Artist Talk: Joe Bun Keo at Real Art Ways

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Artist Talk: Joe Bun Keo
Wednesday, October 26, 6:00 PM. Free admission, no RSVP required.

You’re invited to a conversation between artist Joe Bun Keo and Khmer artist-scholar Sokunthary Svay. Bun Keo will discuss the process behind bitter melons / bitter pillsan exhibition that focuses on sentimental, cultural and utilitarian values within the discussion of materiality and identity. Joe Bun Keo is one of six recipients of the 2021 Real Art Awards, which supports emerging artists in New England, New York, and New Jersey.

 

Joe Bun Keo (b. 1987) is a Khmer (Cambodian) – American artist living and working in Connecticut. His work “unpacks intergenerational trauma through the scope of ‘neomaterialism’ and the concept of ‘power objects.’”

 

Sokunthary Svay was born in a refugee camp inThailand shortly after her parents fled Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. They were sponsored to come to the United States and resettled in the Bronx where she grew up. A founding member of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association (CALAA), she has received fellowships from the American Opera Project, Poets House, Willow Books, and CUNY, as well as commissions from Washington National Opera, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the Chautauqua Institution, and ISSUE Project Room. In addition to publishing a poetry collection, Apsara in New York (Willow Books, 2017), Svay has had her writing anthologized and performed by actors and singers. Svay’s first opera, Woman of Letters, set by composer Liliya Ugay, received its world premiere at the Kennedy Center in January 2020 as part of the American Opera Initiative. A recent recipient of the OPERA America IDEA grant, her second opera with Ugay, Chhlong Tonle, received its premiere in March 2022. She is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Lecturer at CCNY.

bitter melons / bitter pills
Joe Bun Keo
Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of recent work by 2021 Real Art Award recipient Joe Bun Keo.

Connecticut-based artist Joe Bun Keo uses found and altered objects to create poetic installations and assemblages. His recent work is informed by personal experiences with mental health, debt, and Khmer (Cambodian) – American identity. In bitter melons / bitter pills, the artist presents a new body of work that focuses on sentimental, cultural and utilitarian values within the discussion of materiality and identity.

Download a PDF of the show publication HERE. Featuring an essay by artist and scholar Sokunthary Svay.

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About the Artist:

Joe Bun Keo (b. 1987) is a Khmer (Cambodian) – American artist living and working in Connecticut. His work “unpacks intergenerational trauma through the scope of ‘neomaterialism’ and the concept of ‘power objects.'”

About the Real Art Awards:

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2021 Real Art Awards was juried by artist and writer Kameelah Janan Rasheed; Hasan Elahi, artist and Director of the School of Art at George Mason University; and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2021 Real Art Awards is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Specific Matter
Howard el-Yasin
Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by Howard el-Yasin. Curated by David Borawski.

Howard el-Yasin’s sculptural and installation work focuses on everyday materials as signs pointing to multiplicities of meaning. Through unconventional and castoff materials, el-Yasin looks at social value and marginalized racial and gender identities. The gallery installation includes an immersive suspended piece comprised of thousands of baked banana peels sourced from the artist’s community.

From el-Yasin:

“This body of work is an accumulation of two of my ongoing collection practices: banana skins and dryer lint. Both materials are raw and residual, insofar as they are often discarded as waste by people. For several years now, I’ve been collecting banana skins and dryer lint from people I meet, from friends and family—as well as from my own household.

Bananas signify many references (to culture, sex, labor and the global economy…) and dryer lint is largely an American byproduct. Yet, in a speculative sense, this work reflects on the individual and collective histories of its many participants, which can be imagined in the diversity of shapes formed by the process of baking the banana skins, as well as the sorted range of grey hues and other colors with details of various remnants in the lint felted tiles.

When looking at the accumulated mass of ordinary materials, an uncanny possibility of seeing begins to emerge. Henceforth, perhaps the spectator will consider the materials differently and question what they know about the construction of value in relation to oneself.”

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About the Artist

Howard el-Yasin is a New Haven, CT-based interdisciplinary artist, curator and educator holding degrees from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA ’16), Wesleyan University, and New England College. They have exhibited their artwork nationally, and have work in several private collections. They are currently an adjunct faculty member at MICA, and the co-founder/curator of SomethingProjects, an artist-run curatorial initiative. They were a recipient of MICA’s Leslie King-Hammond Award (2016) and the Faculty and Staff Queer Alliance Award (2015). They are a trustee of the Vermont Studio Center and a former VSC residency fellowship recipient (2012). el-Yasin has also served as a volunteer leader with numerous Connecticut-based non-profit organizations, including as Director/Curator of Arts Literature Laboratory (2002-2009).

