorporates four video vignettes of conversations; Imagined Conversations, Defeat the Monster, The Standoff, and The Guided Journey. For this presentation Florival intersects videos, miniatures, props, and paintings to build a textured and collaged set. She assembles her footage sometimes using clips of film media, along with animated drawings, photography, and special effects. Florival tells stories with characters that already exist in our mental landscapes in a journey to understand, and suggest explanations for natural yet incomprehensible phenomena. The first video and the exhibitions namesake, Imagined Conversations, is a dialogue between a rebel alliance of fictional and nonfictional figures, the protagonists include Lin Manuel Miranda in costume as founding father Alexander Hamilton, Luke Skywalker, Sojourner Truth, “bandit queen of India” Phoolan Devi and Jean-Jacques Dessalines in a dream like sequence. United under a singular belief of exciting revolutionary change, Tatiana weaves this engagement of iconic figures through collaged sound, keeping the original voices of the characters played. The second video, The Monster, draws inspiration from John Gardner’s 1970’s novel Grendel, which is a retelling of the poem Beowulf from the perspective of Grendel the monster and antihero of the 8th century anglo saxon epic. A "hero" and a "monster," as they both ponder their existences and come to terms with their roles in mythology. The third video, The Guided Journey, is a split screen film that takes us down a magical river surrounded by a surreal landscape on a boat with shadows of two characters. One fictional character, and one real person; Boy Willie from the Piano Lesson, and Audre Lorde poem readings. The two protagonists share ancestral stories and have a conversation about the evolution of black bodies to nature. Reflecting on African-American attitudes towards nature and how it’s conflicts with most of American history; land was a bludgeon used against the bodies of black people, who were forced to work it to raise tobacco, rice and cotton while being deprived of that bounty. The final video Florival presents us with is The Standoff, a fictional western setting with a backdrop of crafted cardboard saloon buildings where two archetypes face off in a duel of conversations. The two characters share ideologies such as the conflict of the modern person wanting to do good in the world, but also wanting to have nice things, wanting to rest but also wanting to act against injustice. Florival addresses the emotional, personal and political content in her work by asserting the perspectives in a myriad of characters from fiction and nonfiction. Watching the videos we can see the artist’s hand in the materials that lend to her world building, and we are raptured and transported to far and near distant memories by mere conversations. Tatiana Florival received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018. She is currently a 2023 Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York Artist in Resident, and a Video Resident at the BRIC lab in Brooklyn, NY. Previous residencies include The Studio at MassMoca in North Adams, MA and BiPoC Artist Residency at Alfred University in Alfred, NY. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions Cohen Gallery, Alfred, NY; TV Eye in New York, NY; Susan Calza Gallery in Montpelier, VT, NYC; Crit Club Group Show, and Kunstraum Gallery in New York, NY. She has been awarded the Fellowship for Black and Indigenous Artists from Studios at Mass MoCA. https://www.tatianaflorival.com/ Nickola Pottinger is an artist and curator born in Jamaica, West Indies. Raised in Brooklyn, she received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008. Recent exhibitions include the Sargent’s Daughters, The Armory Show, New Museum Triennial, New York, Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris, and the Galveston Artist Residency, Texas. Previous solo exhibitions include Deanna Evans Projects, New York, NY, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles. The artist continues to live and work in Brooklyn, NY and will have her first solo exhibition with Mrs. in 2024.
Past
Take Root in the AirDarryl DeAngelo Terrell
Mar 4 – Apr 3
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present the opening of Take Root in the Air, a solo exhibition in the Main Gallery by Detroit-born and Brooklyn-based artist Darryl DeAngelo Terrell, curated by OyG co-director Adam Liam Rose. Take Root in the Air marks the first New York solo exhibition for Darryl DeAngelo Terrell. It consists of an installation spanning photography and sound, with one sound work created in collaboration with interdisciplinary artist R. Treshawn Williamson. At the heart of the exhibition are photographs from Terrell’s series “A Way to Get Gone,” whereby the artist has been seeking and creating spaces for black liberation and escape through the use of portals. The portals appear in each image as a glistening golden orb, smudge, or a mysterious aura, created through the liberatory act of dancing and moving as the shutter clicks. The images were made during Terrell’s travels, calling forth a cross-global network of escape, accessible only to black bodies and made tangible only through black eyes. As the artist writes: “...So we’re looking for freedom, right? We know that it is a possible thing that can be achieved, but here, as black people, we can not access it, but by entering a portal, it becomes tangible, I’m talking bout complete liberation. Again only we can see them, their shine, their glisten, their golden color...”. Through these works, Terrell imagines a world of possibility where true freedom, joy, and peace might be found. As both a point of expansion and departure from the portal works, Terrel includes a new series of black & white photographs titled “We Celebrate Your Arrival,” influenced by the ring shout, a ritual first practiced by African slaves in the West Indies and the United States, characterized by a transcendent moving, shuffling, clapping, and stomping in circular rotation. The images pull together the liminal space of the surrounding portal images, celebrating and embracing those who have made it through. To Take Root in the Air is to find black liberation in the bodily acts of care, movement, song and praise, leading to transcendence. Darryl DeAngelo Terrell (b. 1991), Is a Brooklyn Based, Detroit Born Artist primarily working within lens-based media, performance, and writing; they’re also a Curator, DJ, Educator and Organizer. Darryl received their Bachelor of Fine Art from Wayne State University in 2015 and their Master of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. Darryl works under the philosophy of F.U.B.U (This Shit Is For Us*). They’re always thinking about how their work can aid a larger conversation about blackness and its many intersections. Currently, Darryl is working across two bodies of work; one work is currently exploring afro-surrealism, thinking of how to get all black people free from the presence of whiteness, getting black people to “elsewhere” where the black diaspora can have complete freedom. Darryl is also exploring queerness and desire by way of a fat black femme non-binary alter-ego named Dion. Both bodies are flushed out through photography, video, activations, sound, and writing. Darryl is a 2023 Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York Artist in Resident, 2022 Fire Island Artist in Resident, 2022 Lighthouse Work Fellow, 2021 Black Rock Senegal Artist in Resident, 2021 The Black Embodiment Studio Arts Writing Resident, 2020/2021 Red Bull House of Art Resident, 2019/2020 Document Detroit Fellow, 2019 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow in Visual Arts. Terrell has Exhibited and/or Performed at the Dakar, Senegal, for the Dak'Art, La Biennale, The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago IL), Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH), Cranbrook Museum of Arts (Bloomfield Hills, MI), The Trout Museum of Art, (Appleton WI), Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, (New York City, NY), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago - (Chicago IL) Adam Liam Rose (b. 1990), is an Israeli-American artist and curator, based in Brooklyn, NY. Rose was a fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts' AIM Program, The Drawing Center’s Viewing Program, and the Art & Law Program. He was awarded artist residencies at the Fire Island Artist Residency (Fire Island, NY), Triangle Arts Association (Brooklyn, NY), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, MI), A-Z West: Institute of Investigative Living (Joshua Tree, CA), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) and the Chicago Artists Coalition's Hatch Residency (Chicago, IL). Rose's publication 'Between the Bars' (Genderfail Press, 2021) is in the artist's book collection of MoMa Library, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, PRATT Institute, and The Frick Fine Arts Library in Pittsburgh. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago ('12) and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts (‘17). Rose joined as co-director at artist-run gallery Ortega y Gasset Projects in 2019.
Past
The Dress / What Touches the FloorGyan Shrosbree
Jan 14 – Feb 26
Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents a solo show by Gyan Shrosbree: The Dress / What Touches the Floor, co-curated by OyG Co-directors Clare Britt, Leeza Meksin, Nickola Pottinger, Adam Liam Rose, Zahar Vaks, and Lauren Whearty. The exhibition, activating both the main gallery and The Skirt. For this presentation, the artist will be showing a series of large scale paintings on tarp and stretched canvas, comprising figures paired with pairs of shoes, encircling the main gallery. In the Skirt space, Shrosbree will create a site-responsive installation of her playful and colorful paintings that range in size from bossy large-scale to tiny and intimate. Shrosbree’s subject matter deals with female-bodied, dressed-up figures, evoking fashion’s ability to signify self-determination, agency and empowerment. This is a feminist point of view - full of spirited resistance to the austere modernist and minimalist ideals still circulating today. Shrosbree addresses the emotional, personal and political content in her work by asserting: “There is a psychological note that I want to hit upon, somewhere between extreme discomfort and pure joy. The feeling that our hands are too big and our outfit too fluffy. Once again, you arrive at the party in the wrong attire feeling exposed and without your armor. Or the opposite, the armor is just right and you feel powerful and protected by the colors that surround you.” In Shrosbree’s chosen list of materials, further content can be gleaned. The supports for her large scale figures are tarps –flexible, unfixed and utilitarian. They can be rolled up easily and hung in a variety of ways suggesting make-shift, temporary home structures, or the processes associated with fixing, rebuilding, repainting, redoing. Pairing paintings on tarps with the more conventional stretched canvases, the implied hierarchies within fine and applied arts are playfully debunked. What is the difference and similarities between dressing up our bodies, dressing up our paintings and dressing up our homes? When looking at the world through the eyes of Gyan Shrosbree we start to see that the questions and answers play charades, while finding pleasure in dress-up, juicy colors, flattened shapes, awkwardness, and masquerade. For the opening the artist has also made a fashion line of wearable art, in collaboration with her mother, Kathleen Shrosbree. Gyan paints her vibrant imagery onto unstretched cotton duck, and Kathleen patterns and sews the individual pieces, ranging from tunics to tote bags. The OyG co-director artists will all be modeling the various items at the opening, made specifically for this occasion. —Leeza Meksin Gyan Shrosbree received her B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute, and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has had recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Jeff Marfa, TX; Wrong Gallery, Marfa, TX; Ola Studio, Pound Ridge, NY: nx.ix Gallery, Detroit, MI; Haus Collective, San Antonio, TX; Grapefruits, Portland, OR; Grand View University, Des Moines, IA; Yellow Door Gallery, Des Moines, IA; Ripon College, Ripon, WI; Lovey Town Space, Madison, WI; and The Iowa Arts Council and State Historical Museum, Des Moines, IA. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL; Cleve Carney Art Gallery, Glen Ellyn, IL; Ground Floor Gallery, Nashville, TN; The Woskob Family Gallery, State College, PA; NYSRP, Brooklyn, NY; and Artstart, Rhinelander, WI. Gyan has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell, Yaddo, The Vermont Studio Center, Two Coats of Paint, and The Maple Terrace. Recent publications featuring her work include Hyperallergic, New American Painting, Egomania Magazine,The Coastal Post, Inertia Studio Visits, Precog Magazine, and Maake Magazine. Gyan is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Maharishi International University. She lives and works in Fairfield, Iowa.
Past
Home MeaningOct 22 – Dec 12
Nuveen Barwari Rubens Ghenov Sean Heiser Maria Walker Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents Home Meaning. The show explores ideas of home through various material narratives. Navigating themes of what it means to be part of a diaspora, finding a community, building a family, being an immigrant, and finding home within being transient. The following passages are gleaned from the way the artists describe their work in their own words. Nuveen Barwari employs a specific shiny material that she uses as a layer underneath a Kurdish dress. By bringing this layer on top, she can use “shininess” as a level or layer of confrontation to disrupt the colonial gaze. When dealing with shine in textiles, the viewer's reflection becomes obscure and disjointed. Occasionally, Barwari will stretch and force the fabrics and Kurdish dresses out of their original, flowy state to make them “behave” like traditional paintings. Stapling the fabric to the stretcher bars feels like an aggressive and violent act. Perhaps the tension of the fabric being stretched from different directions is a form of assimilation and a result of diasporic living. Rubens Ghenov’s work lies at the intersection of fact and fiction where painting, storytelling and sound comprise the preponderance of his work. Both their vernacular and potential inexorably constitute the architecture of his praxis. As an immigrant turned naturalized citizen, Ghenov has become accustomed in localizing the past and the present in this precarious juncture where fact coupled with memory compose fiction. Sean Heiser’s paintings are made using flashe and acrylic paint, on either linen or canvas. They are generally constructed in layers, similar to the way an imaging software would operate. The mediating craft of a hard edge shifts his relationship to the paintings; the act feels closer to building than the action of the brush. Flat expanses of interweaving color form broader compositional structures within the paintings and serve as a sort of stage or machine for the interplay of abstraction and representation. Imagery within the paintings is sourced from day-to-day life, lived experiences, and a separate writing practice. While he is interested in the paintings oscillating between the formal, abstract, personal, and imagined, at the most basic level my practice looks to process thoughts and experience into a language of color, form and architecture. Maria Walker’s works in the show are Window Paintings, built to the same dimensions as the windows in her studio. Each painting focuses on a specific point in Walker’s life. Hung together, they visualize a passing of time, a shift through phases of the moon or cycles of living. The works are painted flat with thin layers of paint applied one color at a time over the entire surface. In some areas the watery paint sinks into the raw canvas, while in other areas it collects on top of a gessoed surface, the colors separating out into a visible spectrum. The movement through the window is made physical in the painting, Cold Moon, Open Window. Here added cross-bars and the weaving back and forth of the canvas parallel the movement of air through the open sash of a window in winter. "If one listens closely, they may hear Homie as Home Meaning is spoken out loud. It is not a coincidence that I share histories, experiences, and friendships with the artists in the show. I was an undergraduate at Tyler School of Art while Maria Walker was a grad. Walker’s generosity to share her work and give feedback along with the other grads solidified Tyler as a place of growth, serious rigor, and discourse. I was eager to learn from the grad students and their interactions with me played a significant role in how I approach my practice. Years later, seeing Walker’s work at her openings in New York became a beacon. Her intuition, risk taking, and commitment was an inspiration to me as I was searching for an art community. Rubens Ghenov was at Tyler before Maria Walker and I. We share stories of the old campus and of working with the incredible faculty there. We met briefly once before I came to Knoxville as the artist in residence at the University of Tennessee. We became fast friends discovering that there were multiple times we were in the same room together without knowing it. From Dona Nelson’s opening to a Stones Throw concert. I became close with Rubens and the rest of the Painting and Drawing faculty. This was also where I had the absolute pleasure of working with my amazing graduate students. This included Sean Heiser and Nuveen Barwari. Ghenov, Heiser and Barwari, along with the rest of the welcoming community at UTK created a home for me over those five months. I have a vivid sensory recall of the incredible Kurdish meal Nuveen put together. Bulgar, chicken rice balls in the shape of mini footballs that her mom put in the freezer. Tomato vegetable eggplant soup that Nuveen made in the oven accompanied by lentil soup and homemade buffalo chicken ranch dip. I can still conjure the magnificent Feijoada that Rubens and Lynne cooked for me. Finally, the magical chicken soup Sean cooked for me. I can still taste the Homey medley of chicken, rice lemongrass, Bok choy and mushrooms! These meals, along with our conversations about art, music, film, places, memory and people provided a feeling of home while being away from home. Home Meaning explores the way artists may use observation, memory, experimentation, research, risk taking and play as modes of material narratives that embody, communicate, or question the meaning of home." —Zahar Vaks Nuveen Bawari was born in Nashville, TN and spent her adolescent years living and attending school in Duhok, Kurdistan. Barwari received a Bachelor of Science in Studio Art from Tennessee State University in 2019 and a Master’s in Fine Arts from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2022. Barwari’s expansive practice includes installations; writing; performances; collecting and repurposing artifacts from her community such as photos, rugs, fabrics, and Kurdish dresses. Barwari has worked with and completed projects with the Frist Art Museum, Oasis Center’s Art and Activism Series, Coop Gallery, and McGruder Social Practice Artist Residency. Barwari’s work has been featured in national and international publications including Nashville Scene, Native Magazine, New American Painting, Yahoo Nachrichten Deutschland, Rudaw, Gazete Duvar, Botan Times, and Caravel Magazine. She has exhibited in numerous locations such as Kurdistan’s first Fashion Week (2018) in Erbil, Kurdistan region of Iraq, the University of Michigan (2019), Sugar Gallery (2019) in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Zg Gallery (2020) in Chicago, 21c Museum Hotel (2021) in Nashville, Tennessee, NGBK Gallery in Berlin Germany (2021) and Duhok Gallery (2021) in Duhok, Kurdistan. Barwari is represented by The Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, TN and is currently based out of Albany, NY. Rubens Ghenov was born in São Paulo, Brazil and immigrated to the US in 1989. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art (1999) and his Master of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design (2010). Ghenov has shown nationally in both solo and group exhibitions at Geoffrey Young Gallery (MA), TSA Brooklyn (NYC), Woodmere Art Museum (PA), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2013, he co-curated with Dona Nelson the 72nd Annual Juried Exhibition at the Woodmere Art Museum. Ghenov has been featured in Title Magazine, Bomb Magazine, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. His work is included in many prominent collections, including Fidelity Investments and the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. He is currently a professor of painting and drawing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Sean Heiser, is a Malaysian-born artist relocating to Knoxville from Milwaukee, WI. He received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and was a recent residency fellow at Anderson Center, MN. He has shown work nationally, with recent solo and two-person exhibitions at The Alice Wilds, Milwaukee, WI, and Real Tinsel (with Georg Frauenschuh), Milwaukee, WI. His work has been published in Duomo IV, and New American Paintings Issue 131 (back cover). Maria Walker received her MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art and her BA in Visual Art from Brown University, where she also completed a Capstone Project in Poetry. In 2011 she attended the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. Walker’s work has been published in the Smithsonian Magazine and reviewed as a Critic’s Pick on Artforum. Her paintings and poems have been featured on numerous other sites including The Brooklyn Rail and New American Paintings, and her work has been shown widely in the United States, including in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Provincetown. Walker lives and works in Bronx, NY.
Past
Point A: Chapter OneKatya Grokhovsky
Sep 10 – Oct 10
Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents Point A: Chapter One, a solo exhibition by Ukrainian born Brooklyn based artist, Katya Grokhovsky. Reflecting on Grokhovsky’s experience of growing up in Ukraine and double migration, Point A: Chapter One is a mixed-media exhibition, which investigates memory, place and origin, via installation, sculpture, video, painting and performance. By excavating childhood recollections, reimagining and reconstructing fragments of images, places and objects, a collage of absences and fragmented moments is staged. The presence of melancholy, nostalgia and longing, alienation and anxiety is explored as a space of existence for the inner ghost of pre-migration identity at the time of war and global health crisis Exploring migration, cultural identity, labor, gender, history and the self through research, material experimentation and autobiographical experience, Grokhovsky weaves the personal and political together. Building worlds and personas, which examine stereotypes, prejudices, and trauma, emphasizing the absurd and the uncanny in the everyday, her work reclaims the body through pleasure, chaos and refusal, residing in the space of the critical Capitalist grotesque, whilst occupying a 21C Dadaist Garage-Band Feminist Punk territory. Born and raised in Ukraine, Katya Grokhovsky is a New York-based artist and educator. Grokhovsky received an M.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a B.F.A from Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, Australia and a B.A (Honors) in Fashion from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. Grokhovsky’s work has been supported through numerous residencies including The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA) Studio Program, Sculpture Space, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NYC STAR Residency, SVA MFA Art Practice AIR, Pratt Fine Arts Department AIR, The Museum of Arts and Design Studio Program, BRICworkspace Residency, Ox-BOW School of Art Residency, Wassaic Artist Residency, Atlantic Center for the Arts AIR, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Fellowship AIR, Studios at Mass MoCA, NARS Residency Fellowship, Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, Watermill Center, and more. She has been awarded the New American Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Council Grants, NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship, ArtSlant 2017 Prize, Asylum Arts Grant, Australian Council for the Arts Grant, and Freedman Traveling Scholarship for Emerging Artists, among others. Past exhibitions and performances include Smack Mellon, BRIC Biennial, Flux Factory, EFA Project Space, Equity gallery, Queens Museum, MAD Museum and more. Grokhovsky is a Founding Director of The Immigrant Artist Biennial (est. 2019).
