April, 2012
AWC presented seven Bright New Prospects at Art in General.
Born in 1989, Pallavi Sen is an Indian artist currently living and working in Brooklyn. She recently re-located to NYC from Columbus, Ohio where she was studying Fine Art at the Columbus College of Art and Design. She loves printmaking, typography, sculpture, fashion photography, fabrics, chintz, patterns and books in equal measure. Having grown up in India, with every surface of her room and home covered with textiles, she is inclined to create work that benefits the heritage of craft and standing of the craftsman. Both skill and imagination are very dear to her and she strives to create pieces that go beyond disciplines and break the creative hierarchy. Sustainability is central to her work --with all that is created, one must also keep in mind the materials that can be saved or avoided. Patterns and construction motivated by myth and religion, embroidery techniques, bodoni, love stories, her own body and the ones she has seen, illustration, botany and birds, cloth bound books and their covers, repeating shapes and William Morris are her biggest influences of late.
“The abundance, the beautiful waste, the people, the tongues and eyes of this city are contagious and act as stimulus that leads to new work. There is so much to see, so much one would like to ignore, it’s such a grand parade.”
Chris Ritson was raised in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. It was in this particular island environment that the subtle influences of nature became the cornerstone of his intellectual pursuits and philosophical inquiries. While studying the sciences at the University of Hawaii and working on
a shrimp hatchery, his interests shifted from biotechnology to the arts in order to explore how we make meaning in the context of our natural world. He later came to California, where he completed his degree at SFAI in New Genres and lived for some time. His work has been featured across the USA, as well as internationally in Taiwan, Korea, Australia and Europe. In 2011, he was selected as an Artist in Residence at the Headland Center For the Arts. He is 26, and now lives and works in New York City, having recently re- located from San Francisco.
Ritson’s work serves to create dialogue with the environment and imagine new roles and modes of interacting with nature. Through this task, he elicits a different sort of art production that places value on natural systems and mankind’s ability to integrate positively with them. He creates works which speak to our cultural anxieties and relationships with nature, analyzing
the labyrinth of myths and prerogatives specific to a psychology of the self. Drawing his materials from the natural detritus of his immediate surroundings, Ritson aims to reconfigure the most elemental substances into objects and phenomena that elicit unique and temporal wonder.
Elyse Mallouk is an artist and writer currently living in Brooklyn after moving from Los Angeles just last week. In interdisciplinary projects that range from installations to a subscription service, Mallouk looks for what it means for artworks to be open: resonant but receptive to the different imaginations that will meet them. In 2010 she launched Landfill, an online archive and material quarterly that redistributes ephemera generated by socially engaged projects. Issue themes twist together works that might not otherwise come into contact; human cheese, beeswax soap bars, and letters to extinct species are all included in the upcoming issue. Landfill is a project that serves other practices, introducing them to new audiences and locating unexpected connections between them.
Her recent studio projects also search for unlikely threads between distinct kinds of sensual information. Notes for an Open Score, a coded investigation of pop and romance novels, took ubiquitous ways of expressing connection and invited their meanings to be rebuilt through a systematic removal of information. Mallouk holds an MFA in Fine Arts and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts.
Enrique Radigales recently moved to New York via Sao Paulo after having previously lived in Madrid and Barcelona, where he received both his BA and MA at the Escola Massana.
He has enjoyed several residences in Sao Paulo and Madrid and currently he is working as a resident at Eyebeam, where he studied technological and cultural symbols of New York and architectural remains of the recent past.
Radigales works with HTML programming, installations and drawing techniques to explore the border between the digital and the analogue worlds. He creates an expanding vague field in order to comment on technological progress as a reflection of social and financial evolution, and the relationship between temporality and technology.
“I always joke that wanting to be a professional artist is like wanting to be a major league baseball player– a nearly impossible goal. But I knew I wanted to try.”
Shannon Finnegan is originally from Berkeley, CA. She moved to upstate New York and then New York City after graduating from Carleton College. She finds that already, being an artist seems more realistic when living amongst so many other brave souls who are faced with similar challenges.
Shannon Finnegan’s artwork addresses the idea of productivity by traversing the line between meaningful and meaningless activities. She works by repeating the same action at length, often for 8 hours at a time. Her drawings—the products of this work—raise issues about the value of labor and the concept of “wasted time.”
Giorgio Guidi and Marta Pierobon formed Draok in 2010 to work collaboratively on shared interests including architecture, perception and social systems. Both Guidi and Peirobon have long been fascinated by the secretive and hidden: crypts, cults, ghosts and memories. Italian cities are built on the foundations of previous settlements--Etruscan, Roman and medieval--producing a stratification of civilizations. New buildings rise on the ruins of the old, burying earlier structures in rubble and debris. In Italian Catholicism there is a long tradition of covering and hiding the past; it is deeply embedded in the hierarchy of the church. Beneath the modern city lies the still present and living past and its treasures, relics, and corpses.
Draok’s work is an attempt to excavate, archive and rebuild this hidden past. Both Guidi and Pierobon grew up in the city of Brescia, outside Milan.
www.giorgioguidi.com
www.martapierobon.it
View Artists from the February 2011 AWC event.