Photo Credit: John Groo

Gallery Performance:
Lani Asunción
Saturday, August 6, 7:00 PM. Free admission, no RSVP required.

You’re invited to a gallery performance and panel talk as part of Lani Asunción’s exhibition, Duty-Free Paradise, curated by David Borawski. The multimedia exhibition plays on the tensions of lived and imagined island life focusing on Hawai’i. Through the lens of ecotourism, around which the islands’ economy heavily revolves, this work explores the contradictions between perceptions and realities of island life as a constructed paradise.

Asunción will perform in and throughout this work in the Main Gallery on Saturday, August 06, 2022, 7-8 PM, followed by a panel discussion 8-9 PM with artists Billie Lee and Joe Bun Keo.

Lani Asunción (they/she) is a multimedia artist creating socially engaged art in both private and public spaces, independently and collaboratively. Weaving together a visual language guided by historical research, community engagement, and experimental performance connected to their identity as a queer multiracial Filipinx-American, Asunción integrates new media technologies and transmedia storytelling. Through ritualized performance, they encourage conversations that magnify connections and facilitate healing in the face of cultural violence, oppression, and ancestral intergenerational trauma narratives.

Asunción has shown their video performance work in CONTACT ZONE (2018) at the Honolulu Museum of Art School presented by Pu’uhonua Society, and had solo exhibitions at the New Bedford Museum of Art (2016) and Radial Gallery (2020) with the Department of Art and Design at Dayton University. They have performed live at Studios at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Little Berlin in Philadelphia, PAO Arts Center in Boston, and Aurora Picture Show in Houston, TX. Most recently, Asunción is the recipient of the 2022-23 Kala Fellowship at Kala Arts Institute in Berkeley, CA and was selected as a 2022-25 Boston Center for the Arts Studio Residency. They are an awardee of the 2022 Public Art for Spatial Justice grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts for their socially engaged project Revolutionary AYAT, in addition to receiving the Live Arts Boston Grant (2020) from the Boston Foundation, City of Boston’s Transformative Public Art grant (2020), and Dame Joan Sutherland Fund from the Australian American Association (2017). They are founding member and Producing Artistic Director of the Boston based multimedia collective Digital Soup. They received their master’s degree in Fine Arts in performance and video from the University of Connecticut.

Click here to visit the artist’s website.

Image Credit: Taylor Blackley

Duality: In Unplain Sight
Heather Heckel
Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of recent work by 2021 Real Art Award recipient Heather Heckel.

“Due to a complication at birth, my eyes do not work together and I have constant double vision. I see a hyper clear image with my dominant eye, and with my weaker eye I see an overlapping ghost image. My double vision has ignited a lifelong interest in dualities, and how they are apparent in every facet of our lives. In order to make sense of my chaotic visual input I organize my life through minimalism and accuracy, which gets translated through my artistic process. My medium of choice is colored pencil, which I treat as dry paint to achieve accuracy through blending. This collection of artwork demonstrates a progression of my work over the last five years from figurative mirror images, to overlapping objects, to an artist residency that focuses on duality.

The porcelain figurines are portraits of family heirlooms that feature my double vision that is both blurry and sharp. Between each image is an overlapping void that represents how two identical objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. This often causes me to wonder: which version is the real one?

The series of historical structures and arms were created during an artist residency at Coltsville National Historical Park in Hartford, Connecticut. Coltsville is located on the grounds of the former Colt factory complex, which was used to produce firearms. Samuel Colt sold weapons to both sides of conflicts, and I wanted to emphasize this duality, among others, through double imagery, symmetry, and balance: Win / Loss, Life / Death, Friend / Enemy, Exploitation / Profit. The all-seeing cobalt blue onion dome that sits atop the factory is visible from all areas of Colt Park, and therefore appears repeatedly throughout the drawings. Colt often used European styles of architecture to provide his immigrant workers with a sense of familiarity, as is seen in workers’ housing. Gold stars appear throughout because they are painted on the onion dome, and they serve as a symbol for the loss of a service member in combat and are worn by the families of the fallen.