Past
Ilegando a tierra (Fantasy Island)Giancarlo Montes Santangelo
Sep 10 – Dec 12
The Skirt Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Ilegando a tierra (Fantasy Island), a solo exhibition by Giancarlo Montes Santangelo. Utilizing a mixture of archival images, collage, and portraiture, Giancarlo Montes Santangelo presents an immersive iteration of his continuous body of work, fantasy island, a project spanning colonial histories, memory, and the artist's own body and familial history. Looking at images produced in Argentina, Puerto Rico and Spain around the turn of the 20th century, he explores the essential role these images play(ed) in the process of nation building–revealing imperial relationships and, through closer examination, photography’s slippery relationship to history and truth. Montes Santangelo is interested in the ancestral trauma and the normalization of violence and abuse that occurs through these narratives, and how the psychic aftermath of colonization lives in the body. For this exhibition, Montes Santangelo focuses mainly on imagery from Puerto Rico. His work mixes subjects that are found and that are staged, overlapping the make believe and the real, and blurring truth to create tension. On the wall, the artist’s images, his family’s images, public archival photographs and materials, and texts of all kinds weave in and out of each other. Historical events become wrapped in the personal and vice versa. Through interventions with collage and portraiture, Montes Santangelo creates new worlds in which to respond to and understand these traumas, and describes the ways in which healing is wrapped into frameworks of decolonization. Giancarlo Montes Santangelo, native of the DC Metropolitan area, graduated from SUNY Purchase in 2018 with a BFA in photography. In 2019, Giancarlo exhibited his photographs alongside Paul Mpagi Sepuya and other collaborators as part of the Whitney Biennial. In 2020, he published his first monograph, "Improvising Sight Lines" with Monolith Editions – a book that weaves together images and writing and is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA. Giancarlo was recently awarded the Aperture x Google Creator Labs Photo Fund and completed residencies with Tangent Projects and Tilt Institute for the Contemporary Image. He photographs and collages in an effort to map out where he comes from and where he wants to go. Collaged photographs bring together the artist’s own body and staged scenes against archival images.
Past
Cornell MFA ExhibtionJun 25 – Jul 25
Erika Germain, Giselle Hobbs, Shelby Johnson, Annamariah Knox, Tina Lam, Christine McDonald, Erin Miller, David Nasca, Bec Sommer, Emily Loamy Tatro, Layla Zubi A Long Toast showcases a range of projects that reflect the current research and concerns of 11 artists who span a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, textiles, print, audio, and video. The title refers to the desire for a sense of community during a time laden with uncertainty, while celebrating the ability to gather in person after being confined to virtual spaces for so long. Erika Germain (’22) works across painting, printmaking, sculpture and ceramics, and social practice, exploring themes of poetics, language, religion, and community. Giselle Hobbs (’23) creates large-scale illusionistic paintings that probe the relationship between humans and the natural environment while taking into consideration a range of cosmologies from various time periods and geographical locations; her work also includes photography, bio-art, and sculptural installation. Shelby Johnson’s (‘23) work is based in therapeutic reimaginings of reality. This piece addresses traumatic memory and how physical manifestations can rewrite the past. Annamariah Knox’s (’23) piece is an embodiment device, designed to give body to the space between people. Tina Lam's (’22) land-art interventions, sculptures and mixed-media installations explore processes of physical and metaphorical transformation, hybridity, and exchange through the melding of industrial materials with natural forms, scientific notions with personal cosmologies, and somatic experiences with philosophical musings. Christine McDonald (’22) is a multi-disciplinary and concert artist based in Brooklyn working with both complex and rudimentary systems of infrastructure; boneyards and their unique methodologies for archiving civilian and war machines with proprietary spraylat is her recent material-concert project. While using print as a starting point, Erin Miller (’22) often traverses between disciplines—printmaking, painting, drawing, textile-work, and sculptural installation—to investigate themes of perception and the theatrics of making. David Nasca (‘22) makes sculptures mining the animal kingdom for queer metaphors. Bec Sommer (’23) creates transformative works that take emotions, figures, and settings from other media and collages them for a shifting variety of emotional and political motives. Emily Loamy Tatro (’23) is a painter and sculptor interested in the life-forces of earth, fragmentation and recombination, and the sentience of matter. Layla Zubi's (’22) recent work features painting, sculpture, and screen print fused together to imagine the movement of historically known Ottoman-era Anatolian rugs departing from depicted Biblical scenes of Renaissance paintings and transforming as its own individual being. Funding for this exhibition is provided in part by the Cornell Council for the Arts and AAP Alumni Affairs and Development.
Past
ElementalAdama Delphine Fawundu & Hong Hong
May 8 – Jun 19
Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents the two-person exhibition Elemental: Adama Delphine Fawundu and Hong Hong, curated by artist and OyG co-director Leeza Meksin. The works in the show explore ancestral histories and myths, diaspora and the role that the elements play in the creation of art. The exhibition features a large-scale paper-pulp painting installation by Hong Hong and new paper/textile and video works by Adama Delphine Fawundu. Born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa, Fawundu draws on her ancestral heritage evoking resistance through spiritualism and mysticism while contending with issues of forced diaspora, dispossession and longing. Hong, who was born in Hefei, Anhui, China and immigrated to the United States at the age of ten, sees her process of working outdoors on large paper pours as a way of communing through time and space with her ancestors and with the world at large. Embodying the power of nature and the idea of landscape as a body, both artists work on sites that are meaningful in terms of their process and family histories. Healing through art and the construction of new self-determined narratives are at the center of Fawundu’s practice, while Hong collaborates with weather and the elements to create her monumental paper pulp paintings.
Past
The Weakness Against the SilenceZhenya Plenchkina
May 8 – Aug 8
Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents The Weakness Against the Silence an installation by Zhenya Plenchkina in collaboration with Misha Sklar of Vydavy Sindikat, curated by artist and OyG co-director Zahar Vaks. Apart, they can’t unmake the limited, concealed, idiosyncratic meaninglessness of war! The Weakness Against the Silence is an audio visual installation in which personal thoughts and feelings, muddled, mistaken for facts, looking at the intense despair from a safe distance, horrific shadows of fake news and propaganda, trajectory changing, mind raping, derailed, human nature, who do you stand with?… The show creates a visual landscape where number of questions, such as "what is it to be a witness? Is there a safe distance that makes you a witness and not participant?" These questions are brought to light with the background of current world affairs. Bold and frontal approach of presenting the work, makes "weakness " to be the most effective antidote to cruelty of silence.
Past
Swallowed Into the Soft UnderbellyKat Ryals & Kate Stone
Apr 2 – May 2
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Swallowed Into the Soft Underbelly, an immersive installation by artists Kat Ryals and Kate Stone exploring the psychology of the interior spaces we inhabit. The exhibition features new sculptural and image-based work that considers how human life is inadvertently indexed in spaces through accumulation, intervention, and evolution over time. Kat Ryals’ custom plush rugs—designed by assembling and photographing both organic and manufactured detritus—will be installed in conversation with Kate Stone’s animations and photographs of the interior spaces of meticulously-crafted miniature sets, as well as Stone’s carpet sculptures.. These fantasy worlds collide to reveal the ‘muck’ that underlies the veneer of each. “By paring these two exceptional bodies of work,” says curators Clare Britt and Tiffany Smith, “we meld Ryals’ fascination with the decorative exterior surface of the consumer world with the intimate, interior domestic world at the core of Stone’s, highlighting how each artists’ work distorts perceptions of authenticity vs. artificiality, luxury vs. austerity, and the transition from pre-consumer to post-consumer in furniture, decor, and design.” Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, Kat Ryals (b. 1988) is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator, and photographer. Ryals received a BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and a MFA in Photography & Adv. Certificate in Museum Education from Brooklyn College. She has shown her work nationally, including in a solo booth at Spring/Break Art Show in 2020, and in recent group exhibitions with ChaShaMa, Ortega Y Gasset Projects, and The Wassaic Project. She has also completed several artist residencies, including the Wassaic Project, ChaNorth, Peter Bullough Foundation, and a Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center. She is the Cofounder of the arts platform, Paradice Palase, based out of Bushwick, Brooklyn and the Curator of Art at Manhattan nightlife and culture venue House of X at PUBLIC. In recent years, she has been pursuing an interdisciplinary approach to her artistic practice where she creates lens based and digital works, 3D objects, wearables, and installations. Her work examines how manmade power is created through means of myth, spectacle, ornamentation, illusion, and assigned value and her projects are often influenced by her Cajun roots and Catholic upbringing. Kate Stone is a Brooklyn-based artist working across photography, sculpture, installation and animation. Her work explores the domestic uncanny and the narratives embedded in everyday architectural structures. Kate received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Parsons the New School for Design. She has been awarded the Tierney Fellowship, The Lotos Foundation Prize and an FST StudioProjects Grant. Her self-published book, “How We End,” was shortlisted for the Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards. She has attended residencies at NARS Foundation, Artists Alliance LES Studio Program and Mudhouse Residency in rural Greece. Her work has been exhibited at 601Artspace, bitforms gallery, Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, Dinner Gallery, FiveMyles, Rubber Factory, Spring Break Art Show, South Bend Museum of Art, The Museum of Broken Relationships and Transmitter Gallery, among others. Clare Britt (she/her) joined OyG Projects in 2013 as a founding co-director. She curated the first solo exhibition of photographic work with Chicago artist Kelly Kaczynski Yes; Or As If. She co curated the group exhibition Code Switch with co-director Lauren Whearty, curated the group show Shadow of the Gradient, and co curated the exhibition entitled Apparitions with artist Alicia Smith and co-director Eleanna Anagnos. Clare has been instrumental in creating virtual content for the gallery including starting the YouTube Channel and creating content for the virtual space. She spearheaded Rendezvous, an interactive virtual experience that serves as a platform for creative exchange between artists with co-director Tiffany Smith. Clare interviews artists in the Flat File Program in a casual studio visit on Friday’s on OyG’s Instagram Live channel. Clare is a freelance photographer and lives in Chicago, IL and works all over the country creating art and NFTs and telling stories of the people she encounters along the way. Tiffany Smith (she/her) is an Interdisciplinary artist from the Caribbean diaspora working between photography, video, installation, and design to define spaces and experiences that oscillate between the roles of visitor and native and parse the definition of home. She teaches photography at Pratt, Parsons, and FIT and is currently a Bronx AIM Alumni resident at the Bronx Museum. Tiffany joined OyG in 2019, curated Becoming Buoyant in 2021 and has been instrumental in creating virtual content and programming for the gallery, partnering with co-director Clare Britt to produce programs such as Black Equity and Rendezvous that serve as platforms for creative exchange and a source of community support between artists. She is passionate about working with others to create strategies that contribute to building better futures for artists and creatives.
Past
Surface TensionFeb 5 – Mar 21
Dexter Ciprian Rachel Granofsky Christina Graham Kirstin Lamb Caitlin MacBride Sarah Pater Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Surface Tension, a group curated by OyG Co-Director & artist Lauren Whearty. Surface Tension explores contrasts between objecthood and its relationship to painting, sculpture, & photography. The artists included in this exhibition work with objects through image depiction and physical manipulation in order to juxtapose content and blur visual and physical boundaries that create new meaning. Surface Tension explores works that playfully make critical use of traditional notions of the picture plane and our experience of looking. Upon approach these works expand beyond their initially perceived sense of flatness and exhibit a resistance to the historic and often assumed presentation of painting - a fixed image displayed on a wall with an ideal frontal perspective viewpoint. Working with the slippage and contrast between the real and the simulated, the flat and the dimensional, or the abstract and representational, these works engage the viewer physically, conceptually, and perceptually. The more time spent closely looking, the more these works reveal a richness of secrets, stories, and content. The objecthood of many works in the show blur boundaries between reality and artifice - as the works reveal physical and illusionistic surprises - like doubled images, surprise reliefs, or everyday materials repurposed or investigated in a new light. Objects represented throughout the show range from art historic references to still life to contemporary things of daily familiarity and work in tandem with representations or depictions of objects and their domestic spaces - immersing us in an environment where specific combinations open up narratives, histories, and a curiosity for more connections. Dexter Ciprian (b. 1984, he/him), is a Dominican-American visual artist living and working in The Bronx, NY. His work explores migration, diaspora and mythology and has been exhibited nationally. He is a current Artist in Residence at The Bronx Museum, and his work has appeared or been reviewed in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, and Artnet Magazine, and published in Architecture Inserted (W.W. Norton & Co., 2012). He is co-director of Open Doors, an arts and justice initiative which supports the creativity and leadership of Black and Latinx people who use wheelchairs and inspires action for safer more just communities. He holds an M.Arch from the Yale School of Architecture (2009), and a B.S. from the University at Buffalo (2006). Rachel Granofsky has an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA from Pratt Institute. She had her first solo show at Rachel Uffner in New York City in 2019. She was the 2019 Deutsche Bank NYFA Fellow. Rachel was an artist in residence at the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lighthouse Works, Ox-Bow and Greatmore Studios. She has exhibited in group shows in South Africa, Germany, Sweden, Canada, the U.S.A. and Brazil. Born in Montreal, Quebec, Rachel currently lives and works in the Catskill Mountains. Christina Graham (b. 1989) is an artist from Brooklyn, NY. Her work uses mirrors, windows, and curtains to explore interiority and the poetics of perceptual experience. Christina graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and is currently pursuing an MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. They have attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Cuttyhunk Island Artist Residency, and Trestle Art Space. Christina’s paintings have been included in group shows at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn; Camayuhs, Atlanta; and Fjord Gallery, Philadelphia; and solo exhibitions at White Couch Projects and Brethren Gallery, Queens. They live and work in Queens, NY. Kirstin Lamb is a painter living in Providence, Rhode Island and working in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Kirstin studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with an MFA in 2005, and she received her AB in Visual Art and Literatures in English from Brown University in 2001. Kirstin’s work has been shown in venues across the country, recently showing at the Spring Break Art Fair in NY, Periphery Space at Paper Nautilus in Providence, RI, the Wassaic Project in Amenia, NY, the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA and Providence College Galleries in Providence, RI, among others. She has attended residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Bunker Projects, the Wassaic Project, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, The Ora Lerman Trust Soaring Gardens Artist Residency, and the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation. Kirstin recently completed a two-year contract curator position at The Yard, Williamsburg, a coworking space in Brooklyn that hosts solo and group shows quarterly, and has begun planning online and new curatorial projects. Kirstin has taught painting and drawing at a range of New England colleges and is currently working at Clark University in Worcester, MA, teaching painting and drawing courses on the undergraduate level. Kirstin gratefully acknowledges the role that her 2020 Rhode Island State Council for the Arts grant has played in her newest work. Her work is in the collections of Fidelity Investments, Boston, MA, the Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA, and Providence College, Providence, RI, among others. Caitlin MacBride is an artist based in Hudson, NY. Her work engages material culture and artifacts in an exploration of labor, desire, and belief systems. MacBride’s paintings balance various languages of painting with the structures of utilitarian objects sourced from museum archives. MacBride has a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. She has shown at Fisher Parrish, Heroes, Chapter NY, Real Fine Arts, Greene Naftali, Zach Feuer, Jack Barrett Gallery, Hesse Flatow, and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein among others. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Modern Painters, Art Forum, New York Magazine, and Vogue.com. Sarah Pater (b. 1987, Wilmington, DE) is a painter based in Philadelphia. Her work blurs the aesthetics of boredom and attention with office-leisure-domestic design, daily experiences, and painting tropes. Her paintings have been included in exhibitions at Orgy Park, Brooklyn; Brennan & Griffin, New York; Fjord, Philadelphia; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; 808 Gallery at Boston University, Boston; and RISD Museum, Providence, among others. She has been awarded residencies at Lighthouse Works, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation, and the Ora Lerman Charitable Trust. She received an M.F.A. in painting from Rhode Island School of Design and a B.F.A. from Boston University. Lauren Whearty is an artist, educator, and curator living and working in Philadelphia, PA. She received her MFA from The Ohio State University (Columbus, OH), and her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University (Philadelphia, PA). Lauren has been a Co-Director at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY since 2017. Lauren has attended residencies such as Yale’s Summer School of Art through the Ellen Battle Stoeckel Fellowship, The Vermont Studio Center, and the Golden Foundation. She has recently received an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Her work has been exhibited at The Delaware Contemporary (Wilmington, DE), The State Museum of PA (Harrisburg, PA), The Woodmere Museum (Philadelphia, PA), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Bridgette Mayer Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Center for Emerging Visual Artists (Philadelphia, PA), Satellite Contemporary (Las Vegas, NV), Monaco (St. Louis, MO), The Painting Center (New York, NY), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Underdonk (Brooklyn, NY), and Deanna Evans Projects (Brooklyn, NY). Lauren currently teaches at The University of the Arts and Tyler School of Art & Architecture in Philadelphia.
Past
The Displaced ImageMay 1 – Jun 14
Anthony Peyton Young, Felipe Baeza, Ilana Harris-Babou, Joeun Kim Aatchim, Peter LaBier, Phoebe Osborne, Tommy Coleman Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present The Displaced Image, a group exhibition curated by OyG co-director Adam Liam Rose. In The Displaced Image, artists explore various ways in which fragmentation persists in our contemporary lives. This might reference our collective moment of loneliness and distance, the depths of individual interiority, as well as the fragmentation and displacement of bodies by various powerful actors and systems. Collectively, the works in the exhibition imagine a means for using fragmentation as a subversive tool towards wholeness. Works give reference to both the psychologically and physically splintered body. Through the use of layering and transparency, Joeun Kim Aatchim’s intimate and meticulously rendered silk paintings offer a quiet yet powerful look into the space between what is seen and what is recalled. Anthony Payton Young’s recent collages use fragmentation as a means to memorialize black and brown individuals murdered due to racial violence and police brutality, drawing our attention to the incomplete images left from lives lost. In Felipe Baeza’s series of small collaged works, hybrid figures are formed by overlaying pornographic magazine clippings with reproductions of mesoamerican figurative sculptures. Some artists in the exhibition approach images and text through processing (cut and pasted, edited, overlaid, downloaded, degraded). Ilana Harris Babou’s installation combines layered sourced video and collage to explore the ways that wellness industries such as infomercial psychics and health gurus target individuals through media. In Tommy Coleman’s works, scraps of language are used as drawing, creating an effect that is simultaneously confrontational and humorous. Similarly, Peter LaBier’s large-scale paintings isolate subjects of the Western canon, including images of horses and columns, stripping them of their context and thereby challenging their dominance. Anthony Peyton Young is a Boston based artist born and raised in Charleston, WV. Working primarily in painting, drawing, paper, and printmaking, Young’s work explores identity, history, and memorialization with heavy influences from Black Americana, film and his home state West Virginia. In his project They Have Names, he uses portraiture as a tool to memorialize the numerous black and brown individuals murdered due to racial violence, hate crimes, police brutality, and fears associated with racial stereotyping. He earned his BA from West Virginia State University and his MFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts/ Tufts University. Felipe Baeza is an artist born in Guanajuato, Mexico. Baeza's practice is equal parts confrontation of violent pasts and a tribute to people whose sense of personhood is constantly litigated and defined by those in power. His “fugitive bodies” appear in different states of becoming and at times are even abstracted to the point of invisibility. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and an MFA from Yale University. Baeza lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Ilana Harris-Babou is an interdisciplinary artist whose works span sculpture and installation while grounded in video. She speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor as a means to digest painful realities. Her work confronts the contradictions of the American Dream: the ever unreliable notion that hard work will lead to upward mobility and economic freedom. She has exhibited throughout the US and Europe, with solo exhibitions at The Museum of Arts & Design, Larrie, 80 WSE, and Hesse Flatow in New York. Other venues include Abrons Art Center, the Jewish Museum, SculptureCenter, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the De Young Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has been reviewed in the New Yorker, Artforum, and Art in America, among others. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, and a BA in Art from Yale University. Joeun Kim Aatchim—in search of transparency in vision and voice—a medium-independent artist Joeun Kim Aatchim crafts contemporary relics and installs audiovisual essays. She is a self-directed lifelong learner of various ancient art, such as Korean silk paintings, silverpoint, mosaics, ceramics, fresco, intaglio, bookmaking, and ventriloquism. Her recent research focuses on her missing stereovision and the psychology of women. Aatchim's projects have shown internationally, namely at SBC Galerie d'art Contemporain in Montréal, Long March Space in Beijing, and 80 WSE Gallery, The Jewish Museum, and The Drawing Center, in which the Foundation of Contemporary Arts supported her project. She has received fellowships at Nida Art Colony in Lithuania, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Triangle Art Association, The Lighthouse Works, and Open Sessions at The Drawing Center. She earned her BFA in Studio Arts at New York University and MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Peter LaBier is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, drawing, music, dance and performance. He is the founding member of the New York based band, Psychobuildings. LaBier’s work has been exhibited in New York, LA, Miami, Houston, and internationally in Berlin and Hamburg. LaBier received his B.A. at Vassar College and his MFA from Columbia University. Phoebe Osborne is an artist and choreographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Their works have been presented across the US and Europe, including commissioned performances at Transmediale Berlin, La Caldera Barcelona, SFMoMA and Oakland Museum of California, and Lenfest Center for the Arts. They have exhibited at False Flag (Long Island City), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), The Boiler Pierogi Gallery (NY), E-flux Bar Laika (NY), and Jacuzzi (Amsterdam). Osborne received an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and an MA in Choreography from DAS Graduate School at the Amsterdam University of Arts. Tommy Coleman is a Florida grown, Brooklyn based artist whose investigations of language, confession, and intimacy lead to the creation of staunchly sincere albeit witty works of art that weed out the invasive moments in our lives and put them in the spotlight. Coleman received his BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University. His work has been exhibited internationally at The Museum of Art and Design (NYC), Homesession (BCN), UCLA, The Windor (MD), The Atlanta Contemporary. Adam Liam Rose is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, drawing, video and installation. Born in Jerusalem and raised mostly in the United States, his works investigate the aesthetic systems of power embedded within architecture. Rose received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago ('12) and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts (‘17). He joined as co-director at artist run gallery Ortega y Gasset Projects in 2019.
