Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Blue Poisoning series , reveals the outcome of artist Tirdad Hashemi’s weary and depressed days in the winter of 2022, following their second migration from Paris to Berlin. The color blue expresses the feelings of sadness and loneliness felt by the artist in the frozen Berlin cold. In the drawing, lonely and tormented bodies seem to struggle to live; despite their suffering, they still hope.

Photography (Photography)

Winfield St by Sadie Barnette depicts a seldom documented scene of men and boys in an intimate domestic setting. In the large format photograph three young boys and a man sit at a dining room table, eating a meal together. One boy is mid-bite, while another looks directly at the camera, obscuring the face of the adult.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Flesh in Stone – Ghost No. 1 is a stunning series of cement made body parts in various scales and movements, along with components such as iron and plaster molds to emphasize their tension. The “incompleteness” of Flesh in Stone weakens the figurative image itself, thus shifting the viewer’s focus onto the relationship between the rough material and the ideal rounded body shapes.

Painting (Painting)

¡Qué triste estoy! (I’m So Sad) is representative of Fernanda Laguna’s practice of the past twenty years. It is an upshot of intense emotional stress and psychological regression for the artist, which resulted in her renewed and strengthened commitment to feminist causes, especially in Villa Fiorito, but also as part of the leading committee of Ni Una Menos in Argentina.

Painting (Painting)

This untitled painting by Tirdad Hasemi presents a space that can be thought of as both a prison cell and a house. Paradoxically, in both cases the color and the importance of the walls give a feeling of confinement. Escaping from prison in Iran and finding the walls of a home in Europe has been a complex and conflicting experience for Hashemi.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s documentary Four Hundred Unquiet Graves is a powerful and vulnerable visual essay about the descendants of those who were disappeared during the Spanish Civil War from 1936–1939. The film reveals the spectrum of violence that surrounds the war, namely the impact of thousands of forced disappearances on different generations. Surviving family members are haunted not only by the absence of their grandparents, but also by the overwhelming grief that lives in their parents.

Painting (Painting)

Llorar mucho (To Cry A Lot) is representative of Fernanda Laguna’s practice of the past twenty years. It is an upshot of intense emotional stress and psychological regression for the artist, which resulted in her renewed and strengthened commitment to feminist causes, especially in Villa Fiorito, but also as part of the leading committee of Ni Una Menos in Argentina. It also picks up the thread of earlier works, accentuating the use of cotton, and embracing an almost cornily sentimental tone.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Head in Hands by Joe Biel is part of a larger series of drawings made in connection with the book of short stories Navigating Ghosts by Annie Buckley. Biel’s small-scale black and white drawing features a torso holding their own head in their hands, though the expression on the bodiless face maintains a serene sensibility. The edges of the drawing around the figure’s neck and torso are softened so that the figure appears ghostly, as if the character is an illusion or dream.

Photography (Photography)

Megan and Hazel Sue at Creekmore House by Carolyn Drake is from a series of works titled Knit Club . For this project, Drake collaborated with an enigmatic group of women in Mississippi who loosely call themselves “Knit Club”. The subject matter of this photograph centers on the relationship between the girl and doll in the painting, and the woman and girl in the photograph.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Almost One by Jeamin Cha dives into an uncomfortable meditation on the relationship between socialization, performativity, truth, and childhood, filtered through the optics of a children’s acting class in South Korea. Such a context possesses a loaded set of connotations due to the meteoric rise of Korean entertainment industries. Acting or singing academies have increasingly attracted negative press for their intensity and cutthroat standards, a system for producing talent with little emotional concern for its offspring.

Photography (Photography)

Jackie and Chloe by Carolyn Drake is from a series of works titled Knit Club . For this project, Drake collaborated with an enigmatic group of women in Mississippi who loosely call themselves “Knit Club”. There is a strangeness to this photograph; details of facial identity are withheld.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Los amantes (The lovers) Diana Fonseca Quiñones uses simple, commonplace objects and experiences that she derives from daily life to develop narratives that mix reality and fiction. Drawing on seemingly everyday moments, such as lighting a match, Quiñones creates poetic metaphors that cleverly comment on broader social issues, as well as politics, and universal human desires. In her profound work Los amantes, the humblest of materials, a pair of burning matches, becomes a parable for the sharing, longing, restraint, and death that everyone faces in life.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Ranging from Baudelaire to the Koran, each of Hassan Massoudy’s drawings are titled with a quotation from a text. In the case of La beauté sauvera le monde, the text originated from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot , alluding to aspirations, models of behavior and words of wisdom. The image itself, though generated in a hybrid manner relating to Arabic and Japanese calligraphy, suggests both fluttering flags and buildings rising high out of the desert as one would see in many developing Middle Eastern countries.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nathan Lewis has always made figurative and abstract drawings, which are related to anatomical textures and patterns he encountered when working as an ICU nurse. Hence the title of this work, Tissue II , is a spare and elegant work, in which the artist combines hand sculpted paper with embossment and frottage for the first time in his practice. The effect recalls African weaving and skin embellishment, but also reflects the influence of his former job as an intensive-care nurse, seeking to heal the most damaged.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jeamin Cha’s essay-film Ellie’s Eye is an extensive examination of the human mind and the effects of new technology, such as chatbots and virtual avatar therapists on the mental health industry. One such avatar, named Ellie, was developed by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. Ellie has the ability to interpret the user’s emotions through data collected from their speech and physical gestures to indicate psychological distress on a micro-level, which would be imperceptible by a human therapist.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Goddy Leye’s installation work The Beautiful Beast , a video is projected onto a gold-colored wooden box filled with sesame seeds. The sesame seeds look like pixels underneath the video, suggesting the texture of animation. The artist portrays a strange man who writhes on the ground like a beast against this ‘pixelated’ field.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film Demos by Danaya Chulphuthiphong draws parallels between zoo animals and humans through an assemblage of footage and images collected from various news and science websites. The soundtrack, made in collaboration with filmmaker, artist, and musician Pathompon “Mont” Tesprateep, was also sourced online and includes recordings of sounds produced in outer space, underwater, the deep jungle, as well by drones and laser beams. The film begins with the watchful eye of a semi-submerged crocodile, then shifts into an industrial scene of cranes swinging building materials across the sky.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Another curious element is that it seemed that I was seeing images from the dreams I had that afternoon. But these images were appearing from end to beginning, like a film reel running backwards. I also couldn’t properly situate them.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lifting Barbells is a video by Kim Heecheon that narrates his letters in Spanish to his girlfriend in Argentina, discussing his feelings after his father died in a bicycling accident. Using the data recorded on his father’s smartwatch, Kim’s video traces digital footage of his father’s route on Google Maps, the location of the accident, and his cardiographic data as he was dying. The video contrasts Kim’s emotional letters with the clinicality of the quantitative data recordings.

Painting (Painting)

Maaike and John

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history. In 1995, OJ Simpson—a well-known American football player—was accused of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Based on the courtroom footage, Ezawa uses his signature style to create an abstract and graphically simplified echo of what happened in the room.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In this video, a parrot chews on seeds printed with punctuation marks. A radio on the shelf in the background broadcasts the news of an unfolding football match. As the game (and video) progresses, the bird eats all of the remaining punctuation.