Ultimately, this collection of artwork is representative of an internal shift of being fearful of how the world views my misaligned eyes to becoming confident in sharing my unique view of the world.” – Heather Heckel

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About the Artist:

Dr. Heather Heckel, EdD is an artist and art educator living in New York City. Her award-winning artwork has been shown internationally, is in several national permanent collections, and is featured regularly in the local Park Slope Reader. She is a lifelong learner who loves to travel, and has been awarded 16 artist residencies through the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management. She will begin her tenth year of teaching public school art this Fall, and has taught at the middle school, high school, and college levels. She earned her BFA in Illustration from the Ringling College of Art and Design, her MAT in Art Education from the School of Visual Arts, and her MFA in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design. This year she earned her Doctor of Education degree in Educational Leadership from the University of the Cumberlands, where her research investigated the relationships between art education, leadership, and creativity. She is a member of the Society of Illustrators and the New York State Art Teachers Association.

About the Real Art Awards:

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2021 Real Art Awards was juried by artist and writer Kameelah Janan Rasheed; Hasan Elahi, artist and Director of the School of Art at George Mason University; and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2021 Real Art Awards is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Supernature
Benjamin Spalding
Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by artist Benjamin Spalding. Curated by David Borawski.

Supernature is a sculptural tableau inspired by the 1977 disco hit by the same name, produced by Cerrone with lyrics by Lene Lovich. Set to a sweaty disco tempo, this song takes a darker turn, narrating humanity’s careless harm to the environment and the monsters that rise up to seek revenge. Although seemingly sinister, the song ends with a hopeful call for humans to renegotiate their relationship to, and commune with the environment. Combining large scale figurative dancers, VHS sculptural works and speculative records, Supernature parallels queer nightlife with questions of biodiversity and pageantry.

Enamored by the mating rituals of birds of paradise, my research led me to ask “what other locations provide extreme moments of aesthetic and energetic outpouring?” Personal interests provided the answer: the nightclub, specifically the history of American nightlife and disco. From 1970-1979 (when the public decried disco as “dead”), disco culture and the nightclub provided crucial spaces for social engagement and finding community through dance. Specifically, this space was embraced by a spectrum of queer, black, and brown dancers and DJs. It is in these special spaces, where incredible expressions of energy and beauty were expressed. Supernature is an homage to the individuals, music and spaces of this era and a call for community with our immediate environment. Amidst all of the duress of the immediate moment, let us pause and learn to dance with nature.’ – Benjamin Spalding

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About the Artist:

Benjamin Spalding is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Maine. Taking inspiration from his Puerto Rican grandfather’s profession as a big band leader, Spalding is preoccupied with movement and the pageantry of the body, weaving together elements of club culture, sports, and nature with family history and questions of migration. While receiving a degree in media studies from New York University, Spalding developed a love for figuration, photography and visual narrative while working as a stylist assistant at publications such as Interview Magazine, and Men’s Vogue. After New York, Spalding relocated to Berlin, Germany for 8 years to define his studio practice. It is in Berlin where he began to find a love for club culture and music as a potent mechanism for connection and exploring memory. Upon resettling in Maine, his practice began to shift into working with family photographs, found images, sporting equipment and local ecology. Spalding has also worked as part of the creative force behind Visceral, a queer techno part in Boston. He received his MFA from Maine College of Art and Design (2017) and currently teaches in the Sculpture and Foundations departments.

Duty-Free Paradise
Lani Asunción
Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Lani Asunción. Curated by David Borawski.

Duty-Free Paradise (2020-2022) is a multimedia exhibition and live performance series that plays on the tensions of lived and imagined island life focusing on Hawai’i. Through the lens of ecotourism, around which the islands’ economy heavily revolves, this work explores the contradictions between perceptions and realities of island life as a constructed paradise. Asunción looks at these tensions through American pop culture, down to the flora and fauna, underwritten by militarism and biopolitics paralleled with Asunción’s lived and family generational experience. Read more about the work in the exhibition essay published in the online Special Issue of Art and Environment in Oceania, Pacific Arts, Volume 20, Issue 1 published by Pacific Arts Association, UC Santa Cruz, CA, 2020.

The gallery’s painted floor is a reference to a hand-drawn floor plan Asunción’s father drafted from memory of his childhood home in the 1930s, located at the historic sugar plantation housing in Kahuku, HI. Viewers can access this floor plan via a QR code to view it through augmented reality within the installation. Asunción will perform in and throughout this work on Saturday, August 06, 2022, 7-8 pm, followed by a panel discussion 8-9 pm with Billie Lee and Joe Bun Keo.