Past
Becoming BuoyantMar 20 – Apr 26
Melissa Alcena Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle Adrienne Elise Tarver Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Becoming Buoyant, a three person exhibition curated by OyG Co-Director Tiffany Smith. Becoming Buoyant centers water as a symbol of life, departure, and return for Black bodies of the diaspora; how water functions simultaneously as a site of freedom and leisure, ritualistic healing, and generational trauma. The collected works present varied contextual relationships to the physical, spiritual, and psychological realm, that describe the process of becoming buoyant as an act of resistance, and the need to find freedom in an unrelenting tide as an act of survival for lives swept up in the wake. Melissa Alcena’s tenderly composed photographs demand attention and command a degree of care emphasized by their life sized presentation. Countering this energy, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s seemingly delicate and intimate collages summon ancestors from the deep sea of the past to contend with the present/future, channeling the measured intensity of Yemoja. Adrienee Elise Tarver’s watercolor paintings of figures seen floating and in repose claim ownership over the rituals of rest, relaxation, and restoration that chart the way to safe harbour. “I am interested in ways of seeing and imagining responses to terror in the varied and various ways that our Black lives are lived under occupation; ways that attest to the modalities of Black life lived under occupation; ways that attest to the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, and despite Black death. Where is the breaking point, the breath, the pause, where the circulation, production, and reception of images of Black suffering and, importantly, the pleasure in them are concerned?” —Christina Sharpe from ‘In the Wake: On Blackness and Being’ Melissa Alcena is a Bahamian portrait and documentary photographer based in Nassau, The Bahamas. In 2012, she completed an Applied Photography course at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. Melissa moved back to The Bahamas in 2016, where she became inspired to take portraits of working class and marginalised Bahamians in their environments. Her work focuses on shifting the paradise narrative of the Caribbean, by directly engaging with the people of The Bahamas in the everyday and tapping into the humanity of its citizens. Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer, and performer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. A term that has become a mantra for her practice is the "Historical Present," as she examines the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective. Her artwork and experimental writing has been exhibited and performed at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Project Row Houses, The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire, SF MOMA, The BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and Páramo Galeria, Guadalajara, Mexico. Hinkle’s work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Hinkle is also the recipient of several awards including The Cultural Center for Innovation’s Investing in Artists Grant, Social Practice in Art (SPart-LA), The Jacob K Javits Fellowship for Graduate Study, The Fulbright Fellowship, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artists Award, and the SF MOMA 2019 SECA Award. She has artworks in the private collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire, The San Jose Museum of Art, and SF MOMA. Her writing has appeared in Obsidian Journal, Artforum and Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics. She is the author of Kentifrications: Convergent Truths & Realities (2018) published by Sming Sming Books & Occidental College and SIR (2019) published by Litmus Press Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist based in Atlanta and Brooklyn with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. Her work addresses the complexity and invisibility of the black female identity in the Western landscape--from the history within domestic spaces to the fantasy of the tropical seductress. She has exhibited nationally and abroad, including museum shows at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Children’s Museum of Manhattan, as well as solo exhibitions at Ochi Projects in Los Angeles; Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY; Victori+Mo in New York; BRIC Project Room in Brooklyn; and A-M Gallery in Sydney, Australia. She has been commissioned for an upcoming New York MTA project, a Google Artist-in-Residence commission, and received the inaugural artist commission prize for Art Aspen in 2019. She has been featured in online and print publications including the New York Times, Brooklyn Magazine, ArtNet, Blouin Art Info, Whitewall Magazine, Hyperallergic, Ingenue Magazine, among others. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from Boston University. Tiffany Smith is an interdisciplinary artist from the Caribbean diaspora working in photography, video, installation, and design. Using plant matter, design elements, patterning and costuming as cultural signifiers, Smith creates photographic portraits, site responsive installations, user engaged experiences, and assemblages focused on identity, representation, cultural ambiguity, and displacement. Smith’s practice centers on what forms and defines communities of people of color, in particular; how they are identified and represented, and how they persist. Smith received her BFA from S.C.A.D., Savannah, GA and her MFA from SVA, NY. Her work has been exhibited internationally including shows at National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, The Bronx Museum, MassArt, The National Gallery of Jamaica; during Photoville, Photo NOLA, and Spring Break Art Show; and in solo exhibitions at The Wassaic Project, Recess Assembly, Brooklyn, NY, and Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA. Her work has been published in Womanly, Nueva Luz, Field Magazine, Bitch, Culture, and Posture Magazine. Tiffany Smith is a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Interdisciplinary Work from The New York Foundation for the Arts, an EnFoco Photography Fellowship Awardee, a Cameron Visiting Artist at Middlebury College, VT, and a current Artist in Residence in The Bronx Museum Block Gallery Residency Program. Smith is currently based in Brooklyn, NY where she serves as Co-Director of Ortega y Gasset Projects and teaches at Pratt, Parsons, and ICP.
Past
A Change in Mood and WeatherMark Joshua Epstein
Mar 20 – Jun 14
The Skirt Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present A Change in Mood and Weather, a solo exhibition of new work by Mark Joshua Epstein in The Skirt space. Featuring shaped paintings, photographs, and a site-specific wall painting, A Change in Mood and Weather transports viewers inside the temporal and perspectival shifts brought about by the artist’s move from New York City to Ann Arbor, Michigan. The exhibition is curated by OyG Co-Director Zahar Vaks. Reckoning with the change that accompanies a new studio and landscape, Epstein’s shaped paintings, his largest to date, delve deeper into queer ornament and graphic excess, while limiting their color schemes. Taking inspiration from pattern and decoration, op art, and furniture design, these works continue the artist’s use of ornate patterning and overlapping panels that confound perception, while relishing in a new discomfort of compositional order. Edging toward a warped rectilinearity, Epstein’s paintings impress not just in their flair but in their intricate details. One painting’s title, Finding refuge in inefficiency (2021), nods to the pleasures found in the laborious and time-consuming nature of pattern-making exemplified in the paintings on view. As with all of Epstein’s paintings, these works continue to challenge a viewer’s sense of taste and orientation. Photographs on exhibit further emphasize Epstein’s painting process. The images reproduce cut-outs created from scraps of paper, which the artist used to generate repetitive patterns within these paintings. Normally used to deliver flatness and depth, shape and form to his fiberglass surfaces, the cut-outs in Epstein’s photographs reframe the landscape surrounding his studio, interweaving his creative environs throughout The Skirt. Running behind, atop, and alongside the paintings and photographs is a site-specific wall painting containing vivid, chromatic hues and a jagged, embellishing frieze. Blending fore and back, wall and work, high and low, remembrance and forgetfulness, A Change in Mood and Weather refuses the either/or of binary polarities and opposing geographic pulls. All the while, by latticing together different planes, motifs, and marks, Epstein's work never forgets its own amusement. Mark Joshua Epstein received an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Arts, University College London, and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Epstein has had solo or two person shows at Spring/Break Art Show (NY, NY), Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca College (Ithaca, NY), NARS Foundation Project Space (Brooklyn, NY), Caustic Coastal (Salford, England) Vane Gallery (Newcastle, England), Demo Project (Springfield, IL), Biquini Wax Gallery (Mexico City, Mexico), Breve (Mexico City, Mexico) and Brian Morris Gallery (New York, NY). Selected group shows include Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, IA), Collar Works (Troy, NY), Good Children Gallery (New Orleans, LA), Monaco (St Louis, MO), DAAP Galleries at the University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH), and Beverly’s (New York, NY). Epstein has been a resident at Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, Jentel Foundation, Macdowell Colony, and Saltonstall Foundation amongst others. His work has appeared in publications such as New American Paintings, Art Maze Magazine and Dovetail. Epstein has curated or co-curated exhibitions at Woskob Gallery at Penn State University (State College, PA) and MONO Practice (Baltimore, MD), amongst other venues. He currently works as a lecturer at the Penny Stamps School of Art and Design at University of Michigan. Zahar Vaks is a visual artist born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and living in Brooklyn, N.Y. His paintings, drawings and structures are material narratives actualized by a multi-sensory approach. The olfactory and tactile elements of his work are just as important as the visual. Vaks received his BFA from Tyler School of Art, and his MFA from The Ohio State University. He has exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, Columbus, Las Vegas, Houston, Vienna, on the Island of Svalbard in Norway, and most recently in Beijing, China. In 2018, Zahar was invited to participate in the Rauschenberg Residency. In 2012- 2013, he attended the Galveston Artist Residency. He will be participating in the Artists in Residence (AIR) University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2021. He is a Co-Director of Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG), an artist-run curatorial collective and exhibition space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Past
Ode to GreenFeb 6 – Mar 15
Paul Anagnostopoulos, Kari Cholnoky, Michael Dotson, Meredith Hoffheins, Butt Johnson, Irena Jurek, Zachary Keeting, Shaun Krupa, Keisha Prioleau-Martin, Zach Seeger, Pamela Sneed Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Ode to Green, a group exhibition curated by OyG co-director Eric Hibit. Consider the “versions” of green: there are light greens, dark greens, yellow greens, blue greens. These versions have different “flavors”: some greens are sour, others are sweet. Some are warm, others are cool. Some are appetizing, others are repulsive. Some evoke nature, while others feel artificial. Green is tremendously versatile and straddles these associative polarities while retaining its identity as GREEN. Ode to Green is about the role of greens in the worlds artists create. Rather than a mere plethora of green, this exhibition includes works in which greens play a crucial role (even if it isn’t the work’s predominant color). Among these artist’s evocations: the skin of a monster, feathers, golf courses, green screen, mysterious sludge, and summer leaves. And what would green be without its complement: red? Or orange?
Past
Black Mayonnaise and Bio-MutantsEzra Jude
Jan 9 – Mar 15
Situated within The Skirt, OyG’s dedicated space for site-specific installations, Black Mayonnaise and Bio-Mutants is a reliquary for toxic waste and chemical mutagens. Just across the street from the gallery, the Gowanus Canal is a symphonic stink of innumerable putrefactions. An EPA Superfund site, the canal has been designated a dangerously polluted hazard of national priority. Government proposals to decontaminate the poisonous waters are expensive and brusque: remove the toxic sediment, bury it in a landfill, and repave the canal bed with fresh concrete. The cleanup plans will rollout this year (2021), dredging the two miles of septic debris – a deadly concoction of coal tar, lead paint, mercury, and raw sewage. Ezra Jude responds to environmental catastrophes such as this via a perverse and eco-feminist lens, reassessing both the anthropocentric responsibility and the human-centric solutions. Indeed, the canal has already devised its own methods of remediation. Entirely new life forms have evolved and adapted to these waters, consuming our excrement and refuse and slowly creating for themselves a healthy and habitable environment. Black Mayonnaise and Bio-Mutants is an aesthetic shrine to the tenacity of microorganisms, to their accountability and stewardship. It is likewise a visual and aural timeline of the historical events that brought the canal to its toxic present. Ezra Jude (they/he) devises ecological interventions and speculative futures. Dystopian and pseudo-scientific, these installations engage with queer identity and the Anthropocene as a means to reimagine the self-imposed binary between human culture and the environment. While seeking resolutions to the imminent problems of climate change and trans/non-binary oppression, each project is approached with a sense of rewilding, re-queering, and reassessing humankind’s relationship to this planet and its manifold organisms. Based between London and NYC, Ezra is a Marshall Scholar and received an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Their sculptures and performances have been exhibited at RIXC Center for New Media Culture (Latvia), the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and Arebyte Gallery (London). Ezra Jude is the art/performance pseudonym of Antonio Campelli.
Past
Flat File 2021Jan 9 – Feb 1
Aidan Boyle, Alex Lukas, Alicia Little, Amanda Konishi, Avital Burg, Bella Carlos, Brooklynn Johnson, Bryan McGinnis, Christine Stiver, Claire Seidl, Claire Whitehurst, Clara Nulty, Cory Emma Siegler, Daniela Gomez Paz, Devra Fox, Eleanor Conover, Fei Li, Gyan Shrosbree, Hilary Price, Ian Etter, Jackie Hoving, Jamie Mirabella, Kate Jeanette Liebman, Lisa di Donato, Loren Erdrich, Lucy Nordlinger, Mary Laube, Mike Ambron, Nicholas Moenich, Quimetta Perle, Renana Neuman, Sammy Bennet, Winnie Sidharta Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Flat File 2021, now in its second season.
Past
TianguisMónica Palma
Dec 5 – Dec 21
Also on view in The Skirt: Rachel Stern "This Terrestrial Paradise" Ortega y Gasset is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Mónica Palma’s work curated by Eleanna Anagnos. This is her second solo exhibition with the gallery. Palma’s labor-intensive, large works explore Pre-Columbian culture, psychoanalysis, alchemy, ritual, divination, and healing. Spanning different genres and media, Mónica Palma employs drawing, textile design, painting, sculpture and performance to negotiate the breach between her Mexican heritage and her experience living in the US. Tianguis is a large floor drawing, an evolving project, that will take form over a period of weeks as the artist gathers ingredients from different vendors in the neighborhood, macerating them into pigments, rubbing and pouring them into the surface. Palma will also utilize materials sent by her mother and sister who live in Mexico City. The project is a tribute to those whose wisdom and labor put food on our tables. Palma discusses the project: For once, I want to conclusively stay on the ground, begin there and end there. I might walk or take the R train from Ortega y Gasset Projects to 45th street and 5th Avenue. I’ve been in Sunset Park many times looking for ingredients, I know some of the grocery stores, not by name yet, but I know what they carry. I’ve seen nopales, I’ve seen fresh aromatic herbs, I go there, order in Spanish, my message is received without a trace of equivocality. Some vendors in Mexico keep their vegetables on the floor, close to the soil where they grew. I don’t know if they do it out of convenience or out of attachment. I’ve seen seeds and flower rugs in Humantla, Tlaxcala – what a celebration, what order! But what am I celebrating? Is this even a celebration? I’ll be a quadruped or a baby crawling, a body twisting, and kneeling. The word Tianguis is derived from the Nahuatl word for an open-air market. Mónica Palma was born and raised in Mexico City, she studied visual art at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Veracruz. In 2008 she received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has been living and working in Brook- lyn since 2008. Her work has been shown at TSA (NYC), 245 Varet Street (NYC), Ortega y Gasset Projects (NYC), the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City), Soloway Gallery (NYC), Underdonk Gallery (NYC) and Essex Flowers (NYC). Eleanna Anagnos (She/her) (born Evanston, IL) is a Chicago-raised, New York City-based artist and curator. In her work she explores the relationship between our bodies in space, notions of being, and the concept of time. Eleanna has received awards from Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts; The Rauschenberg Foundation Residency ; The 2018-2019 Grant Wood Fellow in Painting; Yaddo; BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation; The Anderson Ranch; The Atlantic Center for the Arts; and The Joan Mitchell Foundation. Recent exhibitions include: Monaco, St. Louis; Good Naked, Brooklyn, NY; Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Brooklyn, NY ; The BRIC Biennial in Brooklyn, NY , High Noon Gallery, New York, NY. Her curatorial projects have been featured in The New York Times; Art in America; and the New York Observer. Eleanna has been a Co-Director at Ortega y Gasset Projects since 2014.
Past
BelievabilityKristen Mills
Sep 12 – Oct 12
Also on view: Rachel Stern "This Terestrial Paradise" Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Believability, a solo exhibition of new work by Open Call Main Space recipient, Kristen Mills. Believability, an exhibition of new works by Kristen Mills, takes her video work into a physical dimension. Literally. Ortega y Gasset Project’s Main Space has become a stage setting for videos featuring hand-made scenes, props, and backdrops composed much like the intimate studio sets of her video works. The exhibition continues Mills’ ongoing video manifesto - a durational piece made up of a number of video shorts. Though farcical and non-linear at times, the content of this work is directly dictated by her circumstances as her own daily realness blatantly shines through. This is where believability exists. Artist Statement: I make videos about seemingly innocuous scenarios. I use video to engage with timing and humor, and I use myself as a surrogate for others, freeing me to poke fun at pop-cultural assumptions and behaviors. In these various versions of “me”, I position myself as willful yet unexceptional, in order to highlight the content and sidestep autobiographical confessions. My work can be read as silly or heavy-handed, however subverting larger looming issues such as gender, identity, and classism. I consciously blend and blur the real with the staged in order to heighten visual and cerebral absurdities. Kristen Mills holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art and an MSAE from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She is a former adjunct Assistant Professor, teaching at both Tyler and MassArt while co-running/owning Cloud Coffee, an artist-run mobile caffeinated endeavor. In 2016, Mills maintained an Artist-in-Residence position at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in 2017, she gained her first museum show with her collaborative project, Sister Spaceship, at the Delaware Contemporary Museum. In 2018, Mills successfully thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail (northbound) and then began a year-long residency/staff-artist position at the Vermont Studio Center. She is currently living in Vermont employed as VSC’s Visual Arts Program Manager. Mills’ work engages a variety of strategies: video art, installations, talk shows, comedic performances, collaborative engagements, and teaching - in an ongoing investigation of how meaning is constructed in our contemporary culture. Her work has been exhibited in many, many excellent places.
Past
MessengerTheresa Bloise & George Boorujy
Feb 29 – Mar 30
Also on view in The Skirt: Rachel Klinghoffer "Suspended in My Masquerade" Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Messenger, a two person exhibition of paintings by Theresa Bloise and George Boorujy, curated by co-director Nickola Pottinger. George Boorujy’s work explores our relationship to the environment and wildlife. Whilst Theresa Bloise paintings depict massive geological landscapes that are meta physical and defiant of the laws of physics. Though the artists have not collaborated before, their work has been engaged in a long conversation, and so birthed the ethos of Messenger. The elephant in the room is the reference to the impending environmental crisis which is shifting more rapidly than it ever has in human history. The wildlife and landscape depicted in this exhibition aims to raise awareness of the climate injustice that has continued to threaten us and our planet. Bloise’s large scale painting installation has a commanding presence. Extremely captivating and magnetic with its infinite blue, it reigns supreme in the gallery space akin to an apocalyptic figure. Towering high above the surrounding paintings, we find Boorujy’s painted portraits of species frozen and yet motion rendered with an insurmountable level of care and detail. Each of the creatures’ eyes are protuberant and magnetic as they are individually engaged in their own time capsule. The scale of the works are larger than life telling life stories. There is an intrinsic value in representing these species and landscapes because they will never be able to come back, and their decline is attributed to our global economic system. Theresa Bloise (born in Boston) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design where she studied for a year in Rome as part of RISD’s European Honors Program. She recently completed a large scale immersive painting installation for the Wassaic Project’s “Vagabond Time Killers” exhibition. Her work has also been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Smack Mellon, Kentler International Drawing Space, PS122 Gallery and Governors Island. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Lower East Side Printshop, the Vermont Studio Center, the Wassaic Project, and the Bronx Museum. In 2010 she received a New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowship. George Boorujy is an artist exploring our relationship to the environment, especially our interaction with and perception of wildlife. He has exhibited widely nationally and internationally and is represented by P.P.O.W. gallery in New York. He has had solo shows at P.P.O.W. gallery, the Baker Museum in Naples, Florida, and the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art. He is a member of the fine arts faculty at the School of Visual Arts. He has created work for the Wildlife Conservation Society, the New York Parks Department, the Audubon Mural Project, the Labrea Tar Pits, and for over a decade illustrated the Birdwatch column for the Guardian UK. A recipient of a NYFA grant in painting and a fellowship at the Smack Mellon residency, George Boorujy is a graduate of the University of Miami and the School of Visual Arts. Courtesy of the artist, and P.P.O.W, New York. Nickola Pottinger was born in Jamaica in the West Indies, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2008. She is a co-director of the artist run space, Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn. Her work has been written up in Contemporary Art Daily, Hyper Allergic, and the Epoch Times. Nickola has had a solo exhibition at Parker Gallery in Los Angeles, in Winter 2019. Her work has been shown in group shows at St. Charles Project in Baltimore, Mild Climate in Tennessee, Spring Break, Far X Wide, Deli Gallery and Ortega y Gasset Projects in New York. She was nominated twice for the Rema Hortmann Emerging Artist Grant in 2019 and 2018.