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About the Artist:

Lani Asunción (they/she) is a multimedia artist creating socially engaged art in both private and public spaces, independently and collaboratively. Weaving together a visual language guided by historical research, community engagement, and experimental performance connected to their identity as a queer multiracial Filipinx-American, Asunción integrates new media technologies and transmedia storytelling. Through ritualized performance, they encourage conversations that magnify connections and facilitate healing in the face of cultural violence, oppression, and ancestral intergenerational trauma narratives.

Asunción has shown their video performance work in CONTACT ZONE (2018) at the Honolulu Museum of Art School presented by Pu’uhonua Society, and had solo exhibitions at the New Bedford Museum of Art (2016) and Radial Gallery (2020) with the Department of Art and Design at Dayton University. They have performed live at Studios at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Little Berlin in Philadelphia, PAO Arts Center in Boston, and Aurora Picture Show in Houston, TX. Most recently, Asunción is the recipient of the 2022-23 Kala Fellowship at Kala Arts Institute in Berkeley, CA and was selected as a 2022-25 Boston Center for the Arts Studio Residency. They are an awardee of the 2022 Public Art for Spatial Justice grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts for their socially engaged project Revolutionary AYAT, in addition to receiving the Live Arts Boston Grant (2020) from the Boston Foundation, City of Boston’s Transformative Public Art grant (2020), and Dame Joan Sutherland Fund from the Australian American Association (2017). They are founding member and Producing Artistic Director of the Boston based multimedia collective Digital Soup. They received their master’s degree in Fine Arts in performance and video from the University of Connecticut.

Dishonest Dancers
Jesús Hilario-Reyes
Real Art Ways presents an exhibit by interdisciplinary artist Jesús Hilario-Reyes.

Hilario-Reyes shares Dishonest Dancers, a video installation of two related bodies of work. Informed by scholar Yomaira Figueroa’s concept of ‘destierro’ – through which Figueroa articulates a condition of being ‘torn from the land’ – Dishonest Dancers finds Hilario-Reyes taking a remedial approach, while exploring ideas of Black and queer fugitivity. The exhibited works include video documentation of multiple iterations of Crossing(s), the artist’s series of ephemeral land works. Alongside footage of these “sand weaving” events, Hilario-Reyes displays Untitled, an animated series of “digital quilts” constructed from three-dimensional scans of dance floors after nights of transportive dancing. Developed as a partial archive of evidence gesturing toward queer utopia, the series incorporates club and rave spaces at the center of queer communities, as well as potential spaces, moving bodies, and bodies of water. This work largely contends with truth, applying scholar Saidiya Hartman’s concept of ‘critical fabulation’ as a means to rupture or complicate reality.

This project is supported in part by the National Performance Network Artist Engagement Fund.

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About the Artist:

Jesús Hilario-Reyes (b. 1996) is an artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, whose parents emigrated from the Dominican Republic. Hilario-Reyes holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are a recent recipient of the Drawing a Blank Artist Grant, the Leslie Lohman Fellowship, the Lighthouse Works Fellowship (2022) and the Bemis Center Residency program (2022). Hilario-Reyes has exhibited/screened both nationally and internationally, most notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Black Star Film Festival and Mana Contemporary. While situating their practice at the crossroads of sonic performance, land installation, and expanded cinema, their iterative works examine carnival and rave culture throughout the West. Taking a satirical and remedial approach to the effects of ‘destierro’, they simultaneously explore the impossibility of the Black body, and examine the failures of mechanical optics.

Ephemeral Streams, Tangential Currents
Nomad MFA 2022
Real Art Ways presents a group exhibition of work from the 5th cohort of Hartford Art School’s Nomad MFA program.

The 8 international artists work in differing media and processes, ranging from sculpture and video to drawing, painting, and performance. Curated by artists and educators Mary Mattingly and Neil Daigle Orians, the exhibition runs concurrently with their thesis projects on display at the University of Hartford’s Joseloff Gallery from June 17 – 26. Each artist explores various narratives throughout their work surrounding climate change, ecology, identity, and history. These disparate stories are woven together through their shared experience navigating an advanced degree program during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Featuring work by:

Julie Chen
Kathryn Cooke
Arnethia Douglass
Aiyesha Ghani
Katie Grove
Monica Kapoor
Roberta Trentin
Mauricio Vargas

About the Nomad MFA Program:

The Nomad MFA (Interdisciplinary Master of Fine Arts) is a low-residency, cross-disciplinary program. This course of study prepares artists for a life of engaged studio and civic practice and reflects the dynamic balance of production, inquiry, and cross discipline collaborations in contemporary art, and the world at large. The objective of this MFA is the development of each student’s art practice and the creation of an expanded toolkit through our innovative curriculum. This objective is achieved through engaged mentoring and through high-impact, field-based classes in contemporary art, ecology, place and culture, indigenous knowledge systems, and the technology spectrum from craft to code.

Photo Credit: Denis Semenyaka

Odds and Ends
Steven Laschever
Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by photographer Steven Laschever, celebrating over twelve years of capturing images from Real Art Ways’ Creative Cocktail Hour.

Laschever began photographing Creative Cocktail Hour in 2009 and through the years has compiled a large body of work from the events. Laschever’s solo exhibit, Odds and Ends, captures the energy, camaraderie, creativity and enjoyment of the attendees in a remarkably unique series on display. Included are candid images of attendees, as well as images of the quirky and eccentric Odd Ball parties.

“What an odd thing. When you point a camera at someone, they robotically put there arm around the other person and smile. After years of event photography, I started to loath these ‘grip and grin’ type photos. They say almost nothing. That led me on a path through the start of digital photography to improve my skills in capturing real and unique moments. Not that easy. As a friend of Real Art Ways, I used the Creative Cocktail Hour parties as my photographic playground to practice. All that practice with lighting, lenses and most importantly, the way I approached and engaged people all come from this playground. I enjoy what I do and will never stop learning and challenging myself to simply make cool images and have a blast doing it.” – Steven Laschever

About the Artist:

Steven Laschever creates captivating images that document social events, artists and their work, musicians in performance, personalities at universities, galleries, corporations throughout Connecticut as well as international locations. His work includes publications such as the Hartford Business Journal, Connecticut Magazine and New Haven Biz, as well as corporations and family albums. With a career spanning over 30 years, Steven has emphasized community-building as a lifetime West Hartford resident. He recently had the honor of creating the “Gallery of Pioneers,” large-scale, black & white portraits of more than 80 distinguished lawyers and judges affiliated with the UConn School of Law.

Steven holds a Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies from Boston University. He has traveled all over the world photographing architectural interiors, conferences and scenic destinations. He has a passion for all types of photography, including landscapes, aerial views and products, using his technical lighting expertise. But, Steven’s greatest joy comes from photographing people, with his gift of making his subjects feel at ease and capturing their true essence.

Photo Credit: Denis Semenyaka

Dreaming in Black & White
Deep Pool
Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of recent work by 2021 Real Art Award recipient Deep Pool.

“Precious and dark, Dreaming in Black & White reckons with maternity, unrequited feelings, and personal understanding of femininity. Combining digital imaging, screen shots, video stills, and both analogue and cell phone photography, the work presents echoes of the past, and ellipses into the future. These small portals resist resolution, embracing dissonance and generative confusion.

Dreaming in Black & White is a compilation of monochromic images spanning from a seven year archive (2016–2022). Often re-visited and re-mixed, Dreaming in Black & White is an homage to my photographic background, (short) life span of ritual, and ultimate effort to reconcile with my past, while acknowledging its inherent ephemerality.” – Deep Pool

Download a PDF of the show publication HERE. Featuring an essay by poet Morgan Võ.

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About the Artist:

Deep Pool (b.1997) is an image maker and self-identifying “trans-disciplinary” artist. Informed by their upbringing as a transcontinental adoptee and their current gender transition, Deep Pool makes meaning with the reality of one’s identity being undetermined and in flux. The moniker “Deep Pool” is a rough English translation of their given name at birth, “Ji Tan.”

Most notably, Deep Pool is the recipient of the 2022 New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship at Wave Hill. They have exhibited in Richmond, VA; New Brunswick, NJ; Berlin, Germany; and have a forthcoming solo show in the Bronx, NY. Deep Pool graduated with a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, and currently lives and works out of Queens, NY.

About the Real Art Awards:

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2021 Real Art Awards was juried by artist and writer Kameelah Janan Rasheed; Hasan Elahi, artist and Director of the School of Art at George Mason University; and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2021 Real Art Awards is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Real Wall: Traé Brooks
Real Art Ways presents damnNation, a collection of mixed media works by artist Traé Brooks and part of the Real Wall series.

“I have always had a great fascination with history. Whether through studying the subject in school, or learning about the complexities of my genealogy and familial relationships, I find history to be a supremely powerful component of our lives that provides structure and purpose. This series expresses my relationship with American history and the constant struggle to reconcile being a POC in America while criticizing much of the “American Dream” and customs that simply do not resonate with my experiences. My goal as an artist is to create work that both embodies my personal history and comments on the present. With this body of work, I hope to demystify some of these American symbols and transform them into something that reflects an honest and direct attitude towards “Americana.” After all, is being critical and downright angry with one’s nation not the ultimate form of patriotism?”