Past
In/Flux: On Influence, Inspiration, Transmission and TransformationJan 25 – Feb 24
Tannaz Farsi, Yevgeniy Fiks, Fox Hyusen, Helina Metaferia, Eden Pearlstein, Walter Pirce, Ralph Pugay, Charlie Rauh, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung Also on view in The Skirt: Rachel Klinghoffer "Suspended in My Masquerade" At root, this kaleidoscopic collection of paintings, sculpture, prints, collage, music and writings is the fruit of numerous conversations conducted and now curated by Zahar Vaks, Co-Director of OyG. Beginning on Captiva Island in 2018, as part of the Rauschenberg Residency, Zahar joined fellow visual artists Molly Zuckerman Hartung, Ralph Pugay, Walter Price, Tannaz Farsi, and musician Charlie Rauh for 6 weeks of intensive creation, collaboration, and communion – with each other, with the natural environment, with the work space energy legacy of an iconic artist, with their own practices and processes of making and being. The initial desire to continue these conversations and to share some of their varied influences and outgrowths with a wider community was the seed of this show. And yet, as seeds planted in fertile soil will do in time under the right conditions, this idea grew. A series of spontaneous conversations between Zahar and poet/publisher Eden Pearlstein in the summer of 2019 presented the opportunity to expand the context of the show to include a more conceptual and poetic dimension. A collection of works meant to commemorate an intensely influential experience slowly but suddenly morphed into a creative reflection on the role of influence upon one’s creative practices and paradigms in general. Poet/Publisher Tom Haviv and Ayin Press were invited to produce a chapbook/catalogue to accompany the show. It was happening again. Encounters, electricity, intuition, openness, In/Flux. This inspired Zahar to further open up the curatorial field to include conversations he had been having and wanted to facilitate between the socially-engaged and historically-critical works of artists Yevgeniy Fiks and Helina Metaferia. Similarly, around the same time Zahar visited painter Fox Hysen’s studio and rekindled their creative conversations begun a year before when she visited the Rauschenberg residency and completely immersed herself in that environment and community. Whether wrestling with history, language, representation, or technology, each of these artists added a new level of depth to thinking about how artworks are informed by the past and can transform the future through activating the present. The multiple modes of thinking and making represented in this show — including research, ritual, improvisation, ekphrasis, strategy, and serendipity — all demonstrate the various ways these artists engage their creative practice in relation to their influences and experiences. Taken all together, this collection of works is a snapshot of creative conversations continuing in real time. Come listen in to see what we mean. "Experiences. Ideas. Identities. Processes. Practices. Paradigms. Conversations. Connections. Conventions. Traditions. Transmissions. Transgressions. 'We are all In/Flux!'" - Eden Pearlstein
Past
Flat Files 2020Jan 11 – Jan 20
Heather Beardsley, Sanie Bokhari, Jesse Bransford, Su A Chae, Mike Chattem, Joseph Cuillier, Rachel Deane, Yael Eban, Mark Joshua Epstein, Shanti Grumbine, Efrat Hakimi, Johannah Herr, Cary Hulbert, Michelle Leftheris, Max Manning, Alexander Mansour, Nick Naber, Alex Paik, Jessica Pettway, Dana Piazza, Leah Piepgras, Lauren Prousky, Lucha Rodriguez, Eleanor Sabin, Kris Scheifele, Casey Jex Smith, Charles Sommer, Gabriela Vainsencher, Tom Wixo Ortega y Gasset presents its first-ever Flat Files program! Following the exhibition, all works will be in OyG's physical flat files throughout the duration of 2020.
Past
Mirror EyeJan 3 – Jan 6
Alex Paik (Brooklyn, NY), Amelia Briggs (Nashville, TN), Brendan Shea (Portland, ME), Brian Rattiner Brooklyn, NY), C. Anthony Huber (Iowa City, IA), Christian Ruiz Berman (Westport, CT), Darren Dempster (Brooklyn, NY), Ethan Stuart (Santa Monica, CA), Georgia Elrod (Brooklyn, NY), Georgia Hourdas (Brooklyn, NY), Ian Etter (Brooklyn, NY), Jason Rohlf (Brooklyn, NY), Joey Weiss (Brooklyn, NY), Joseph Dolinsky (Brooklyn, NY), Kara Cox (Providence, RI), Kiwha Lee Blocman (New York, NY), Leonora Loeb (New York, NY), Liz Ainslie (Brooklyn, NY), Loren Erdrich (New York, NY), Max Manning (Spring, TX), Molly Hassler (Milwaukee, WI), Nina Kintsurashvili (Iowa City, IA), Raymie Iadevaia (Los Angeles, CA), Roland Santana (Chicago, IL), Sharon Servilio (Jackson Heights, NY), Supaform (Moscow, RU), Taylor Loftin (Jackson, MS), Taylor O. Thomas (Tampa, FL), Travis LeRoy Southworth (Brooklyn, NY), Zuleyka Alejandro (New York, NY) Ortega y Gasset is pleased to present Mirror Eye, a three-day exhibition curated by Young Space and Far By Wide to benefit Art Start. This exhibition showcases exceptional work by early-career and emerging artists, and 50% of proceeds from sales support the mission of New York City nonprofit organization Art Start in their continuing mission to identify and nurture young people through art (the other 50% to artists)!
Past
Elsewhere is a Negative MirrorNatessa Amin & Susan Klein
Oct 19 – Nov 18
“Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?” And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.” - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Natessa Amin and Susan Klein depict spaces that are records of desires, dreams, and memories, and the slippages between them. Both artists are preoccupied with representing lived and shared experiences, and delightfully use bold color, patterns, and geometric shapes to delineate phenomenological narratives and responses. These formal elements contain secret codes, interlocking networks, and personal history. Amin and Klein are interested in how symbols - like experiences - are flexible and contextual, and simultaneously take on numerous meanings, connotations, and interpretations. Amin, who was born and raised in Pennsylvania in an Indian-American family, grew up navigating the complex relationships formed from contrasting cultures and religions. Her choice of patterns, materials, and color are rooted in her personal history and disparate cultural identities. Allusions to Pennsylvania Dutch craft found in her work, mixed with inspiration from Indian and African textiles, amalgamate into a new and unique visual lexicon. By depicting imagined places and fantastical dream-like environments, with decipherable moments of recognizable imagery, Amin grapples with her identity, responsibility as an artist, and navigation of daily space, ultimately to bend the parameters of history, possibility, and reality. Klein has a similar preoccupation with ornamentation, bizarre patterns, and hidden codes. Her work is filled with sensitive observations and material responses; they tease you with their shifting perspectives and shifting identities. There is an implied functionality to Klein’s forms and shapes: are they spiritual or devotional markers? Objects for a domestic space? Public space? Futuristic possible architectural plans? Any and all of the above? This ambiguity nestles itself into a sweet spot, in which Klein reflects upon past relationships and experiences while remaining firmly rooted and connected to the present. Elsewhere is a Negative Mirror is a reflection on creating connections and empathy, and the ongoing search for things beyond ourselves and the physical world. What do we hold onto, and what do we hold order to? Curated by Will Hutnick Natessa Amin (b. 1987, Easton, PA) is a visual artist based in Philadelphia. Amin earned her BFA in Painting from Boston University (2010) and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (2015). She is the co-director of Fjord Gallery in Philadelphia and a full-time faculty member at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA. Amin’s solo and two-person exhibitions include Dancing on the Water Tank at the Philip & Muriel Berman Museum of Art (2017), Past is a Place at the Hub Gallery at Moravian College (2016), We Can’t Say What We’ve Seen at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles (2018), and a scheduled exhibition (October 2019) at Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn. She has shown work in group exhibitions at Hangar H18 Gallery, Brussels, Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, Distillery Gallery, Boston, Benaco Arte, Sirmione, Italy and at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Woodmere Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Pilot Projects, and CFEVA in Philadelphia. Amin has been awarded residencies at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (2016), Wassaic Project (2017), Lacawac Sanctuary & Biological Field Station (2018), and the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts (2019). Susan Klein (b. 1979, Morristown, NJ) is an artist and curator living in Charleston, SC. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally. Her most recent solo exhibition “Day Person” was on view fall 2018 at the Sumter County Gallery of Art. Other exhibition venues include: The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, The Southern, Redux Contemporary Art (all in South Carolina), Southside Gallery (Mississippi), Collective Crossing (NYC), Trestle and Brooklyn Artists Gym (Brooklyn), 3433 Gallery (Chicago), PDX Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), University of Ulsan (South Korea), Wayne State University (Detroit, MI), as well as additional spaces. Curatorial projects include the 2018 exhibition Nighttime for Strangers at NARS Foundation (Brooklyn) and upcoming exhibitions through Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville. Recent awards include a Wassaic Project Residency (NY) and residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (Brooklyn) both summer 2018. Other awards include a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, an Ox-bow Artist-in-Residence Summer Fellowship, an Otis College of Art and Design Summer Residency, residency at Arteles Creative Research Center (Finland), and residency at Takt (Berlin). Klein received her MFA in 2004 from University of Oregon, a BFA in 2001 from University of New Hampshire, and studied art at NYU from 1997-99. Currently, she teaches painting at the College of Charleston. Will Hutnick (b. 1985, Manhasset, NY) is an artist and curator based in Wassaic, NY. He received his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY) and his B.A. from Providence College (Providence, RI). His work has been exhibited most recently at Standard Space (Sharon, CT, solo), One River School (Hartsdale, NY, solo), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Brooklyn), LVL3 Gallery (Chicago, IL), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Paradice Palase (Brooklyn), Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington, MA), Providence College Galleries (Providence, solo) and Pratt Institute. Hutnick has curated numerous exhibitions at Spring/Break Art Show, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Trestle Projects, Pratt Institute (New York and Brooklyn) and Hamiltonian Gallery (Washington, DC). He has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY), Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency (Granville, NY), DNA Gallery (Provincetown, MA), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) and a curator-in-residence at Benaco Arte (Sirmione, Italy) and Trestle Projects (Brooklyn). Hutnick is a 2017 Martha Boschen Porter Fund grant recipient from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation and a 2015 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. Hutnick is the Co-Director of Ortega y Gasset Projects, and is currently the Residency Director at the Wassaic Project, a nonprofit organization that uses art and art education to foster positive social change.
Past
Before I Let GoCameron Granger
Sep 14 – Oct 14
Also on view in The Skirt: KT Duffy "The Ways We Record the Universe Are Evidence of Our Own Primitive Nature" Before I Let Go includes new video, sculpture, and text based works from Cameron Granger, creating an immersive installation within the gallery. The show is dedicated to the wonderful gift of being seen by someone we love, and the life that gift can bring. A two-channel film plays as a stream of consciousness and alludes to how U.S. History and its media have played an influential role in Granger’s upbringing. The works provide an existential and voyeuristic lens into the soul music and figures that played an influential part in Granger’s practice. “In 1995 Antwan Patton & André Benjamin—Outkast, outcasts—stood against the world. Because at that time, you see, all eyes were either to the East or the West, but these kids were from the South, so believe me when I say that when those two kids from the South were named best new artists at the ‘95 Source Awards, the room tore itself apart at its very seams. If you watch the footage today you’ll probably hear the booing first. Massive, as if it could push on through whatever screen you were watching it on. If you stay longer though, you’ll see the two artists, making their way through the crowd and to the stage where, standing tall, unshaken, and side by side, André would assure us all that—no—where André would declare that: 'The south got something to say.' I guess i’m thinking of Antwan, standing alongside his nigga, eyes trained forward, ready to defend him against whatever may come from that moment on. I guess i’m thinking of my own niggas, with their eyes trained forward past me, ready to do the same." - Cameron Granger Cameron Granger came up in Cleveland, Ohio alongside his mother, Sandra, inheriting both a love of soul music, and a certain way of apologizing too much. A 2017 resident of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, his work explores his place in, and role as a product of American history and its media. His most recent projects include Ten Toes Down at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Pearl a body of collaborative works with his mother at Ctrl+Shft in Oakland, and A Library, For You a traveling community library.
Past
How ShallowJul 27 – Aug 26
Sage Dawson Meghan Grubb Allison Lacher Edo Rosenblith Also on view in The Skirt: Winnie Sidharta Ambron "Boundless" Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present How Shallow, a group exhibition with works by four of the Co-Directors of the artist-run space Monaco in St. Louis. How shallow. The wind stirs the surface of a shallow pool. The image invites us, then repels us. A surface, a pattern, is just a pattern. But past civilizations knew that meaning is always hidden in ornament, and vice versa. How Shallow presents four artists - Meghan Grubb, Edo Rosenblith, Allison Lacher, and Sage Dawson - working in mixed modes: abstract and pictorial; unidimensional and sculptural. How shallow? A fantasy. A flood. A magic carpet ride. An entrancing image. Abstraction hides itself from our picture-making, and a meaning-making look is looking back. Where flamingos gather, silhouettes on a miniature horizon: blank. Pejorative. Shallow people, shallow acts. There's not much to it, and not much depth. But who’s to say? Still waters run deep, so shallow waters churn and leap. Sage Dawson is a St. Louis-based artist, curator and educator. Her work examines dwelling rights, domestic labor, and the identity of spaces. She teaches at Washington University, if a founding member of Monaco, and directs Stndrd - a gallery project examining the power and potential of flags. Dawson completed an M.F.A. and Museum Studies minor at the University of New Mexico, and a B.F.A. at Missouri State University. Dawson has exhibited, lectured and presented work at various sites including the Center for Contemporary Printmaking Norwalk. Endless Editions EFA Project Space, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the Chicago Artists Coalition, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Tate Exchange at Tate Modern, Boston University, Terrain Biennial - Enos Park, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Springfield Art Museum, The Luminary, Pyramid Atlantic, the City University of New York, the University of Pennslyvania, the University of Toledo Center for the Visual Arts, and the International Print Center New York. Meghan Grubb is a visual artist based in Saint Louis, Missouri. Her practice explores a range of subjects including wilderness structures, daylight rhythms, recursive spaces, and natural disasters. The resulting physical work ranges from immersive installation to sculptural objects – each outcome revealing unease between humans and the physical spaces that we inhabit. Grubb has completed residencies at Acre, Wassaic Project, Paul Artspace and Vermont Studio Center, and has received awards and grants including the Regional Arts Commission Artists Fellowship, American Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship, and nominations to the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant and Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant. Allison Lacher is an artist and curator based in Springfield, IL. Her work orbits collaboration, site-responsiveness and installation. She is the Exhibitions Manager at the University of Illinois Visual Arts Gallery and she is a founding member of the artist-owned gallery Monaco in St. Louis, MO. In 2013 she Co-founded Demo Project, a space for contemporary art in Springfield, and served as Co-director of the space until its demolition in 2018. She has been awarded residencies with Acre, Spiro Arts, The Luminary, Signal Fire on US/Mexico borderlands, and was a full fellowship resident with Vermont Studio Center. She was a Hatch Projects curatorial resident and is a previous recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award. Her work has been featured in ‘From Here to There’ published by Princeton Architectural Press, NewCity Magazine, Temporary Art Review and Floorr Magazine, among others. Edo Rosenblith (b. 1988 Tel Aviv) received his BFA in painting in 2011 at the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA in Visual Art at Washington University-St. Louis in 2017. Rosenblith has exhibited throughout St. Louis, at The Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis; The Center of Creative Arts, University of Missouri-St. Louis, and The Luminary. Rosenblith has exhibited nationally at, The International Print Center, New York; The Elmhurst Museum, Chicago and internationally, at Jenifer Nails Gallery in Frankfurt Germany. A two-year survey of Edo’s sketchbook drawings became the content of his first book, Pink, published by Fort Gondo Press in 2013. Rosenblith lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri and became a member of Monaco Gallery in 2019.
Past
Shadow of the GradientJun 15 – Jul 22
Devra Freelander, MaDora Frey, Rachel Guardiola, Roxanne Jackson, Taryn M. McMahon, Kat Ryals, Shelley Smith Curated by Clare Britt An astronaut drifts across the galaxy in a red convertible Tesla. A backcountry hiker lingers on a trail watching the Brown Mountain lights flicker. A group of scientists try to conquer and control nature while sealed inside Biosphere 2. A Yogi climbs to the top of Cathedral Rock to get lost in an Energy Vortex. UFO chasers await the sun to set and witness the Marfa lights in the distance. A team of documentary filmmakers board a boat and set sail to the Plastic Island in the Pacific Ocean. These are realties where humans chase the unknown, explore the depths of space, and face the monsters that haunt them. This is the Shadow of the Gradient. Humans create and use technology while searching for a connection that feels authentic and enduring, giving meaning to existence. Technology is used to solve problems and - in the process - a whole new set of problems arise that need to be wrangled. This creates a constant circle of never ending solutions. The artists share a longing to see nature integrated into contemporary technological experiences. Their work uses photographic, sculptural and painterly languages to ask the questions such as: Will technology redeem us? Or eventually choke us out and suffocate us? The artists in Shadow of the Gradient use imagery of nature and associations with sci-fi aesthetics that trigger emotional responses. The exhibition is an immersive experience with large scale art objects that blend mediums to create a neoteric tableau. Ryals, Smith and McMahon create a flattened out landscape with lenticular photographic prints, digital imagery printed on embroidered textiles and large scale banners. Freelander and Frey create a landscape in the gallery with the use of sculptural elements on the floor and on the wall. Jackson’s creatures are fauna that inhabit this portal of existence. Guardiola’s work creates flora and another perspective of the dimension. No one wants to see reality, we only want to see a better version of ourselves and create a new truth. When every image (motion or still) can be doctored, every word can be twisted and taken out of context a new phenomenon emerges. We become primed and ready to believe the fantasy whenever it is colorful and shiny and seductive. Together, these works evoke events or phenomena that are beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. A common thread is an anticipation of time passing with some hope for a reconstructed future where new biologies and organisms exist beyond technology on the other side of human existence. Devra Freelander makes sculptures and videos that explore climate change and geology from an ecofeminist and millennial lens. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. Freelander has exhibited with Times Square Arts, Crush Curatorial, the New York Design Center, the RISD Museum, Zoya Tommy Contemporary, and the Fjuk Arts Centre. She is a founding member of Material Girls, and a recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award and 2018 Women’s Studio Workshop Residency Grant. She is represented by Circa Gallery in Minneapolis, MN. MaDora Frey creates sculptural paintings using neon, LED lights, wood and glass. Frey contemplates how environment psychologically impacts and determines one’s emotional orientation. Frey is currently serving a residency with the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center’s Studio Artist program. Frey was recently commissioned by the Katonah Museum of Art to create a large-scale outdoor public work on the museum campus. She has also exhibited at the Newark Airport in New Jersey. Accolades include the Prince of Wales Fellowship in Normandy, France, publication in New American Paintings, and two-time grant recipient at Vermont Studio Center. She is a founding member of NYC art collective Future Present. Kat Ryals is a southerner who completed a Masters of Fine Arts degree at Brooklyn College, followed by a certificate in Museum Education in 2016. Ryals has shown her work nationally, and was included in recent group exhibitions with the Holocenter on Governor’s Island, Temporary Storage Gallery at Brooklyn Fireproof, and the Wassaic Project. She has also completed several artist residencies, including the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship in January 2018, the Wassaic Project in January 2019, and she will be an upcoming resident at ChaNorth in August 2019. She is the co-founder of the curatorial project and art space, Paradice Palase, based out of Bushwick, Brooklyn. Rachel Guardiola is an interdisciplinary artist and naturalist. Her practice utilizes lens based technology to investigate the human relationship to wilderness through the construction of fantastical other earth mythologies. Rachel is a Studio Resident at School 33 Art Center and is a recipient of the 2016-18 Hamiltonian Gallery Artist Fellowship. She has exhibited internationally with List í Ljósi Festival, Sydney College of the Arts, Dakar Biennale de l’Art Contemporain. Currently she is participating in The Studios Residency at Mass MoCA. She is Adjunct Faculty of New Media at George Mason University and Photography at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, GW. She received a MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Roxanne Jackson is a ceramic artist and mixed-media sculptor living in Brooklyn, NY. Her macabre works are investigations of the links between transformation, myth and pop-culture. Press for her work includes The New York Times, Whitehot Magazine, Beautiful Decay. She is the recipient of residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Ceramic Center of Berlin, and the Pottery Workshop in Jindezhen, China, funded by an NCECA fellowship. Jackson has exhibited widely with recent exhibitions at The Hole (NY), Cob Gallery (London), Anonymous Gallery (Mexico City), Kunstraum Niederösterreich (Vienna). Jackson is the co-founder of Nasty Women, a global art exhibition and fundraising project. Taryn McMahon received her MFA from the University of Iowa and is currently an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Kent State University. Her work has received numerous awards and residencies including a Denbo Fellowship at Pyramid Atlantic, Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch, Anchor Graphics, Women’s Studio Workshop, and the Lawrence Arts Center. She has had solo exhibitions at The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA and Lexington Art League, Lexington. Her work has been included in numerous group shows at venues such as Whitdel Arts, Detroit, MI; Artist Image Resource, Pittsburgh, PA; Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and the International Print Center, New York, NY. Shelley Smith is interdisciplinary artist whose practice addresses such universal themes as memory, identity, myth, and the feminine. Her work often explores conceptual self-portraiture through methods of digital collage, video, hand-embroidery, and drawing. Smith combines traditional hand techniques with contemporary tools to create work that reflects how identity is formed over a lifetime. Shelley Smith holds a Master of Art & Design from the North Carolina State University College of Design. She is the Creative Director of Anchorlight, an artist led space that is home to artist studios, exhibition space, and a residency program in Raleigh. N.C. Clare Britt is a photographer working in Chicago, IL. She digitizes collections for cultural institutions like the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, The Chicago Public Library and The Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a founding member of Ortega y Gasset Projects and travels the country documenting landscapes for her Claremerica Series. Her camera captures proof of nature fighting with and taking over what man has created.