Real Wall is a series of wall-mounted exhibitions taking place in between formal gallery spaces. Artists are invited to experiment with the space in short-run exhibitions.

About the Artist:

Traé Brooks is a fine artist from Windsor, Connecticut. He studied painting at the University of Hartford, earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art. Brooks is primarily interested in ideas and themes related to family and personal identity. Through his work, Brooks examines where he comes from, processing family history in order to better understand himself in relation to the world. Brooks has shown at Windsor Art Center, Farmington Valley Arts Center, and Kehler Liddell Gallery, among other venues. Currently, Brooks works as a gallery employee at WORK_SPACE in Manchester.

Artist Talk: Merik Goma
Tuesday, May 17, 6:30 PM. Free admission, no RSVP required.

You’re invited to a conversation between artist Merik Goma and Moriah Peoples of The Amistad Center, hosted by Visual Arts Manager Cody Boyce. Goma will discuss his work and process behind Your Absence Is My Monument, a moving exhibition that speaks to the isolation and pain experienced during the pandemic. Goma is one of six recipients of the 2021 Real Art Awards, which supports emerging artists in New England, New York, and New Jersey.

“After the loss of a close friend and then my grandmother, I came face to face with a new understanding of absence in my life. Grappling over this concept and my internal dialogue, I wondered if there is ever room for absence to exist. And by invoking the presence of absence, does something else take its place? Looking at the climate of this moment, this idea resonates with how so many of us are without family, stability, and certainty on a massive scale. Reflecting on my narrative practice of set building and re-examining contemporary themes, it feels urgent to bring this work into a public space.”

Merik Goma is a New Haven-based photographer and recent graduate of the NXTHVN Studio Fellowship Program, an arts incubator founded by renowned artist Titus Kaphar. Goma builds intricate sets within his studio that he uses both as subjects of tableaux and as backdrops for narrative portrait photography. His technique is painterly in execution, with close attention paid to color and lighting. His work has been shown by Tilton Gallery, and is in the collection of Yale University. In 2021, Goma was selected as the Joyce C. Willis Artist in Residence by the Amistad Center for Arts & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum. As part of the residency, Goma will present a solo exhibition in 2023.

Visual Arts Manager Cody and artist Merik

Click here to visit the artist’s website.

Click here to learn more about the Real Art Awards.

Your Absence Is My Monument
Merik Goma
Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of recent work by 2021 Real Art Award recipient Merik Goma.

In Your Absence Is My Monument, photographer Merik Goma explores loss through implied narrative and surreal atmosphere. Of the work on view, the artist shares:

“After the loss of a close friend and then my grandmother, I came face to face with a new understanding of absence in my life. Grappling over this concept and my internal dialogue, I wondered if there is ever room for absence to exist. And by invoking the presence of absence, does something else take its place? Looking at the climate of this moment, this idea resonates with how so many of us are without family, stability, and certainty on a massive scale. Reflecting on my narrative practice of set building and re-examining contemporary themes, it feels urgent to bring this work into a public space.”

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About The Artist:

Merik Goma is a New Haven-based photographer and recent graduate of the NXTHVN Studio Fellowship Program, an arts incubator founded by renowned artist Titus Kaphar. Goma builds intricate sets within his studio that he uses both as subjects of tableaux and as backdrops for narrative portrait photography. His technique is painterly in execution, with close attention paid to color and lighting. His work has been shown by Tilton Gallery, and is in the collection of Yale University. In 2021, Goma was selected as the Joyce C. Willis Artist in Residence by the Amistad Center for Arts & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum. As part of the residency, Goma will present a solo exhibition in 2023.

About the Real Art Awards:

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2021 Real Art Awards was juried by artist and writer Kameelah Janan Rasheed; Hasan Elahi, artist and Director of the School of Art at George Mason University; and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2021 Real Art Awards is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Lamentations
Tina Freeman
Real Art Ways presents an exhibition by New Orleans-based artist Tina Freeman.

Over the past seven years, Tina Freeman has photographed the wetlands of Louisiana and the glacial landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctica. In Lamentations, Freeman pairs images from these dissimilar regions in a series of diptychs that function as stories about climate change, ecological balance, and the symbiotic relationship between disparate environments over time. Each pairing is chosen for the ways in which they relate, aesthetically and practically, demonstrating how rising sea level along the coast of Louisiana is both visually and physically connected to melting glaciers at the poles, despite the separation of vast distances. The large, color photographs in Lamentations make plain the crucial, threatening, and global dialogue between water in two physical states.

Organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art.

The presentation of Tina Freeman: Lamentations at Real Art Ways is made possible by support from Agnes and Billy Peelle.

Text courtesy of Tina Freeman, artist and Russell Lord, Curator of Photographs, NOMA.

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About the Artist:

For the past forty-five years, Tina Freeman has focused on revealing interior subjects through the exploration of physical environments and natural light. In addition to architecture and interiors in her native New Orleans and around the United States and Europe, Freeman’s subjects include urban warehouses and Louisiana’s natural landscape and backcountry swamps.

Freeman’s photographs have been published by The New York Times Magazine, Art and Antiques, Connoisseur, House & Garden, Elle Decor, and Architectural Digest. In addition to receiving an “Art in Public Places” commission from National Endowment for the Arts, Freeman’s work has been exhibited in New Orleans, New York, Los Angeles, London and Moscow, and is included in permanent collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris), the National Media Museum (Bradford, UK), the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Luciano Benetton Imago Mundi Collection in Italy. In the 1970s, Freeman photographed Andy Warhol in New York and Paris, capturing the image of Warhol used for the cover of the French edition of his book, Ma Philosophie de A à B.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Teeter/Totter
Ken Morgan and Peter Waite
Real Art Ways presents a two-person show of work by artists Peter Waite and Ken Morgan.

After four decades of friendship, Waite and Morgan are exhibiting together for the first time. Morgan shares a poetry series completed during quarantine, as well as abstract works from 2020–2021. Waite presents his School Studies series produced from 2018–2021. Through the works on view, both artists express a desire to return to a childlike sense of freedom and play, while grappling with themes of time, memory, and loss. Teeter/Totter was curated by Maria Porada, and first organized as a one-night event at the Arts Industry Gallery in September 2021. Real Art Ways is pleased to be giving the exhibition a longer run.

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About the Artists:

Ken Morgan has shown his work in gallery shows, exhibitions, and permanent collections across the country thanks to his efforts to continually create and share. Morgan is most proud of his past longstanding affiliation with the OK Harris Gallery, as well of his current representation by Exhibitions 2d in Marfa, Texas. He is honored to be included in the Connecticut Collection as well as being supported in the past by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Berkshire Taconic Foundation, The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and The Connecticut Commission for the Arts.

Peter Waite was born in North Adams, MA and currently works and resides in Connecticut. He received a BFA from the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, in West Hartford, CT, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has received many awards including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Gottlieb Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship. Waite’s works have been featured in the New York Times, Art New England, BOMB, Harper’s, and Time Out New York. Waite’s paintings are in many public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Some of his commission work includes projects for the University of Connecticut; the NASA Art Program in Washington, DC; Pacific Enterprises in Los Angeles; the Waterbury Criminal Court in Waterbury, CT.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Battlegrounds
Elizabeth Flood
Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of recent work by 2021 Real Art Award recipient Elizabeth Flood.

Through her ongoing practice of painting outdoors in the elements, Flood surveys complex layers of extraction, violence, and expression within the American landscape. The artworks in the exhibition were made at Civil War battlefields in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and Chancellorsville, Virginia, and at the U.S. Capitol. These works commune with and bear witness to the land: they look at past scars to grieve, to learn, to forecast future impact, and to keep watch over a country and land in crisis.

Battlegrounds is built around a body of work made over the last year and a half, comprising six paintings and eighteen drawings. Together, these artworks express the chaos of our current national landscape and the emotional weight of the charged terrain Flood depicts. The black and white ink drawings are tangled and urgent, each a watchful and restless representation of the battlefields as they exist today. The paintings are atmospheric and embodied, drawing color from witness boulders, local flora, and the earth itself. Their surfaces are gritty reliefs, connoting calluses, cast iron plaques, or imagined burials for those who perished nearby. Flood’s largest painting, “Battlefield (Chancellorsville, summer),” consists of nine separate panels and incorporates grasses from the battlefield into humid August greens. Combining different vantage points and elevations into one turbulent cycle, it grapples with a painful past and present.