Past
Ghost StoriesNorm Paris & Mark Shetabi
May 11 – Jun 10
Also on view in The Skirt: Winnie Sidharta "Boundless" Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Ghost Stories, a two-person exhibition featuring recent work by Norm Paris and Mark Shetabi, curated by Ortega y Gasset Projects Co-Director Lauren Whearty. Ghost Stories presents Paris’ and Shetabi’s investigations into the inexplicable, the ghostly, and the ominous. Their works access viewer’s experiences of the familiar, transforming it into a haunting encounter. Norm Paris’ large-scale graphite drawings and plaster sculptures show the material and psychological making and unmaking of his athletes. Dynamic poses of figures found on baseball cards become material and psychological investigations of icons and relics from the past as they look toward the future. Mark Shetabi’s sculptures based on movie theaters and monster films frame our view with computer privacy screens, evoke both distant and intimate space, as one discovers their eerie charms from a very close range. The play of scale in both artists' work between the monumental and the miniscule flips our expectations of both epic and intimate. Story and history converge and resurface as images and forms are unearthed through material processes, selected subjects, and obstructed views. Each artist’s work is alive and in a constant state of flux, where the viewer feels the residue of the artist’s process of making, unmaking, reframing, and editing. Norm Paris (New York, NY) is from Cleveland, Ohio. He creates sculptures, drawings, and mixed-media works that explore his complicated relationship to popular culture of the recent past, focusing on objects, iconography, and mythology that alternately aggrandize and diminish historical figures over time. Paris re-envisions once heroic figures as relics, ruins, and absences. Bygone icons of once-celebrated athletes and musicians sourced from a mix of personal and public mythologie - are used as vessels to be modeled, covered, crated, or redacted. He alternately renders and obliterates his iconography through labor-intensive processes of drawing, casting, and erasure. Mark Shetabi (Philadelphia, PA) was born in New York, and as a child lived for five years in Tehran, Iran before his family returned to the United States in 1979, on the eve of the Iranian Revolution. The experience of straddling two cultures - often in conflict - is an enduring subtext for much of his work. Shetabi’s paintings and sculptures are made with the same materials and tools and as a result, share a skin. Through his work, Shetabi uses representations of familiar subjects to provide a visual access to a subjective and disjointed overview of Iranian and American histories, politics and possible futures. Lauren Whearty (Philadelphia, PA) received her MFA in painting from The Ohio State University where she received a Graduate Teaching Associate Award, an Arts and Humanities Research Grant, and was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. She received her BFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, with honors. While attending Tyler, Lauren received the Ellen Battell Stoeckel fellowship to attend Yale’s Summer School of Art residency in Norfolk, CT. She has attended Vermont Studio Center with a fellowship, and has exhibited at such venues as the Woodmere Museum of Art in Philadelphia, The Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, Vox Populi, Satellite Contemporary. Lauren has taught at The Ohio State University, Tyler School of Art, University of the Arts, and Hussian College of Art. Lauren is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Lehigh University.
Past
FootlooseDavid Humphrey & Keisha Prioleau-Martin
Mar 23 – Apr 29
Also on view in The Skirt: Patrice Aphrodite Helmar "Feeling Good About Me" Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce Footloose, a two person exhibition featuring David Humphrey and Keisha Prioleau-Martin curated by Co-Director Catherine Haggarty. Footloose is a painting show about the connection and rhythm between two artists. Although they do not work collaboratively, Keisha Prioleau-Martin and David Humphrey share similarities and differences just the same. Their pairing in this show is not for similar subject matter, but for their shared attitude and how that generates our perception. Ultimately painting and dancing are centered around the body. Both provide the opportunity to move fluidly and free the mind from concern. Deep down inside, everybody loves to dance. Perhaps just the same, painting is like dancing: expressive, uninhibited and mysterious - and it becomes harder to do freely as you get older. Dancing mirrors several facets within the field of painting - it can reveal and demonstrate moments of self revelation in a way that is often ineffable. Often, awkward, clumsy and sexy moves are stand-ins for how the body navigates physical space. Dancing can be as primal as music and is a form of expression that releases endorphins as soon as it begins. Within painting, the audience often projects, dissects, imbues, and translates what they see in relationship to what they already know. Footloose is a celebration of painting and of the endearing effort to be a part of something much larger than yourself. David Humphrey is a New York-based artist who has shown nationally and internationally. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, among other awards. An anthology of his art writing, Blind Handshake, was published by Periscope Publishing in 2010. He teaches in the MFA programs at Columbia and is represented by Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, NY. Keisha Prioleau-Martin currently lives and works in Ridgewood, New York. She received her B.F.A. from SUNY Purchase and her work was recently included in Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York’s The 2018 Flat File: Year Five. Catherine Haggarty is an artist, curator, and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Haggarty earned her M.F.A from Mason Gross, Rutgers University in 2011 and is an adjunct professor at The School of Visual Arts (SVA) and Hofstra University. In 2018, Haggarty was the Anderson Endowed Lecturer at Penn State University and the Juror for Espositivo Residency in Madrid, Spain.
Past
Swimming Blind in a Wine-Dark SeaCarl E. Hazlewood
Feb 9 – Mar 18
Also on view in The Skirt: Patrice Aphrodite Helmar "Feeling Good About Me" Swimming Blind in the Wine-Dark Sea explores formal, poetic and evocative aspects of my multimedia practice. The title of the exhibition suggests my unknowable journey as I work through possible solutions to various formal and other problems. While many of the things I make are ephemeral, they tend to respond to the light, space and surfaces where they are installed. Beside the painted/constructed environments I create on occasion, I like making discrete/specific 'things'... Thus most of what I do transmute into defined objects of a formal sort; shape, scale, light, colour, materials, etc., are all manipulated as a way to bring my work alive in the presence of the viewer. Theory, in particular… and even history (on occasion), gives way to practical/personal (& usually formal) impulses concerning material and the physical environment in which a particular work exists. While I've always resisted performing limited notions of ‘identity’ as an aspect of my creative work, lately some subtle references concerning our current problematized social environment creep in - despite myself. But I’m a border-crosser of sorts continually negotiating various transcultural, social and artistic locations. And as an older black person, poor, an immigrant, in the current political climate, I suppose I’m somewhat suspect. But functioning at that liminal edge of social and artistic possibilities perhaps my experience can be translated into something positive. Bob Marley, the reggae singer, once remarked “some people feel the rain…others just get wet.” For me it’s always the center of a storm… It’s all about being in the moment, on ‘presentness’, of always being “real”, in life as well as how one approaches art with its multiplicity and endless possibilities. - Carl E. Hazlewood A recent MacDowell Fellow, Carl E. Hazlewood was born in Guyana, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA (with honors) from Pratt Institute and his MA from Hunter College. A visual artist, curator and writer, he co-founded Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ. Recent awards and honors include Fellowships and residencies from The Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France; The Bogliasco Foundation, Genoa, Italy; the NARS Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. A 2017 ‘Tree of Life’ award grantee, his fifty-two feet work, ‘Traveler’, (2017) was commissioned by the Knockdown Center, Queens. Hazlewood’s work has been shown recently in Prizm, Volta, and Scope Art Fairs, and has been written about in Bomb Magazine, the NY Times, and Hyperallergic.
Past
Some Stuff You Forgot AboutBen Pederson
Jan 5 – Feb 4
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce Some Stuff You Forgot About, the NYC debut solo exhibition of artist Ben Pederson curated by artist and OyG Co-Director, Eleanna Anagnos. Presenting in both the main gallery and The Skirt (OyG’s space for site-specific work), Pederson creates an immersive installation that reflects the depth and breadth of his practice. In The Skirt, Pederson creates a “reality-tunnel” that reflects the totality of his perceived experiences, both conscious and unconscious. Large-scale hanging sculptures form a dense invitation to enter Pederson’s universe, disassembled and reassembled from earlier works of wood, paint, and childhood ephemera. In the main gallery, 28 Shapes Later is an investigation into the artist’s changing views on the Transcendent vs. Immanent aspects of his process that begs the question: does creativity come from above or within? Fourteen horizontal, balanced rods hang from the ceiling and spin in relation to air movement, casting shifting shadows. These are flanked by tree-like vertical sculptures on custom pedestals that contour to the sculpture’s base. Speckled with bright, sometimes, fluorescent paint, the sculpture’s surfaces unify to create a neutral tone when viewed from afar. Twenty-eight corresponding watercolor silhouettes - realized from a meditative state - act as a visual key that links the family of forms in the exhibition. Pederson likens his practice to childhood memories of sifting through a junk drawer, hot glue gun in hand. Disparate, seemingly unrelated ephemera is united and form new, hybrid connections. This points to the more prevalent, essential “junk drawer” occupying his heart and mind: a sea of experiences, dreams, failures, and triumphs that he sifts through to create meaning out of the absurdity of life. A catalog launch and closing reception for this exhibition will take place on February 3, 2019 from 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM. Ben Pederson (born 1979, Grand Rapids, MI) is a Brooklyn-based artist. He shows his work locally and nationally. Pederson is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2018); a Yaddo Fellow, Saratoga Springs, NY (2015); the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency in Skowhegan ME (2013); and the Materials For The Arts Residency in Queens, NY (2013). He received his M.F.A. in Sculpture from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2007) and a B.A. in Studio Art from Aquinas College (2003). Eleanna Anagnos (born 1980, Evanston, IL) is a Brooklyn-based artist and curator. She has received awards from The Rauschenberg Foundation (2019); The Grant Wood Colony (2018-2019); Yaddo (2017); BAU Institute (2016); The Anderson Ranch (2011); The Atlantic Center for the Arts (2009) and The Joan Mitchell Foundation (2011, 2009). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Artnet, and The New York Observer, among others, and her curatorial project Wish Me Good Luck, was reviewed in Art in America (2017). She exhibits her work nationally and internationally with her debut NYC solo exhibition slated for April 2019 at High Noon Gallery. Eleanna has been a Co-Director at Ortega y Gasset Projects since 2014. She earned her MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art (2005) and a BA with honors and distinction from Kenyon College with a concentration in Women’s and Gender Studies (2002).
Past
SpineOct 20 – Dec 10
Cati Bestard, Lisa Blas, Sonia Louise Davis, Shoshana Dentz, Anne Eastman, Jenny Monic, Anne Vieux Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Spine, a group exhibition curated by artist Suzanne McClelland and OyG Co-Director and artist Leeza Meksin. Opening during the weekend of Gowanus Open Studios, Spine explores the mental and physical structures of a book and questions what is legible, optical, physical, emotional or cerebral. Reading is viewing and occurs any time anyone engages with visual art but it also happens when we’re handling and engaging with books as objects. Printed media lives in the realm of the physical and the private with a spine functioning as an interruption, an intersection, a fulcrum and a central structure, often simultaneously. The work presented in the exhibition questions when does the private act of reading become public and what is shared. Spine brings together a wide range of media, including drawing, photography, sculpture, video, fiber, multiples and artist books.
Past
The Mahavidyas and Fields of IceJesse Bransford
Apr 21 – May 21
Ortega y Gasset presents The Mahavidyas and Fields of Ice, a solo exhibition by Jesse Bransford. The exhibition will feature Bransford's paintings and drawings in conversation with a site-specific installation. Feeling can lead to understanding. Other times, an understanding of something can hold certain emotions. Jesse Bransford‘s work does both simultaneously. His work elicits both understanding and an intuitive emotional response. Work is clear and lucid; one can experience it and say that they understand in that first moment of looking, yet over time the work becomes ambiguous: layered with subtle meaning and something that is beyond understanding. Jesse Bransford's The Mahavidyas and Fields of Ice works with two specific magical trajectories: the Mahavidyas and Icelandic folk magic. These works seek to articulate the intimate relationship between the creation of art and the working of magic. Bransford calls these works "spells" not paintings. He describes his "spells" as having a hesitant and ephemeral quality resulting from the unforgiving medium of watercolor. Some of the works are direct manifestations of Iceland's land, using local well water and of a scale congruent with traveling in outdoor spaces. Bransford is highly aware of the power of color (he teaches color theory) and describes working with it as being a "synthesis of intuition and intellect. There is often too much of an attempt to make sense of color. Color is unpredictable. The magic lies in its visceral, pleasurable, and mysterious qualities; not verbal, not rational, and yet holding an internal logic." The color use in his "spells" takes on a language of its own, born of a deep engagement with the material. Yantra (यन्त्र) in Sanskrit literally "machine contraption" is a mystical diagram, mainly from the Tantric traditions of the Indian religions. They are used for the worship of deities in temples or at home; as an aid in meditation; used for the benefits given by their supposed occult powers based on Hindu astrology and tantric texts. They are also used for the adornment of temple floors, due mainly to their aesthetic and symmetric qualities. Specific yantras are traditionally associated with specific deities. (Wikipedia) The Mahavidyas (Great Wisdoms) are a group of ten aspects of the supreme feminine principle (Adi Parashakti) in Hinduism. Especially invoked in Tantric practices, these emanations depict the cosmic cycle of birth, evolution, death, and regeneration. For example, Bhuvanesvari is the fourth concept and is the universe at the apex of its development. The entire Universe is said to be her body and all beings are ornaments of her infinite being. (Wikipedia) Her yantra here is imagined as a radiant space of light in fullness with the lotus petals carrying the colors of the rainbow. Curated by Zahar Vaks Jesse Bransford b. Atlanta Georgia is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work is exhibited internationally at venues including The Carnegie Museum of Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center and the CCA Wattis Museum among others. He holds degrees from the New School for Social Research (BA), Parsons School of Design (BFA) and Columbia University (MFA). An associate professor of art at New York University and the chair of the Department of Art and Art Professions, Bransford's work has been involved with belief and the visual systems it creates since the 1990s. Early research into color meaning and cultural syncretism led to the occult traditions in general and the work of John Dee and Henry Cornelius Agrippa specifically. He has lectured widely on his work and the topics surrounding his work and is the co-organizer of the biennial Occult Humanities Conference in New York. Zahar Vaks, (b.Tashkent, Uzbekistan) Is a visual artist based in New York, NY. He earned his BFA from Tyler School of Art, and his MFA from The Ohio State University. He has shown at the Leslie Heller Workspace and performed at the Henry street settlement in New York, The Contemporary Art Museum in Houston (CAMH), along with galleries in Philadelphia, Columbus, Las Vegas, Vienna Austria, Rome Italy, and on the island of Svalbard in Norway. Zahar attended the Galveston Artist Residency from 2012-2013. Currently, he is a member of the Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG), an artist-run curatorial collective and exhibition space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
Past
When Geometry SmilesMar 3 – Apr 9
Samantha Bittman, Chris Bogia, Corydon Cowansage, Leah Guadagnoli, Charlotte Hallberg, Fawn Krieger, Kerry Law, Gary Stephan, Anne Thompson, Nichole Van Beek, Paul Wackers, B. Wurtz Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce When Geometry Smiles, a group exhibition curated by Eric Hibit. When Geometry Smiles presents the work of 12 artists who use geometry as a structural aspect of their work, while simultaneously exploring how structure opens doors to play and cultivates emotional levity. Eschewing rigidity, the artists in When Geometry Smiles create work that is potentially smile-inducing for its liveliness and lightness. These artists explore geometry as an essential component in the quest for personal meaning via their choice of imagery, their tactile engagement with materials, or their painterly style. Many of the artists in the exhibition use fiber-based materials that, literally, soften geometry. This emphasis on painting “fabric” leads to new associations with the world of the home. The desire to fuse the comforting domestic with the impartiality of geometry raises new ideas about the artist’s sense of themselves, their surroundings, and the world. Eric Hibit is a visual artist based in New York.
Past
Strange BusinessRose Nestler
Jan 6 – Feb 12
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce Strange Business, the first New York solo exhibition by multi-disciplinary artist Rose Nestler. Strange Business brings together video, free-standing sculpture and wall pieces that focus on Nestler’s interest in simultaneously creating tension and humility between bodily and physical space. Nestler’s free-standing sculptures are totemic, soft, and somehow also humorous. Melding ideas of gender, play, and monuments, these sculptures stand taller than most of us in the gallery space and remind us of our mobility in their stoic state. Nestler’s video work brings her sculptures to life in unusual ways. There is an uncanny and eerie quality to the videos Nestler creates which are informed by her psychological interest in objects taking on sexual and asexual overtones. We are confronted with her sculptures moving in real space, and are forced to re-evaluate how our own bodies take up space. Rose Nestler, b. 1983 in Spokane WA, lives and works in Brooklyn NY. She received her MFA from CUNY Brooklyn College in 2017. Her work has been featured in group shows at Crush Curatorial, Couples Counseling, Bruce High Quality Foundation and NARS Foundation. Nestler has been an artist in residence at Byrdcliffe, NARS Foundation, and Chashama.
Past
Saxon CornerJim Osman
Jan 6 – Apr 9
The Skirt at Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce Saxon Corner, a site specific installation by Jim Osman. Using pigmented plaster, Osman creates Wall drawings that compress different kinds of space. The vessels that give these spaces form can be clear and tangible like architecture and furniture or symbolic like a flag or just formal -- a color. Combining these forms makes for odd, unthought-of arrangements that once started must be reconciled formally, all the while staying true to a notion of space that is convoluted, dense, and opaque yet somehow understood. Jim Osman was born in New York City. He received his BA & MFA from Queens College (CUNY) in Flushing, NY where he studied with Tom Doyle, Mary Miss and Lawrence Fane. He has had solo exhibitions at Lesley Heller Workspace, Long Island University’s Kumbal Gallery and Dartmouth College. His work has been included in group shows at the Brooklyn Museum, Transmitter Gallery and University of Texas at San Antonio. Osman’s public sculptures have been shown at Pulse Miami, FL; Art Hamptons, NY; Sculpture Mile in Madison, CT. He received a NYFA Artist Fellowship in Craft/Sculpture in 2017. Mr.Osman teaches courses in three-dimensional design, sculpture and public art classes at Parsons School of Design. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Past
Friends You May KnowDec 15 – Dec 18
Lindsay Burke, Jaqueline Cedar, Nicasio Fernandez, Dominique Fung, Paul Gagner, Catherine Haggarty, Angela Heisch, Brandon Johnson, Rachel Klinghoffer, Adam Mignanelli, Dan Schein, Sarah Slappey, Mike Tracy, Rebecca Senn Curated by Calli More Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Friends You May Know, the first curatorial venture of the New York-based startup See You Next Thursday (SYNT). The pop-up exhibition, curated by SYNT’s Founder Calli Moore, presents work in a physical gallery space for the first time beyond the screen of a phone. SYNT is an ongoing, weekly Instagram-based art auction featuring the works of emerging artists based in New York. SYNT is a platform that provides the opportunity for artists to share and sell their work with a growing community of artists, collectors, and Instagram followers. This directly supports independent artists who are in the process of building and establishing a career. SYNT makes art accessible and affordable for buyers, while still maintaining the integrity of the artist’s work and practice. Friends You May Know puts the SYNT platform in a physical gallery space and addresses themes of connectivity, artistic community, and communication through the works of 14 contemporary artists. In Moore’s project, SYNT, the viewer is prompted to collect art from contemporary working artists at an affordable bid. This gesture, facilitated by Instagram is relevant, efficient, democratic and generous. The often lofty prices of contemporary art can scare many away from collecting. This is the catalyst for SNYT and a noteworthy and community inspired approach to building the art world beyond the makers. SYNT was founded by Calli Moore, a painter and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. This venture, encapsulates and embodies Moore’s passion for connecting and cultivating a community of artists.
Past
Code SwitchNov 2 – Dec 4
Joeun Aatchim Minhee Bae Christy Chan Alexis Granwell Mark Martinez Ortega y Gasset Projects is participating in the inaugural Gowanus Biennial with Brooklyn Art Cluster, Trestle Projects, Ground Floor Gallery, and Textile Arts Center. Each gallery is working with an interpretation of the theme "Sanctuary City". Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Code Switch. Code Switching is a linguistic term, defined by one who can go back and forth between two languages. In popular culture it has expanded to include social and identity based behaviors which may alter based on situational necessity, or proprietary cues. Code Switch is an exhibition of 5 artists, co-curated by Lauren Whearty and Clare Britt. This invented language comes from working through and within a variety of combinations, which come together to form a new whole. The trained and intuitive ability to shift between language and culture is imperative to artworks which dig into complex subjects ranging from identity to intimacy, navigating our contemporary existence, power and politics. Joeun Aatchim crafts a visual form of writing borrowed from the literary diction in Essayism. To gratify her agonizing yearn for crafting intangible “coincidences” as her core medium, she vigorously, yet steadily, executes multimedia craft, such as mosaics, ceramics, drawing, fresco, and printmaking, as proxies. In her artist talk performance with dubbing and ventriloquism, she illogically recounts the relationship between the artist and his/her work, provoking queries about authorship, disembodiment, and the sincerity of voice. She received her BFA in Studio Art from New York University, MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University in the City of New York and attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in class of 2017. Currently, she is working on her never-ending manuscript, Four (of) Mattresses Stacked on Misery. Minhee Bae is an artist whose textile practice utilizes contemporary signs and symbols, DIY feminist techniques, and a quiet sense of humor to negotiate the landscapes of identity, language, heritage, and desire. She was a resident at the Wassiac Artist Residency in 2016 and has recently exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, and Toronto. She received a BA from University of Toronto and an MFA from Parsons The New School for Design. She is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Christy Chan is an artist and filmmaker based in Oakland, California. Her narrative films, videos, performances and installations have been exhibited at venues including Southern Exposure, The Kala Art Institute, SOMArts, Root Division, the Los Angeles Film Festival Shorts Series, and in storytelling venues such as NPR. She has been awarded residencies and support from Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, The Wassaic Project, Kala Art Institute, and Real Time and Space, among others. Chan holds an M.A. in Communication Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University and a B.A. in English from Old Dominion University. She is currently a 2017- 2018 Fellow at The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Alexis Granwell received an MFA from The University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from Boston University. Granwell is a recipient of The Independence Foundation Fine Arts Fellowship Grant. She is a co-director and one of the founding members of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, an artist collective, in Philadelphia. She most recently exhibited her work in a three-person show at Fleisher/ Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. She has exhibited many solo exhibitions across the country, including at ; Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, PA; Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, CT; Towson University, Baltimore, MD; and Bryan Miller Gallery, Houston, TX. Other recent group exhibitions include Field Projects, New NY; Select Art Fair, New York, NY, IPCNY, NY; Artist-Run, Miami, FL, Momenta Art, New York, NY; Trestle Art Gallery, New York, NY; Elephant, Los Angeles, CA; Hemphill Gallery, Washington DC; PrattMWP Art Museum, Utica, NY; The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; SOIL, Seattle, WA; and CTRL Gallery, Houston, TX. Mark C. Martinez is a mixed-media artist that makes paintings, objects, photo based works and installation work. His work engages with issues related to identity (more specifically his own) using history/origin, invented persona and carefully arranged systems to question and challenge the notion of identity. Mark works and lives in New York. He received his M.F.A. in 2014 from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia. Mark’s work has been shown predominately in Philadelphia and this group show will be his first time showing in New York. Lauren Whearty is a painter who lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. Lauren received her MFA in painting from The Ohio State University where she received a Graduate Teaching Associate Award, an Arts and Humanities Research Grant, and was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. She received her BFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, with honors. While attending Tyler, Lauren received the Ellen Battell Stoeckel fellowship to attend Yale’s Summer School of Art residency in Norfolk, CT. She has attended Vermont Studio Center with a fellowship, and has exhibited at such venues as the Woodmere Museum of Art in Philadelphia, The Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, Vox Populi, Satellite Contemporary. Lauren has taught at Lehigh University, The Ohio State University, Tyler's Continuing Education program,Moore College of Art and Design continuing education program, and PAFA museum workshops, and Hussian College of Art. Clare Britt is a photographer living and making in Chicago, IL. Her work explores themes about materiality and form deconstructing photographic images and making layers of found images to create sculptural collages. She also uses light as subject and found objects in space to transform ordinary places for site specific installations. She founded the Nonprofit Arts Organization Fraction Workspace in Chicago, IL (2003-2007). She graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a Masters in Fine Arts (2008). She is a freelance photographer traveling the country documenting various projects that include the Friedman House assisted living facility for the visually impaired and One Tail at a Time no kill dog rescue Center.
Past
Architectonics Of Dispersion \ Immersive Acts And ObjectsKuldeep Singh
Oct 20 – Oct 23
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce Architectonics Of Dispersion \ Immersive Acts And Objects, the NYC debut solo show of Kuldeep Singh. The exhibition coincides with Gowanus Open Studios and will be on view during normal gallery hours of 1-6 pm, with performance times: October 20: Act I 7:00 pm to 7:20 pm Act II 8:00 to 8:20 pm October 21: Act III 4:00 pm onwards (open ended) In Architectonics Of Dispersion \ Immersive Acts And Objects, Singh creates a diorama-like installation housing objects in textiles, fragile drawings in assorted proportions, shelves of glazed vegetables against mud washed walls - all as an invented mythic realm in which his carefully directed team of collaborating artists set sensuous acts in instrumental music of sitar, violin, and movement. Poised and immersed, the acts extract eclectic components in transliteration from Nātyashāstra (2nd century AD dramaturgical Sanskrit treatise) and Manasollāsa (11th century AD socio-cultural tome) in undulating masculine and feminine in a body through inventive situations - with hypnosis of primitivism, decor and a sense of languor. Large hay filled pillows and a delicate muslin carpet of lotus medallion drawings, in hues of pale pinks and tinted blues, becomes the recurring site for the attired performers to incarnate. The acts come together to constitute a system that questions human nature, its genesis and defects, and as well as the multiplicity of its facets. Artists in collaboration: Harsh Shah on sitar Kannan Mahadevan on violin Sophia Salingaros in movement Daniel Llaría in movement Mollie Goldstrom in movement Kuldeep Singh in movement Kuldeep Singh was born in 1984 in India, where he received his BFA from College of Art, Delhi University in 2007, and a decade-long training in the Indian classical dance of Odissi under the critically acclaimed dancer Madhavi Mudgal. He obtained his MFA in Intermedia in 2015, from University of Iowa on full scholarship. Singh is the recipient of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency (2014), Yaddo residency (2015) and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts residency (2016). He holds the National Freedom of Expression Award, Mumbai (2009). He has presented work at Kolkata International Performance Festival-2014, 5th Rapid Pulse International Performance Festival in Chicago 2016, Queens Museum in NYC, and at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC (with Rajika Puri). He is currently based in Brooklyn.
Past
Among NinesPadma Rajendran
Sep 9 – Oct 2
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.
Past
RetreatPolly Shindler
Jul 29 – Aug 28
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce Retreat, a solo exhibition by Polly Shindler, curated by Will Hutnick, that explores themes of isolation, identity and connection – both physical and psychological – through intimate portrayals of recognizable spaces. Retreat is Shindler’s first solo exhibition in New York. “You want your art to reflect something about you, whether it’s your desire, or maybe it’s your current situation. I came back to Connecticut and I was alone. I was forced to be alone, but I also felt like I had to be alone. Did I make this choice? Or did it happen to me? Am I alone in this room or am I alone in the world? There were days when I didn’t see anyone and these works became fantasies. If I could design my home, these are elements of a place that I would like to hang out in. They’re peaceful…they’re retreats in both senses of the word: it’s like running away, but also finding a safe place, finding YOUR space. And some of it can be a little scary. You feel so invisible when people don’t know where you are. Maybe it’s just me but I feel like if people don’t know where I am I don’t exist.” Ortega y Gasset Projects will publish a catalog accompanying the exhibition with an essay by Adam Zucker. Polly Shindler (Hamden, CT) received her M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in 2011 (Brooklyn, NY) and attended the Vermont Studio Center in 2013 (Johnson, VT). She completed a yearlong curatorial residency at Trestle Projects in 2015 (Brooklyn). Shindler was named one of “30 Artists to Watch in 2012” by NY Arts Magazine. Recent exhibitions include: Good Works Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Spring/Break Art Show (NY, NY), The Cape Cod Museum of Art (Dennis, MA), and The Neuberger Museum (Purchase, NY). She has an upcoming two-person exhibition at Spoonbill & Sugartown in Brooklyn in September.
Past
Frame WorkJun 3 – Jul 16
Aubrey Levinthal, Kelly McRaven, Dustin Metz, Jason Mones, Jennifer Packer, Eleanor K. Ray, George Rush Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce Frame Work, a group exhibition of paintings curated by our newest co-director, Lauren Whearty. The act of painting a window-view is an unabashed celebration of the best of painting. Time, materiality, subjectivity, are all present within the narratives. There are few subjects more traditional to painting, and yet it has endless possibilities. A painting of a view outwards can carry with it a multitude of meaning, emotion, and visual/tactile pleasures. Most of all it is a dialogue with the practice of painting, image making, and our practice of painting on (for the most part) a window frame stretched with canvas. Leon Battista Alberti asked his audience to perceive the painting, and its underlying structure, as a window itself. This 15th Century metaphor may seem antiquated, yet these artists show us that within this concept there is so much potential. Within Frame Work these settings range from those based on memory, to those directly observed, to inventions and reconstructions of ideal or imagined spaces. Each artist works through this motif in order to dig deeper into their own practice. Kelly McRaven’s employs physical divisions as a way to use many styles or variations within one painting, while Jennifer Packer’s careful insertion of breath into each painting displays her touch and hints of air movement. Jennifer Packer employs narration in a figurative way, while George Rush implies it through much more subtle means. Dustin Metz and Aubrey Levinthal flirt with more gestural abstraction through their use of tactile experimentation and Eleanor K. Ray navigates memory through use of the grid and color to evoke light’s ethereal, emotional and temperature qualities. When we approach a window and its frame, we look through rather than “at” it. The experience of a painting is a look into and through the surface, beyond the obvious, which allows for painterly metaphor, for any number of our experiences and reflections. These opportunities are what allow painting to transport us as artists and viewers. When looking “at” a painting one does not just look at the image, but into the painting – the surface, the actions and gestures of the painter – and into the content of the image and materials. The layers of space, textures, and framing are undeniably a painter’s language.
Past
(I) PineRick Briggs
Apr 22 – May 22
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce (I) Pine, a solo exhibition by Rick Briggs. The exhibition is curated collectively by the Co-Directors of Ortega y Gasset Projects. This exhibition represents the last six years of paintings by New York based artist, Rick Briggs. (I) Pine is an invitation into the ambiguities and slippages of abstraction. Briggs’ work explores the physicality of paint through gesture and layering with the use of house-painting materials such as rags, paint sticks, and rollers. These utilitarian items are presented in ways that often defy their intended purpose: collaged into paintings as evidence of play, exploration, and intuition. The detritus of a house-painter’s vocation are gathered and re-contextualized. Disks of dried paint peel from the bottom of near-empty paint cans or paint-caked rollers that are inserted through the painting’s surface. Mid-sized and small works explore the artist’s inexhaustible curiosity with the possibilities and processes of paintings. Large-scale paintings made by rolling, spraying, pouring or splashing the paint declare the body’s movements and remain as indexical moments of existence. The frankness of the artist’s tools and techniques belies the purpose of a true idealist, a true believer, a true painter: the pursuit of freedom and the desire for mystery. In a Kierkegaardian way, freedom and mystery are in a suspended state of becoming. They are open-ended endeavors driven by an impulse, a curiosity or a longing. Rick Briggs received a BFA from Tyler School of Art and a MFA from SUNY Purchase. He was a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship (2012) and The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2011). He has exhibited at Valentine Gallery, Sarah Bowen Gallery, Yale University School of Art, Islip Art Museum, and Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Past
Unwanted WomenVictoria Lomasko
Mar 4 – Apr 10
The subjects of Victoria Lomasko's sensitive, insightful portraits include sex workers in Nizhny Novgorod, women in underground lesbian clubs, teachers in a remote village school, and children at the juvenile prison colonies where Lomasko volunteers as an art teacher. Lomasko is a fixture at Moscow's political trials and protests. Not content to limit herself to the political life of the country's capital, Lomasko travels around the country and through the former Soviet republics, exploring the domestic, psychological, and spiritual condition of its diverse marginalized groups. With empathy at the heart of her approach, Lomasko is drawn to people who challenge her, whose stories do not necessarily illustrate her own political views. In her graphic reportages, we find a panorama of modern Russian society. Alongside her continuous artistic and journalistic work, Lomasko has emerged as a prominent feminist among her Russian contemporaries, co-curating The Feminist Pencil, an exhibition and lecture series showcasing women's socially engaged graphic art. This show, unique in Russia (and beyond) for its non-commercial and political focus, has so far seen four incarnations, two in Moscow, one in St. Petersburg, with a fourth in Oslo, Norway, in May 2014. Unwanted Women features drawings from her stories on modern slavery in Moscow, the everyday life of sex workers, feminist initiatives in the post-Soviet landscape, the fates of women in the Russian provinces, and repressions against the Russian LGBT community. These real women – migrant workers, feminists, sex workers, elderly women, lesbians – are considered “unwanted women” by their society. “Why am I interested in them?” Lomasko writes in her artist statement. “Because I’m a superfluous woman myself. Both as an unmarried woman with no children, and as woman artist daring to address social and political issues.” The exhibition Unwanted Women coincides with the publication of Lomasko’s debut collection, Other Russias (n+1, 2017). In addition to being present at the opening of this show, Lomasko will be embarking on a US book tour, which will include a second show of her drawings opening at Carnegie Mellon University on March 20th. Curated by Leeza Meksin & Bela Shayevich Victoria Lomasko was born in Serpukhov, Russia in 1978. She works as a graphic artist and has lectured and written widely on graphic reportage. Lomasko is the coauthor of Forbidden Art, which was nominated for the Kandinsky Prize in 2010. She has also co-curated two major art exhibitions: The Feminist Pencil and Drawing the Court. Her work has also been exhibited in Germany, France, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Lebanon, Austria, Belarus, Ukraine and the U.S. Her series have been translated into English, German, and French, and her 2011 graphic novel Forbidden Art was published in German translation in 2013. Other Russias (n+1, 2017) is the first anthology of her work, chronicling series from 2009-2016. She lives in Moscow. Leeza Meksin is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working in painting and installation. Born in the Soviet Union, she immigrated to U.S. with her family in 1989. Her artistic practice highlights parallels between the conventions that govern painting, architecture and our bodies. Most recently Meksin has created site-specific installations for The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, (2016), The Kitchen, NYC (2015), BRIC Media Arts, Brooklyn (2015) and Brandeis University, Waltham (2014). She is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015) and the co-founder and director of Ortega y Gasset Projects since 2013. Meksin teaches at Columbia University. Her solo show Purse Strings and Body Bags is currently on view at Miller Contemporary, NYC. Bela Shayevich is a Soviet-American artist and translator. Her published books include Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, and Vsevolod Nekrasov’s I Live I See, co-translated with Ainsley Morse.
Past
Lay, WeightPhoebe Grip
Mar 4 – May 22
Phoebe Grip’s snares and nets are metaphysical traps which borrow the ancient form of a simple handmade snare to explore the dynamics of predator and prey. Lay, Weight questions the universal sense of sehnsucht: a vague and nagging desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist. Nonfunctional and feminine, these snare traps are designed for an impossible and imagined prey; traps for a desire that is a persistent absence. The variety of materials - including horsehair, monofilament, fish scales, wire and shells - play with space and line quality while working with a variety of depths through texture, reflection and obfuscation. Embodying the form of a trap, they intend to draw you in like a lure: shiny, beautiful, but threatening. In woven trap systems that are feminine, messy, shiny and seductive, Grip explores an implied gender narrative through predation while questioning how we augment and distort our world. Phoebe Grip lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Grip has most recently exhibited at BRIC House for the 2016 Biennial, Re: Art Show in the Pfizer building, and the Wassaic Project’s Summer exhibition Appetite for Destruction. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center, The Lehrman Trust at Soaring Gardens, and The Wassaic Project. Grip has a BA in English from Colorado College.
Past
About LookingMatt Phillips & Travis Fairclough
Jan 27 – Feb 20
"The field that you are standing on appears to have the same proportions as your own life." - John Berger, About Looking, pg. 205. Ortega y Gasset Projects is proud to present About Looking, an exhibition curated by Catherine Haggarty featuring Brooklyn-based painters Matt Phillips and Travis Fairclough that offers us a viewing experience rooted in patience and presence. Phillips and Fairclough’s paintings create a weightless environment, one that urges us to grasp for forms and ground to rest on as we question the reoccurring shapes as figures, objects, and material. About Looking is a nod to the late John Berger, who advocated endlessly for patient and concerted attention in all facets of the arts. We may find steady ground to rest on as a way to assert our knowing of Phillips and Fairclough’s approach and technique, and are pressed to stand back and recalibrate our understanding again and again. To feel or to know these paintings is to feel and know the land and the ground we rest on, as Berger suggests in his text, About Looking, 1980. It is an invaluable ability and a necessary practice to let go of outcomes while both viewing and making painting. Gracefully and patiently, Phillips and Fairclough’s work allows us freedom while viewing. Let us simply sink and swim in the work and company of Matt Phillips and Travis Fairclough in About Looking. -CH Travis Fairclough is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Fairclough earned his B.F.A in Painting at SUNY, Purchase College in 2014. His work has been shown at Scott Charmin Gallery, Gallery 1989, Gallery 151 and Life on Mars. Travis was twice an artist in residence at Byrdcliffe Arts colony and More Arts Engaging Residency. Matt Phillips is a painter living and working in Brooklyn. Recent solo exhibitions include Comfort Inn at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects and Yard Sale at Devening Projects and Editions (Chicago). This April Phillips will have a solo exhibition in Trento, Italy at Studio d’Arte Raffaelli. The NYC Dept. of Ed. and the Public Art for Public Schools Program recently commissioned Phillips to install a large-scale mosaic at PS106. He is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a professor of art at FIT. Catherine Haggarty received her M.F.A from Mason Gross, Rutgers Univeristy in 2011; and is currently a Co-Director of the artist run gallery, Ortega y Gasset in Gowanus, Brooklyn and a contributing writer and curator for The Curator. Having shown both nationally and internationally for a decade, Haggarty's work has traveled steadily through New York and most recently Art on Paper Fair as part of Armory Week and Paper Paris, France (2016). Exhibitions include but not limited to: Geoffrey Young Gallery, Life on Mars, Bridget Mayer Gallery, This Friday Next Friday, Transmitter Gallery, Proto Gallery and more. Her work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, and she was the recipient of the ESKFF Emerging Artist Grant and Residency at Mana Contemporary in 2014.
Past
Philly CajDec 10 – Jan 16
Steve Basel, Nadine Beauharnois, Emily Elliott, Morgan Hobbs, Lucan Kelly, Julia Owens, Marcelle Reinecke, Jillian Schley In an effort to open up discussions with other artist-run spaces, especially those beyond New York, Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition exchange with Automat Collective in Philadelphia. The exchange begins with Serious Play, an exhibition* of works by the directors of Ortega y Gasset Projects at Automat, opening Saturday, December 2. Soon to follow, Ortega y Gasset Projects presents Philly Caj, a group exhibition of works by members of Automat. It is tempting - and very difficult - to locate a unifying theme in the work of artists whose main collaborative project is not collaborative art-making itself, but the launching of an artist-run gallery. The 8 artists in Philly Caj work on a variety of styles and approaches. So, what is the link between the work, if one exists at all? We venture to suggest a certain casualness. Paintings show loose gestures and edges that soften and blend; forms sag and embrace their own irregularity. By eschewing the monumental, the artists in Philly Caj question the notions of artistry and beauty. In doing so, they connect with a relevant emotional poignancy expressed in hand-made form. A fresh sense of playfulness is expressed in upbeat colorfulness and a commitment to off-beat tactility. Automat is a new force in the Philadelphia art scene. Opening its doors in April 2015, the collective has since put on 12 exhibitions. Curatorial themes have included the amorphous nature of identity; gender; class; and a curatorial response to the building in which the gallery resides. Automat members are Steve Basel, Nadine Beauharnois, Emily Elliott, Morgan Hobbs, Lucan Kelly, Julia Owens, Marcelle Reinecke and Jillian Schley. *Serious Play at Automat runs from December 2 - January 8, 2017 and includes works by the directors of Ortega y Gasset Projects: Eleanna Anagnos, Clare Britt, Joshua Bienko, Catherine Haggarty, Eric Hibit, Will Hutnick, Leeza Meksin, Sarah Rushford, Zahar Vaks
Past
Wish Me Good LuckMonica Palma
Nov 5 – Dec 5
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce Wish Me Good Luck, the solo exhibition debut of work by Monica Palma, curated by Eleanna Anagnos. In the intersection between time-tested auguries and contemporary artistic approaches, Palma finds new ways to create life, through a search for meaning and identity. Palma’s labor-intensive, large works explore Pre-Columbian culture, psychoanalysis, alchemy, ritual, divination, and healing. Spanning different genres and media, Monica Palma employs drawing, textile design, painting, sculpture and performance to negotiate the breach between her Mexican heritage and her experience living in the US. Wish Me Good Luck traverses four of Palma's bodies of work: Textile Drawings, Sound Drawings, Sound/Mirror Drawings, and her most recent, Souvenirs. In Souvenirs, Palma drapes large sheets of paper across her body, which become an extension of herself. Meaningful actions create folds: she hugs the painted paper, creating creases and tears which she then cuts into and marks using saws, knives and paint. Through Palma’s rigorous physical engagement, her work is transformed into remains from a mystic ritual performance: a body map, a guide, or a membrane. Like sound etched into an LP, it is also a physical record of her sonic experiences. Obsidian is an important material for Palma, for its traditional uses in pre Columbian culture, and also for her personal connection to the volcanic glass, which is found in abundance in Mexico. Assuming the role of shaman, Palma sets an intention or makes an inquiry, and rolls them like dice (or spits them out of her mouth) onto a work in progress. After gluing the them in place, Palma sometimes reworks this initial positioning of the stones and tears them off, thus asserting power and control over the chance results. The paper bears the scars of such tearing, revealing the artist’s desire to exert determination beyond the traditional methodologies of divination. Palma believes in second, third and fourth chances. Mónica Palma (Born Mexico City, 1978) is a New York-based artist. She studied visual art at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Veracruz (2002), and received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University (2008). Palma’s work has been shown at TSA (Brooklyn), 245 Varet Street (Brooklyn), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn), and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City). Eleanna Anagnos (born Evanston, IL 1980) lives and works in New York. She creates work that explores the nature of human perception and our awareness of space and consciousness. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art (2005) and a BA with honors and distinction from Kenyon College with a concentration in Women’s and Gender Studies (2002). She has shown internationally. Some of Eleanna’s awards include: Yaddo Fellowship; BAU Institute Fellowship; The Anderson Ranch and The Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Past
On Knowing Unknowing: A Material NarrativeOct 8 – Oct 31
Nancy Azara Yevgeniy Fiks Maia Cruz Palileo Sun You Curated by Zahar Vaks Behind this crazed, Beloved veil, Are vision after twilight vision Loving you. And staking out a clearing In the jungle, From an alley, Bearing an emancipating taste For your release alone, Your very presence on the scene, Repeating to you: In the diamond, On the corner, We first heard Those wild words, From pistols To the core, Our body dog, Our movie mind in avalanche, Our peacock heart, The double-dealer, Frantic, no-look pass To spirit, Floating upwards From slick lips Where all life poured, And downward From the dark and moon, Our miracle, Our earth-sick sun. Alexander Nemser People seek out different things. Some want clarity while others yearn for ambiguity. Some plan methodically while others rely on instinct and improvisation. Some want to focus on one thing and master it, while others glean from multiple practices. The act of making allows us to make and unmake, act and react, know and un know. In "On Knowing Unknowing: A Material Narrative" artists Nancy Azara, Yevgeny Fiks, Maia Cruz Palileo, and Sun You address the space between knowing and unknowing. There is a spectrum of what is acquired knowledge and what is intuition. Nancy Azara paints, carves, traces, cuts, and moves around her materials in a way that negotiates raw instinct with thoughtful deliberation with a very specific and intricate thinking. The work embodies serious play. Surface is super rough yet delicate. There is a definite sense of knowing the materials yet the forms and imagery continue to unravel into the unknown. Yevgeny Fiks conducts rigorous research that dictates his work. He is inspired by the collapse of the Soviet Union. His work makes us take a closer look at the accepted Soviet history and offer a lens that shows repressed histories. Fiks also muses on weaving the Soviet and Yiddish narratives. Imagine a painting of a Soviet Era satellite flying over the oldest Synagogue in Russia. The moonlight glares off of the satellite making it read like a constellation circumambulating around the illuminated star of David. Maia Cruz Palileo creates painting that fuses her memories with an imagined narrative. The paintings are inspired by the oral histories passed down in her family. Ghost images emerge out of the woven and layered marks. The background and forms merge while maintaining their distinction. Her black and white paintings don't feel like the absence of color. You look at the narrative of these paintings and you feel like you know the source but just cant seem to verbalize. Memories in the mist of mysterious mirages. Sun You makes objects by assembling various metals and connecting them with magnets. The intimate scale work commands the space around it. Other times the metal pieces are attached to pieces of painted wood, or fabric where she taps into the physicality of painting and combines it with her mode of composing found and sculpted objects. There is a spontaneity present in how these are composed, overtime the playful spontaneous gestures accumulate to a kind of instinctive knowing. The compositions offer a beautiful conversation between the fragmented and the whole.
Past
The Shifting Space Around UsMegan & Murray McMillan
Sep 10 – Sep 26
Also on view: Don't Shower When It Rains by Emily Kloppenburg Ortega y Gasset Projects is proud to present The Shifting Space Around Us, a video installation by artist team Megan and Murray McMillan. Curated by Sarah Rushford, this monumental two-channel installation invites viewers to feel emotionally buoyed as the projections convey a filmic, richly illustrated mythic scene set in a locomotive roundhouse. Original sculpture made by the artist team, functioning as set and prop, perch atop the roundhouse's gigantic mechanical turntable as this refreshingly expositionless story is shown and not told. We won't spoil it and tell you what happens, only that it prompts the viewer's presence-of-mind to blossom, over one long take, into an engaged state of layered wonder. The slow and understated camera movements, enabled by the transformation of the turntable, by the building itself, not only carry the viewer's attention but seem to embody the arching inward spectacle of the viewer's emotional selfhood. They become the motions of one's own consciousness. Though the work is filmic, the viewer of The Shifting Space Around Us is not tucked into their movie theater seat, they are standing in the dark gallery, there are two perspectives in play at once and the kinesthetic presence of the sculptural objects and the shifting of the roundhouse seem to merge with the gallery. The viewer is swept up and the volumes represented in the work become that of one's own body and mind. The Shifting Space Around Us gives a shout out to the legendary cinema historical film A Trip to the Moon. Both pieces convey, however outwardly or subtly intoned, a perilous trip to outer space. The studio of Georges Méliès where A Trip to the Moon was made was also mechanical. (The building transformed to use the sun and sky as studio lighting.) This film, made at the birth of narrative cinema revealed the cast and crew's creative camaraderie and a certain childlike vulnerability is essential to its emotional tone. Though strikingly ambitious and of the highest, most innovative level of craft, a tone of tenderness and vulnerability also pervades The Shifting Space Around Us and that pervasion is deeper than the acting or the set or any aesthetic choice. It's tenderness rises from the passion of the community of people that worked on the project, at all levels. This power can be sensed in The Shifting Space Around Us and the McMillan's entire body of work. The action that unfolds is an incomplete, multivalent mythology (it has elements of Orpheus and Eurydice and many more likenesses). While remarkably beautiful, it's intentionally incomplete and calls on the viewer to fill in hulking narrative gaps. It gives a lot to the viewer and asks a lot in return. Instead of illustrating a myth the piece acknowledges the space that all of mythic narrative occupies in the emotional mind of the viewer and by viewing the piece, the viewer is allowed to feel that their experience is grand and mythological. They are traversing their lives, finding themselves in 2016 Brooklyn walking into a darkened gallery to be shown the self, one's own tenuous state in a huge unknown. Here are these lives projected, and their own lives being lived bravely in the face of change and risk. Megan and Murray McMillan (Providence, RI) have been collaborating since 2002. They make interdisciplinary projects that incorporate video, installation, performance, and photography. They often start their process by building large sets in their studio or on location. That set then becomes the stage for video and photographs with choreographed actors who activate the set in a filmed performance. The McMillan's work is included in a concurrent exhibition at Mass MOCA entitled Explode Every Day An Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Wonder. ***** Ortega y Gasset Projects is also excited to present the first project in the 2016-2017 line-up for our newly minted space The Skirt, dedicated entirely to site-specific work. Emily Kloppenburg’s site-specific installation Don’t Shower When It Rains will remain on view through the end of November, 2016. Don’t Shower When It Rains levels Ortega Y Gasset Projects with the neighboring Gowanus Canal. Using the gallery’s subterranean entry vestibule as a guiding frame, the artwork immerses spectators within the adjacent body of water otherwise off-limits. The Canal is of particular significance due to the broad spectrum of distant histories and more recent developments it pertains to. Pre-war roads, expired industrial plants, Whole Foods and contemporary real estate projects all convene around a government mandated Superfund Site, constituting a vertical stratum of narratives from past to present. The project incorporates Ortega Y Gasset Projects into this topography as a means of exploring the incredible diversity, urgency and contradictions that describe thisarea of Brooklyn today. The title of Kloppenburg’s installation derives from the advisories of Owen Foote, a local architect, city planner and lifelong New York City resident who has been leading canoe tours on the Gowanus Canal since 1999. On rainy days, excess runoff frequently pushes city sewage into surrounding bodies of water, such as New York Harbor and the Gowanus Canal, a phenomenon exacerbated by the flow of NYC tap. In response, Don’t Shower When It Rains directly addresses the actions of the individual within the city. Using dual channel video projection and poster installation, the piece visually and geographically addresses an accumulation of urban issues encapsulated by the Gowanus, including city-wide pollution, food supply, industry and hyper-real estate development. Video footage vertically adjoins adjacent, yet disconnected elements of the Gowanus district—murky waters, oil globules, grass patches, concrete, organic raspberries, new and abandoned buildings, sand and stone—abutting a bending wall blanketed in CAUTION posters announcing the site’s toxicity. Through enclosure and submersion, the installation forces individuals to assess their personal relationship to the state of the Gowanus terrain. Rendering the invisible visible, Kloppenburg’s work probes the slippery boundaries between landscape, architecture and the city, positioning the concerns of the urban upon a fluid continuum rather than preserving them as uniquely distinct. Emily Kloppenburg lives and works in New York, NY. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2016, and a BA from Vassar College in 2011. Kloppenburg has exhibited at Finished Goods Warehouse (2016), Black & White Gallery Project Space (2016), The Fisher Landau Center for Art (2016), The Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery (2016 & 2015), The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University (2016), Judith Charles Gallery (2015), and ArtSpace New Haven (2014).
Past
ChangefulAug 13 – Aug 14
Performances at 3pm and 7pm by: Christie Blizard Libby Rowe Cayla Skillin-Brauchle Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce Changeful, part of The Quick Brown Fox, a series of events, performances, film screenings and public interventions this Summer at OyG. The entire program will run at 3pm and 7pm. These three performance artists use found text, monologue, ritual and interaction with sculptural objects to destabilize cultural constructs and address the viewer's inward experience. Organized by Sarah Rushford, the group of artists was selected from Emergency Index; an annual anthology of performance documentation published by Ugly Duckling Press and edited by Yelena Gluzman and Sophia Cleary. The approaches each of these performers take to reach the audience are drastically different from one another and individually they are also refreshingly volatile in tone and intent. Christie Blizard, coming in from San Antonio, claims to be embodied by rock legend Keith Moon. Her costume and monologue are both doubt-worthy and electric, like that of a stand-up-psychic-medium. Libby Rowe, also traveling from San Antonio, performs several works including Pearls of Wisdom in which she works to put on a pair of impossibly long white gloves while reading idiomatic phrases relating to good manners. And Cayla Skillin-Brauchle hailing from Salem, Oregon to be with us at OyG performs Soft Data, in which the artist’s costume functions as an informal polling station and votes are cast by slipping pieces of paper into a custom-made jumpsuit covered in small pockets. All three artists will perform at 3pm and 7pm. Changeful is part of The Quick Brown Fox, an events series with a radical roster! Be sure to check out what's on, and come along! All events are free and all are welcome. Wednesday, August 3rd, PSYCHEDELIC PANTRY PARTY Friday, August 5th, L’APPEL DU VIDE Sunday, August 14th: 3-6pm, GOLDENROD Saturday August 20th: 6pm, MULTI SENSE STORY Christie Blizard - Blizard has exhibited widely, working in a variety of media that merge painting, poetry and performance. Recent venues include the McNay Art Museum, (San Antonio, TX); The Epitome Institute, (San Antonio, TX); the School of Visual Arts, (NY, NY); The Painting Center; (NY, NY); 1708 Gallery, (Richmond, VA); Women & Their Work, (Austin, TX); Lawndale Art Center, (Houston, TX); and NOMA Gallery, (San Francisco, CA). She has also received residencies at Anderson Ranch, (Snowmass Village, CO); MacDowell Artist Colony, (Peterborough, NH); SIM Artist in Residency Program (Reykjavik, Iceland); and Centraltrack, (Dallas, TX). Her work has been featured in Art News, Hyperallergic, Blouin ArtInfo and Art in America. Libby Rowe is an artist working in photography, sculpture, interactive installation, and performance. Her artwork explores ideas of identity and belonging through self-definitions as informed by social and domestic constructs. Rowe is interested in breaking from traditional presentation strategies for photographs to engage viewers in a more interactive experience as well as the role of the photographic image in relation to femininity using image, object and installations. Rowe’s performances were included in the Vertigo Performance Series at the Waterloo Center for the Arts and Fountain Art Fair New York in 2014. Rowe’s current photographic series, Inside/Out and the installation (sub)Division were recently exhibited together at United Photo Industries in Brooklyn New York and were exhibited with Like Panes of Glass at Morlan Gallery in Lexington, KY. Rowe received her BFA from the University of Northern Iowa and her MFA from Syracuse University. She resides and works in San Antonio, Texas. Cayla Skillin-Brauchle is a visual artist whose transdisciplinary practice spans drawing, video, installation, performance, and social practice. Skillin-Brauchle’s recent performances explore things that cannot be easily measured: our relationship to our possessions and beliefs; the notion of truth; possible correlations between the social and environmental climate; and how and why we might acquire good luck. On August 13th Skillin-Brauchle will present a new and interactive performance at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn. Skillin-Brauchle’s work has been shown at numerous international and national venues including Artspace Mackay in Queensland, Australia; the Rotunda Gallery in Bangkok, Thailand; ROY G BIV Gallery in Columbus, Ohio; the Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai, India, and 621 Gallery in Tallahassee, Florida. Skillin-Brauchle has been awarded residencies at Iskra Print Collective, Vermont Studio Center, and most recently the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences. Having earned a BA from Beloit College (2006) and her MFA from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio (2012), Skillin-Brauchle was 2012-13 Fulbright Fellow in Mumbai, India. Skillin-Brauchle lives and works in Salem, Oregon where is an Assistant Professor of Art at Willamette University.
Past
Psychedelic Pantry PartyAug 3 – Aug 4
Lily Chan Zebadiah Keneally Janie Korn John O’Donnell Ryann Slauson Tiffany Smith Liz Zito Curated by Will Hutnick & Liz Zito Psychedelic Pantry Party is a collection of videos from artists who are exploring ideas surrounding virtual reality, the past and the present, and Jesus-themed infomercials.
Past
LunacyJun 25 – Jul 25
Jonathan Cowan John Dilg Matthew F Fisher Everest Hall JJ Manford Luc Paradis Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Lunacy, a group exhibition curated by Eric Hibit. "The moon is a lock of witch's hair tawny, and golden, and red and the night winds pause and stare at that strand from a witch's head" - Aureila Frances Plath, from Voices and Visions (a documentary on Sylvia Plath) produced by Annenberg Learner, 1988 The moon has a long history of captivating painters. Since the beginning of modernism, painters such as J.M.W. Turner, Ralph Blakelock, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Georgia O'Keefe, and Arthur Dove have represented the moon for poetic and personal ends. The artists in Lunacy work in this legacy and push the subject to new expressive realms. John Dilg, Matthew F Fisher, JJ Manford and Luc Paradis use the moon as a visual anchor that orients the viewer in space. For them, the moon is a point on which to rest the eye as a fantasy world takes shape. Everest Hall represents the moon with intense realism, and in other works uses the moon as a gateway to abstraction and painterly freedom. Eschewing outward representations of the moon, Jonathan Cowan uses the conventions of landscape and atmosphere to speak of mysterious celestial bodies, lovingly rendered in embroidery.
Past
Repeat Pressure UntilMay 21 – Jun 20
Catherine Cartwright, Moyra Davey, Stacy Fisher, Hilary Harnischfeger, Dana Hoey, Pati Hill, Vera Iliatova, Hein Koh, Dani Leventhal, Carolyn Salas, Kim Waldron, Carmen Winant Curated by Sheilah Wilson Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Repeat Pressure Until, a material investigation into the spaces between the recognizable and the unknown. Artists in the show use inhabitation and over-inhabitation of both material and societal norms to transform perception and offer new proposals. We cannot avoid the material, social, and cultural worlds we live in. Utilizing understood reference points becomes radical because it implies that all knowns have the potential to be made strange. There is a space opened up when testing limits of ideas or materials. Insistence both strengthens through emphasis and falls apart through over-repetition. The gendered female body is presented as benignly understandable and simultaneously profane. The object is holding or is held. Dominant can be overthrown. (Although unnerving, it is made palatable because it is beautiful and the chaos is momentary.) Artists in the show suggest ways for us to live inside the known world, while subverting these knowns through the act of placing pressure. This exertion of energy can create new forms and functions out of recognizable tropes and materials. Artists use photography, painting, drawing, video, and sculpture as tactics towards newly imagined versions of that which we know. They shoot arrows of violence, obsession, re-imagined sexuality, kinship, and motherhood into anything in the world around us to which the arrow can cling. There is an ambivalence in understanding that we are our material form(s), gender(s) and role(s), and a courage in using exactly those to imagine other. It all begins with a geological re-formulation suggested in the work of Harnischfeger; elements of color, paper, clay, and remnants from the natural world fuse into a newly stratified past. Fisher and Salas use sculptural forms to forge new ways of taking up space through material presence and pressure. Hill provides a historical foremother to the idea of using the available materials to render them newly and fiercely poetic. Cartwright, Davey, Hoey, Iliatova, Koh, Leventhal, Waldron, Winant use photography, painting, drawing, and video to create tension between ideas of gendered and expected roles, with twists and reconfigurations of such ideals. There is an uncomfortable yet seductive force at play. We are witnessing the prying open of the lid of our recognizable world; the mirage is made material. Here is a new proposal. In conjunction with this show, the publication Mother Mother will be released, with contributions from over fifteen artist and writer mothers. This publication makes visible the act of being a mother, articulating conflicts and confusion in being mother, artist, lover, partner, sister, friend and more.
Past
Pass / FailApr 15 – May 16
Adam Ekberg, Robert Otto Epstein, Leif Low-Beer, Erin O’Keefe, Gabrielle Roth, Megan Stroech, Denise Treizman Curated by Will Hutnick “Lately I’ve been getting interested in creation. There’s the magic of the thing, sure, that’s all of a sudden there, shimmering and strange, so newfangled, undreamed of, seemingly and in fact actually until this very moment impossible. And there’s the paradox of that magic, too, spinning your head from the thing created, which never existed, round to the materials it was created from, which always did, and back to the thing, once separate from the world, back round to the materials, once the world itself, and so on…” – Dorian Rolston, From Nothing When I asked Dorian if we could use some of his words here, I wasn’t thinking much more than that epigraphic thing above, just a little something on creation. I would’ve been perfectly happy with that, really, the opening to his unfinished From Nothing as the opening to the press release for the opening of the exhibition-to-be Pass / Fail. There was a nice symmetry to it, all these works in progress working in progress together, and so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect—a sudden discord in the harmony, an off note, I feared—when he began writing what follows as well. I had absolutely no idea he’d try to pass himself off as me, going on about how pleased Ortega y Gasset Projects is to announce Pass / Fail, a group exhibition featuring the works of Adam Ekberg, Leif Low-Beer, Erin O’Keefe, Robert Otto Epstein, Gabrielle Roth, Megan Stroech and Denise Treizman that…or something. To be sure, these impersonations weren’t always perfect, and I found myself bristling when I—or he—didn’t sound like me, not so much because he—or I—was breaking character but simply because there existed in someone’s—his—head the thought that that—this—was how I actually sounded, kind of like when you hear yourself on your own answering machine greeting. Hi, you’ve reached Will Hutnick, you might hear, and what a barefaced lie, when you think about it, because if you’re Will Hutnick you can’t possibly have reached Will Hutnick, Will Hutnick being the one doing the reaching and this, this thing he’s reached, is a recording. Which is kind of the point: the countless times you tried to record your greeting never get recorded, never heard. So, this is the recording of the recording, the outtakes as takeaway. Maybe you sounded too eager, borderline overzealous, at first, and to compensate you brought your tone way down to something more subdued. Only a little too far subdued, maybe. Isn’t that kind of depressing? You’re happier than that! You ought to be, nothing to really complain about, and besides, important to sound professional. But not so unctuous, don’t oversell, so keep that messy swish of traffic on the wet streets outside, nice atmospherics hopefully you’re not really scrutinizing because, seriously, whose window is open on a rainy day, that’s just silly. As if I had to open it so badly I’d risk catching chill, that I need some air desperately. Did someone let one rip? It’s just me on this recording…and so on and so on, rehearsing your sound in a particular place, making and unmaking, creating and failing, passing and failing and everything—that is, the oblique slanting line known as the solidus, or more colloquially as the slash, which in poetry signifies a line break, all the open space—in between. “…and so on. But what’s really sustaining my interest, I think, is not the thing, the feverish novelty, but the simple, humble, mysterious act—the prime movement that moves without itself being moved, the creation that creates the creation, the moment when from nothing comes something. Comes what, exactly, isn’t my place to say. A quick look at the press materials tells me something Rube Goldbergian, lost in the space of its own disorientation, so slapstick it hurts. Suppose I could just go to Pass / Fail to find out.” – Dorian Rolston, From Nothing Ortega y Gasset Projects is an artist-run curatorial collective and exhibition space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Comprised of artists currently living in Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio and Tennessee, OyG operates as a cross-country collective and incubator for dialogue and artistic exchange.
Past
UsesFeb 27 – Apr 4
Mark Dion Todd Freeman Richard Klein Naomi Safran-Hon Zoe Sheehan Saldaña Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present in its main gallery Uses, a group exhibition curated by Fritz Horstman. Concurrently in the vestibule gallery, Kirsten Hassenfeld’s Star Upon Star will be on view. Drawing on George Kubler’s seminal 1962 book The Shape of Time (Yale University Press), we observe that merely useful things disappear more completely into history than pleasurable things. There are not many shovels or shoes still in existence from the Middle Ages because they wore out and were thrown away, useful though they once had been. From the same time period there are countless paintings, held onto and preserved because they were elevated to the realm of art – certainly not because their owners anticipated some future practical use. The group of work brought together in Uses plies the drift between objects that are made to simply be pleasurable to behold, and objects that are beautiful because they are useful. Everything in this exhibition was made with the intention of being art, but with at least one eye looking back across the spectrum of usefulness towards the mundane tools that will fade into history. In Mark Dion’s print Oceanomania we see the tools and trophies of an ocean voyage. Barrels and spears are displayed beside taxadermed fish and paintings of boats. The cabinet Dion depicts is filled with objects that have been taken out of use so that they can be preserved and displayed. While the print exists as art, the cabinet and its contents are a waystation between tool and art. A net is a system of lines woven in a repeating rhythm. In Todd Freeman’s drawings, the same features that make a net functional make it visually beautiful. His nets seem to be on display rather than in use, as if to question whether they should be allowed back into use or preserved in their elevated state as art objects. Richard Klein combines found salt dishes and glass ashtrays in Salt and Cigarettes. The sparkling cut and molded glass on which bygone logos are emblazoned seem to be sliding off or grabbing the edge of the low table on which they are set. The sculpture forms a sort of hand-sized disused landscape, on which we look down from above. In Fragment: Pattern in 2 Parts Naomi Safran-Hon has pushed concrete through a decorative fabric pattern, and then applied gray spray paint through the same pattern. It is an acknowledgement of the usefulness of decoration, and the beauty of concrete, a material mostly known for its utility. Zoe Sheehan Saldaña makes seemingly simple everyday factory-made objects by hand. Working with chemist Dr. Glen Kowach, she made Strike Anywhere, an edition of 250 strike-anywhere matches. They are the same size and material as a conventional match, but made by hand by the artist. If they are ever put to use they will be destroyed. Their status as art objects denies their potential as useful objects. Prompts and questions Kubler: Every man-made thing arises from a problem as a purposeful solution (8). Q: What problems produced these artworks? Kubler: Works of art are distinguished from tools and instruments by richly clustered adherent meanings (26). Q: Are the adherent meanings changed when a group of objects, each layered with the realism of useful tools (though self-defined as artworks), are gathered together in a room? Horstman: Ontologically nothing repeats, epistemologically everything repeats. Q: By making use of the knowledge gathered in the making of non-art useful objects, are the artworks in this exhibition simply replicating the existence of the referred-to object, or are they doing something new? Kubler: Tools and fashion are the boundaries of man-made objects (39). Q: What a spectrum to behold! If a rudimentary hammer or ax is one extreme, and the wigs of 17th century France (to pick one of many candidates for this extreme) is the other, where do art objects that make direct reference to, or also function as, tools fall on that spectrum? Fritz Horstman is an artist and curator based in Bethany, CT. His sculptures, drawings, videos, music, and sound projects explore the tools and ideas that are created in the space between nature and culture. His work will be featured in the upcoming deCordova Biennial. Mark Dion is best known for his use of the vocabulary of science within his art practice. He is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, where he has a solo show running from Feb 25 through April 16, 2016. Todd Freeman lives and works in Grand Rapids, MI. His drawings and prints pull from a deep curiosity for the natural world, exploring subjects from science and folklore. Richard Klein is an artist, curator and writer based in Norwalk, CT. He reclaims eyeglasses, ashtrays, and other objects, often made of glass, making use of what material already exists in the world. Naomi Safran-Hon lives and works in New York, but was born and raised in Israel. Her work explores the domestic places and objects of her homeland, examining their state of ruin and redressing their materiality. She currently has a solo show at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD from Jan 27 through April 3, 2016. She is represented by Slag Gallery in New York. Zoe Sheehan Saldaña’s work often hides in plain sight. She creates by hand exact replicas of tools and objects that usually come to us from a factory. She lives and works in New York. Educated as a printmaker, Kirsten Hassenfeld makes sculpture from paper and found objects. She lives and works in Brooklyn and the Catskills.
Past
The SwerveJan 23 – Feb 22
Julia Bland, Caroline Wells Chandler, Glenn Goldberg, Bill Komoski, Joyce Kozloff, Bruce Pearson, Sarah Peters, James Siena, Barbara Takenaga Curated by Lauren Frances Adams and Jennifer Coates The title for the exhibition is based upon a book of the same name by Stephen Greenblatt, which touches on ancient atomistic theory, wherein atoms normally falling straight through a void are sometimes subject to a clinamen -- a slight, unpredictable change. It is in this interruption of regularity where the action lies. According to Lucretius, if atoms were not in the habit of swerving, “nature would never have produced anything.” Taking this as a point of departure, The Swerve presents contemporary paintings and sculptures that explore the haptic and conceptual approaches to pattern: how pattern and its rupture are employed in service of meaning. Joyce Kozloff appropriates the iconic Islamic star to create a richly colored all-over pattern that merges non-Western motif with an American quilting logic, revealing the political in the decorative. Julia Bland utilizes an eccentric, loose weaving technique to build emblematic, symmetrical imagery that seem to contain hidden meanings, while Caroline Wells Chandler uses crochet to generate soft sculptures: feminist homunculi that merge cartoons with craft. Sarah Peters’ ancient Assyrian hair patterns become almost architectural as they frame and support an open-mouthed female: many periods of art history coalesce into a single head. Barbara Takenaga’s woozy forms radiate from a glowing center, as her carefully tended surfaces create cosmic vortexes. Bill Komoski’s lattices and sculpted holes on canvas leak toxic sludge in tongue-like shapes, as he channels the bodily via the urban industrial. Bruce Pearson’s white-on-white biomorphic carvings also make use of relief, embedding text within them: once your eyes adjust the code is broken. In James Siena’s drawing, a figure emerges from a density of tiny marks, she seems to be trapped within the edges of the paper. Glenn Goldberg makes hallucinatory use of dots to create an atmospheric world from which two tiny birds emerge. The artists all share a propensity to tease out meaning from complex visual matrices. Images range from figuration to abstraction, but the recurrent theme is an organic wavering between recognizable form and repetition.
Past
On the Fence Finish FlagNov 13 – Dec 14
Eleanor Aldrich Catherine Haggarty Becky Kolsrud Curated by Joshua Bienko On the Fence Finish Flag 1. You got that land o'lay, now power on through and to! 2. If you aren't done flapping about, hurry up then. 3. We have a name but too many times becomes hectic enough all right. 4. All rise, we'll find the sucker with the red nose on. 5. And to you, step, step, high knee, high knee, you'll learn drumsticks down. 6. There were eighteen and no one counted. Not even me. But I'm pretty sure I can still fly around. Prolly not tonight though. 7. Knock 'em down right in that sauce. 8. If you like the big underwear, dance. 9. Cheek and Toe followed by Lightning Tom, Rancid Charms, Fill her up and Fancy Arms. 10. Chase them down. Yuck right at him. Don't start with me mother fucker. 11. Chincey 12. Bill up and feet up are two things you can do in a soft chair. Looking up, well, you can do it. 13. Ride around rear ramps. Those ones will get the records. 14. Jude, Luke, Joshua, Isiah, Anna, these were my neighbors. Eleanor Aldrich lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee. Catherine Haggarty lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey. Becky Kolsrud lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Joshua Bienko lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Past
Dr. Super IgorPat McElnea
Oct 30 – Nov 9
When sickness takes hold of our bodies, we seek refuge in small white rooms for brief and at times baffling expert advice. More familiar with our bodies than ourselves, the doctor knows something about us that remains illegible. In Dr. Super Igor (MD) we are repeatedly diagnosed, turned into a scene of innumerable readings. Gentle, well intentioned, clumsy, and cryptic, Dr. Igor organizes our interior life and feels “invigorated” as he does so. When we’re not patients in his examination room, we play therapist to his confessions about life as a doctor, his adamant beliefs and personal insecurities, his longing for physical contact. Borrowing from self-help culture, modernist poetry, and colloquial metaphor, Igor helps us picture our illness in language. Performance and painting merge to explore how symptoms are read like marks and how our bodies are consequently marked by diagnoses. This is a journey through Dr. Igor’s scientific imagination, at the divide between sight and touch, empirical evidence and projection, preventative care and intervention, informed consent and blind trust. Patrick McElnea is an artist based in New York who exhibits his work internationally. He teaches experimental video and drawing at Vassar College.
Past
Color Against ColorSep 11 – Oct 19
Andy Cross, Benjamin Degen, Alyssa Gorelick, Hein Koh, Ben Pederson, David Scanavino, Richard Tinkler, Nichole Van Beek Curated by Eric Hibit The word "colorful" is broadly used to describe many things that have color. However, in many aesthetic and utilitarian applications, color is often interspersed with black, white and neutrals to achieve “balance”. The works in this exhibition forgo such measures and force the viewer to confront color against color, without the breathing room normally provided. When these works are placed in context, the potential for further color clash is exponential. Working within traditions of painterly abstraction, Gorelick, Scanavino, Tinkler and Van Beek explore color as conveyed via the plasticity of paint (in the case of Gorelick’s work, printer ink; in Scanavino’s, paper pulp). The bodily implications within these abstract works are highlighted by the overtly figurative and innuendo-laden works of Degen, Koh and Pederson. In situ, the works in this exhibition enact titillating narratives of caress, body heat, wetness, pressure, and touch. Eric Hibit is a visual artist and painter based in New York. He received his BFA from Corcoran College of Art + Design (1998), and Yale University School of Art (2003). Hibit has exhibited his work at Zurcher Gallery, C24 Gallery, Field Projects, Anna Kustera Gallery, Curator’s Office, Momenta Art, and Geoffrey Young Gallery. His work has been reviewed in The Village Voice and The Washington Post. Hibit has taught studio art at Temple University, New York University, Hunter College, and Cooper Union. Hibit joined Ortega y Gasset Projects in 2014. Also on view in the gallery vestibule, Leeza Meksin curates Windows, Curtains, Wall, Painting, a site-specific installation by George Rush. The piece will be on view throughout the Ortega y Gasset fall/winter exhibition program. Rush’s painted wall depicts an imagined modernist interior that both disrupts the existing architecture of the gallery’s entrance and provides a ghostly, apocryphal context for his painting, Couple with a Dog. The piece was inspired by the wall painting of Pompeii and Herculaneum and decorative wall frescoes from Roman Renaissance and Baroque interiors. George Rush has been exhibiting in the United States and Europe since 2001. He received an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Grant and a NYFA fellowship in painting, and is currently an Assistant Professor and chair of graduate studies in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University. Leeza Meksin is an interdisciplinary artist, who makes paintings, installations, public art and multiples. She received a MFA from The Yale School of Art (2007), a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005) and a joint BA/MA in Comparative Literature from The University of Chicago (2000). Meksin has exhibited her work at Regina Rex Gallery (2011, 2014), Airplane Gallery (2014) and Thomas Erben Gallery (2009). She has created site-specific public art installations at Brandeis University (2014), the former Donnell branch of the New York Public Library (2011), and in a National Endowment for the Arts funded project in New Haven, CT (2012). Her work has been featured in BOMB magazine, TimeOut, Chicago Tribune and many other publications. In 2015 Meksin was appointed to the faculty at Columbia University School of Art. Ortega y Gasset Projects is a gallery curated projects space in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Comprised of artists currently living in Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Tennessee, OyG operates a cross-country collective and an incubator for dialogue and artistic exchange.
Past
The Gaps Between UsAug 21 – Aug 31
Damon Arhos Sarah Clough Chambers Suzy Kopf Kirk Daniel Palmer The Gaps Between Us is an MFA exhibition from Maryland Institute College of Art. Working from traditions of painting, these artists explore themes related to contemporary American culture, including leisure, personal histories, queer identity, and the nature of perception. A unifying theme is the relationship to traditional painting approaches while simultaneously pushing the limits of the medium’s scale and material presence. This exhibition is curated by Ortega y Gasset member Eric Hibit.
Past
Accessories to the ProjectAug 8 – Aug 17
Megan Heckmann Netta Sadovsky Amy Stober Alex Zandi Kaini Zhou A pop-up exhibition featuring works by OyG’s current and past interns.
Past
Love ChildJun 12 – Jul 27
Eva and Adele, Anna Gaskell, and Douglas Gordon, Nyeema Morgan, and Mike Cloud, Rachel Dubuque and Justin Plakas, Maria Walker and Jonathan Allmaier, Carrie Moyer and Sheilah Pepe, Jennifer Coates and David Humphrey Ortega y Gasset Projects presents love child, an exhibition curated by Eleanna Anagnos which highlights the intimate collaborations between artists couples. Each of the individual artists in the exhibition have established their own independent practice expressing their own voice and vision. The “love children” unearthed and exhibited here are seemingly outliers of each artists’ practice. However, they might even be more important than the work we know. The work exhibited here is the physical manifestation of an harmonious connection and dialogue between these couples. Some of the work was made with clandestine intention. We may not be familiar with these collaborations, as they were never meant to be shown.
Past
Imaginary MonumentsApr 25 – Jun 1
Aimée Burg Mark Dixon Thale Fastvold Emily Hass Matthew Koons Imaginary Monuments, an Ortega y Gasset Projects exhibition curated by Fritz Horstman, brings together five artists who create paintings, sculptures, and photographs that monumentalize a possible or desired – though absent or disappearing – object or idea. This urge to create imaginary monuments, or document real ones, seems to stem in part from the artists’ recognition and celebration of the precariousness of contemporary culture and current historicizing trends. There is a theme of slowing things down, of cementing a fleeting moment – an urge to resist the ever speeding now. Because we are venturing into the imaginations of these artists, into less-than-real or no-longer-real spaces, the work often contains fragments of narratives, and often tends towards the mysterious. Aimée Burg lives and works in New Haven, CT. Her installations combine a natural history museum with sci-fi sets, placing herself in the past looking at the future looking at our past. (BFA Pratt; MFA Yale) Mark Dixon is based in Glenside, PA. His paintings and drawings are of his neighborhood at the edge of Philadelphia. They depict neglected monuments and spaces. (BFA University of Delaware; MFA Maryland Institute College of Art) Thale Fastvold is an artist, curator and writer living in Oslo, Norway. Working with photography and installations, her art practice researches concepts such as liminality in time and space and the Earth’s place within the Universe. (BA Istituto Europeo di Design, Rome; MA Art History and Literature, University of Oslo) Emily Hass lives and works in Manhattan. She paints in gouache and ink on paper, investigating the architecture of Berlin in the 1930s, specifically where persecuted Jews, artists, and intellectuals lived. (BA Hampshire College; M.Ed in Psychology, Harvard University; M.Des Design, Harvard University) Matthew Koons is based in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He makes collages about light from mirrored paper and old magazines, and totemic wooden sculptures evoking geology. Fritz Horstman is an artist and curator based in Bethany, CT. He focuses on unusual and quiet instances of nature and culture overlapping, often producing scientific-like tools and images. He has been a member of Ortega Y Gasset Projects since 2014. (BA Kenyon College; MFA Maryland Institute College of Art)
Past
Thinking & Touching TimeMar 13 – Apr 13
Michael Ambron, Yevgeniya Baras, Paul Demuro, Austin Lee, Larissa Mellor, Dustin Metz, S.E Nash, Dona Nelson, Mike Olin, Nickola Pottinger, Eric Schnell, Winnie Sidharta, Paul Simmons, Nicholas Sullivan, Lauren Whearty Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Thinking & Touching Time curated by Brooklyn-based artist Zahar Vaks. This exhibition is the first in our new space in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn. A journey into tactility, the works in this exhibition engage sensuality and touch, as related to time. Non-verbal modes of communication such as body language and physical contact are explored as manifesting in painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture. Eschewing a linguistic explanation as a stand-in for the experience of the work, the curator’s notes point to the intended effect: It is important to take time and make something. At times it is valuable to be a romantic. Leave room for imagination. This show addresses the passage of time by the various material narratives of the artists. This is actualized through the way the surface is built; the way the color is layered. There may be a mode of observation. An example of recording in real time or a recall from memory. Sometimes the timing in the work is structured and specific, other times it may feel elusive or timeless. This allows for multiple meanings. There is potential for narrative simultaneously fused with the possibility of a non-verbal experience. Zahar Vaks was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He moved to the United States after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. He received his BFA from Tyler School of Art and his MFA from The Ohio State University. He has shown in Philadelphia, New York, Columbus, Vienna, Galveston, and Hammond, Indiana. He participated in the yearlong Galveston Artist Residency in 2012-2013. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, where he is a Chashama Studio Resident. Ortega Y Gasset Projects is a gallery and curated project space in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Comprised of artists currently living in Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, Maryland, Connecticut, and New York. O y G operates as a cross-country collective and an incubator for dialog and artistic exchange.