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About The Artist:

Elizabeth Flood was born on Long Island and grew up in Stafford, Virginia. She studied History, Religion, and Studio Art at the University of Virginia where she earned her BA in 2014. Flood attended Boston University for graduate school where she earned her MFA in Painting in 2019. She attended the Mount Gretna School of Art in 2014-2015 and taught painting there during the summer of 2020 while she was on faculty at Colgate University (2019-2021). In 2019, Flood was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was an artist-in-residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA. She is currently a 2021-2022 fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA where she will have a solo exhibition in March. Her work is currently on view at Exeter Gallery in Baltimore in a two person exhibition with Bradley Milligan and has been exhibited in several group exhibitions throughout the Northeast. Flood is the recipient of several grants and awards including the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Graduate Fellowship, and the John Walker Alumni Award at Boston University.

About the Real Art Awards:

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2021 Real Art Awards was juried by artist and writer Kameelah Janan Rasheed; Hasan Elahi, artist and Director of the School of Art at George Mason University; and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2021 Real Art Awards is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Real Wall: Sydney Morris
Real Art Ways presents Reclamation, an installation by Connecticut-based artist Sydney Morris and part of the Real Wall series.

Of the use of photographic chemistry in this recent body of cyanotype works, Morris notes: “these pieces are unique in the fact that they are ever-changing. Much like ourselves, their colors may change, become brighter, or slowly fade over time. They age, grow, and adapt to the environment around them. While some pieces may have been made from the same cloth, no two are entirely uniform. They are each as powerful on their own as they are together.” The installation opens Thursday, January 20, and will be on view for one month.

About the Artist:

Sydney Morris is an alternative process photographer, website developer/designer, and digital media marketing manager. In 2012, she attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City with a concentration in Photography; continuing on to receive her BFA from the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford in 2015. Morris has exhibited at Five Points Gallery in Torrington, CT, the Niche Gallery at Middlesex Community College, and Rowayton Arts Center, among other venues.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

ENDURING CARE
Day With(out) Art 2021
Real Art Ways is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2021 by presenting ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new videos highlighting community care within the ongoing HIV crisis.

For one week starting Wednesday, December 1st (World AIDS Day), Real Art Ways will show the ENDURING CARE program as a looping presentation in our video room.

To watch the program online, please visit: visualaids.org/enduringcare

Visual AIDS presents ENDURING CARE, a video program highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic. The program features newly commissioned work by Katherine Cheairs, Cristóbal Guerra, Danny Kilbride, Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad and Uriah Bussey, Beto Pérez, Steed Taylor, and J Triangular and the Women’s Video Support Project.

From histories of harm reduction and prison activism to the long-term effects of HIV medication, ENDURING CARE centers stories of collective care, mutual aid, and solidarity while pointing to the negligence of governments and non-profits. The program’s title suggests a dual meaning, honoring the perseverance and commitment of care workers yet also addressing the potential for harm from medications and healthcare providers. ENDURING CARE disrupts the assumption that an epidemic can be solved with pharmaceuticals alone, recasting community work as a lasting form of medicine.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

A Dream Walking
Anne Wu
Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of new work by 2020 Real Art Award recipient Anne Wu.

In A Dream Walking, five vibrantly hued sculptures reference familiar architectural forms that evoke both a sense of place and no place at all. A railing grows from the ground, emerging upward before reaching an abrupt end. A door opens, or closes, to nowhere in particular. Stripped of specific characteristics, the forms become framing devices for ornamental objects such as plastic packing rope, incense sticks, garden wire, and cast items. Tied, placed, or held by tension, these elements create patterns against the skeletal structures that suggest themes of growth, ascension, and time. The sculptures signal viewers to walk under, toward, alongside, and around, providing a set of directions that eventually disappears, as if trailing off mid-sentence. While tethered to the existing space, the works simultaneously point elsewhere as they imagine a dimension beyond the purely visible and physically tangible.

Download a PDF of the show publication here. Featuring an essay by curator and writer Danni Shen.

Lisa Young of “The Here and There Collective,” interviewed artist Anne Wu on Instagram Live. You can listen to the full conversation HERE.

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About The Artist:

Anne Wu is an artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. She received a BFA from Cornell University in 2013 and an MFA from Yale University in 2020. Her work has been shown at The Shed (New York, NY), NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon (New Lebanon, NY), and New York Public Library (New York, NY), among others. She was an artist-in-residence at the BHQFU Residency in 2015 and the NARS Satellite Residency on Governors Island in 2020. Currently, she is a 2021-22 Studio Artist at Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY).

About the Real Art Awards:

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2020 Real Art Awards was juried by artist and educator Mary Mattingly, Director of the Laundromat Project Kemi Ilesanmi, and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2020 Real Art Awards is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Excellence in the Arts award from the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation. Visual arts at Real Art Ways is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo