Black Things in White Spaces
Dominique Duroseau
Main Gallery, Gallery Aferro
September 23rd – October 28th, 2017
Curated by Jeanne Brasile
Opening Reception September 23rd, 7-10 PM @ Gallery Aferro
Duroseau creates narratives. She documents, cross-examines, creates cultural hybridizations. She de-contextualizes/re-contextualizes texts, topics, and issues on Black Culture’s constant striving within today’s society. She works within the cusp of her cultures as Haitian, American, and African Diaspora, then links unresolved issues across time as a political strategy. This takes into account the nuances of language and mannerisms, while illuminating social issues and injustice; depicting contemporary struggles against indifference, coded vernacular, and entrenched economic dispositions.
The issues addressed in her works may at first seem outdated and irrelevant, but instead have actually remained persistent, and morphed. The work folds in residuals of colonial influence, women’s issues, and criticism of imperialist white-supremacist patriarchal cultures.
Dominique Duroseau is a Newark-based artist born in Chicago, raised in Haiti. Her interdisciplinary practice explores themes of racism, socio-cultural issues, and existential dehumanization; it questions the roles we play in society, highlights the fractures within the Black race, and emphasizes the oft-ignored objectification of women. The work creates narratives which document and focus on different overlapping elements in Black culture’s constant striving within today’s society; these take into account language, culture, injustice, coded vernaculars, entrenched economic dispositions, and depicts our contemporary struggles against indifference.
Exhibitions, performances, and screenings include SATELLITE ART and PULSE Play in Miami; The Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, A.I.R. Gallery, BronxArtSpace, Rush Arts Gallery and Smack Mellon in New York City; Index Arts, Project for Empty Space, and Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ. She is an artist-in-residence at Gallery Aferro, and has curated “RAW FORMS FORUM,” a Performance Art group exhibition, at the Newark Museum. Duroseau holds a Bachelor’s in Architecture from the New Jersey School of Architecture and a Master of Arts in Fine Arts from Kean University.
No Words
Evonne Davis
Liminal Gallery, Gallery Aferro
September 23rd – October 28th, 2017
Opening Reception September 23rd, 7-10 PM @ Gallery Aferro
The difficulties and urgency of communication inspire Evonne Davis’ freeform text works. These works on paper made on a vintage typewriter along with large, text-based, silkscreen prints move freely between different modes of speech; colloquial and clinical, isolating phrases out of context to create new potential narratives in a variety of emotional tones. In one piece, we appear to be reading direct transcription of an institutional trauma intake of some kind, but the trauma may itself be institutionally induced. The ambiguity is haunting.
Elevator Music 4
John Pugh
Elevator Installation, 2nd Floor Gallery Aferro
September 23rd – October 28th, 2017
Curated by Jacob Mandel
Opening Reception September 23rd, 7-10 PM @ Gallery Aferro
This piece was composed using a feedback loop and three pitch shifter effects pedals. The signal was produced from one microphone, moving within a space 5 ft X 4 ft X 11 ft which is slightly larger than the typical dimensions of an Otis elevator. The feedback signal rises and falls and then contorts and expands as the spacial dimensions change. This repetitive ascension/descension in tone imitates the work-a-day function of the elevator, while the chaotic aberrations in tone imitate the inherent deviations that inevitably occur. These deviations are due to wear and tear, mechanical failure, human interaction, weather conditions, natural disasters and any number of random accidents. The repetition of service is where we place our unspoken faith every time we step into an elevator. But imbedded in our primal instincts is the fear that this time, this trip, something might go wrong. We may be stuck between floors for hours, or worse, plummet past floors within seconds. This creeping dread is present in the piece; the musical antithesis of Muzak which was invented as a means of muting that dread while the passenger rides in the elevator. The piece invites a further exploration of the ways in which we put our lives in the hands of mechanical, non-human systems everyday, and the dire consequences of its failure. These themes of faith vs. fear, technology vs. time, and the untameable beast of chaos run through our culture, society and politics more deeply than ever.
John Pugh is a musician and sound artist living and working in New York City since 2001. He was born and grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas playing in punk and experimental groups such as Jet Jangua, The Rat Finks, Uptown Prophets, Rebel Android and No City No State. During that time he was a co-founder and organizer of the Das Yutes A Go Go Arts Center located in the downtown area, which hosted many free music performances as well as art shows, film screenings, poetry readings, activist meetings, while providing a communal space for the local homeless community and at-risk youth.
On Belonging and the Void Between
Curated by Asha Ganpat
Gallery Aferro, Main Gallery
July 8th – August 31st, 2017
Opening Reception July 8th, 7-10pm
Gwen Charles
Sky Kim
Donna Conklin King
Mahtab Pedrami
Elisa Pritzker
Ronit Levin Delgado
Farideh Sakhaeifar
Nisha Sondhe
Suzie Tuchman
This exhibition is a selection of works about the nature of belonging and a look to the vacuous and vulnerable experience of being out of place. Without a sense of belonging, we are adrift in a sea of otherness. Of the ways we may untether from familiarity, the shift in becoming an outsider can shake the foundation of our very sense of self.
Sometimes is it desire that draws us out of what we know and into the unknown. “The Kissing Wall” by Ronit Levin Delgado, is an act of adoration. In this piece, it is the dream that she attempts to kiss awake and bring to life, each kiss a prayerful wish, and in her performance as a stand-in for us all, Levin Delgado renders sensual the connection between self and home. Belonging may not always be what we desire most. Mahtab Pedrami’s wall installation “From Guinea to New Guinea” is made of unfired terracotta vessels with blue silk birds. The vessels house the birds, and in repetition, represent a section of microcosm exposing the temporal and powerless schemes of living existence. Pedrami entraps the birds through the vessels’ immobility, limiting the flight and life of the winged creatures.
Sky Kim’s polymer clay sculptures draw attention to the body through disjointed and dysmorphic forms, seemingly tender and alive with life. The red tint in Kim’s delicate objects read as soreness and invoke a sense of the wrongness when a body is swollen and attempting to reject something that does not feel right. Her sculptures draw our attention to our own bodies and show us forms where our bodies could no longer feel like our own.
In domesticity, there are rigid stereotypes, demanding and inflexible. What victims are women in this inculcated role? How many live lives of pretense, going through the motions to fulfill expectations? In “Diamonds and Pearls” by Donna Conklin King, the symbols of a lasting marriage are turned gesture of suffering, as broken glass and fake pearls fill the cups of a pair of plush velvet-lined knee pads. King represents the burden of wifely duties again in, “You Made Your Bed, Now Sleep in It”, a bare box spring coil bed stuffed with lint flowers and a draped by a thin fabric. The flowers become precious in their placement, although in truth a collection of the ick and iota removed from the dirty clothes and fabrics of the home. Alternately, in embrace of the traditional responsibilities of wife and mother, “Domestic Majesty” and “Domestic Party” by Suzie Tuchman are two free-standing dresses, a cocktail dress and an elongated gown. They are two of the costumes of womanhood made from steel wool, a symbol for cleaning, one of the main roles often a task performed by women in marriage.
Farideh Sakhaeifar tells stories of belonging through photographs of material objects. Her series “Closets” and “Pending” depict opposing circumstances. In “Closets,” the portraits are not of people themselves, but of their things, organized and stored, visible in compositions with closet doors agape and all-exposed. These are the closets of people who dwell in those houses, with roots laid and a home made. In a disturbing acknowledgement of the loss of belonging, Sakhaeifar’s eerie series “Pending” gives us appropriated images of Syrian refugees capturing the heartrending trudge and trek of escape. However, Sakhaeifar has digitally removed all of the refugees, erasing them entirely, leaving the viewer only barren landscapes and trails of hovering personal items, the only things left in their possession from what was once a full life full of things.
When feeling out of place, there is often heightened vigilance for safety. Gwen Charles’ installation and performance titled “Safety Kiosk” provides viewers with a chance to borrow a safety vest to protect against unforeseen disaster. Her piece humorously takes on the challenge to help viewers be proactive in safety while in the gallery. Charles also presents two videos. In “Exhaustion Storage” a woman is sealed and trapped in Tupperware, lying alone in a shallow opening. A claustrophobia grows as minutes pass while the figure extends her limbs to the ends of the limited space. There is futility in the entrapment, a stifling of being where one should not be. In the video titled “Venetian Blinds,” we are faced with a representation of the other. We see a woman without expression raising and lowering white blinds, placing and removing a barrier between us. She just watches and stares, alienating the viewer with the lack of connection. The blinds become the line dividing us and them, inside and out, the viewer forced to the outside.
From the series Bombay vs. New York, two pairs of photographs by Nisha Sondhe present comparisons of everyday life. We see women beating laundry against rocks alongside a lines of machines in a laundromat with an idle patron. Also are pair of the inside of train cars, a nyc subway and one from India. A mere matter of a change of location or viewer and each pair are interchangeable in the polarity of the known and unknown.
Three shaman figures referencing the Selknam tribe of Argentina, loiter the walls in obscurity. Made by Elisa Pritzker, the canvas figures are the memory of a people who no longer have a place to belong as their tribe is now extinct. The viewer may see her future self mirrored in the shaman, for our mortality demands that we cannot always belong here.
Cover image by Donna Conklin King
Backwards View
Emma Wilcox
Curated by Evonne M. Davis
Gallery Aferro, Liminal Gallery
July 8th – August 31st, 2017
Opening Reception July 8th, 7-10pm
Emma Wilcox is a photographer concerned with environmental justice, land usage, eminent domain, and the role of individual memory in the creation of local history. Her solo exhibitions include Where it Falls, The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA and William Patterson University Galleries, Wayne, NJ, 2012, Emma Wilcox, 2010 at Gitterman Gallery, New York, NY, Salvage Rights, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, 2009 and Forensic Landscapes, Jersey City Museum, 2007. She is the recipient of a Harpo Foundation Grant, a NoMAA Creative Grant, a NJ State Arts Council Fellowship for photography, the Camera Club Of NY residency, the Newark Museum Residency and was a core participant in Night School at the New Museum in 2008. Her work has been reviewed and featured in Art In America, American Suburb X, and the New Yorker’s photo blog, Photo Booth, Women in Photography, Low Life, Black and White Magazine, and others. She has written for Bomb Magazine, Zing Magazine, and Influence. She participated in Emerge 7, Aljira, Newark, NJ and AIM 29, Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY. She is also co-founder, with Evonne M. Davis, of Gallery Aferro, a Newark, NJ alternative space. She lives by the river.
Wilcox writes “The work here isn’t new, consisting of images made from roughly 2005 – 2012. It hasn’t been much exhibited in Newark, which it depicts primarily though not exclusively. A “backwards view” has various meanings; either a retrograde, uninformed opinion, or accessing what is past, either visually or intellectually. It feels appropriate given events both local and national to consider what it is to remember, and to retain a record, whether visual, textual, or otherwise. What do you remember that has disappeared from view?”
She is interested in the density of the landscape: chemically, visually, textually. This density of markings includes human bodies, geological timekeeping, stories told in bars, news archives, and EPA documents. She makes photographs at or near night, on foot or via helicopter, and within a 5-mile radius of Newark. She makes photographs of things that can always be found, and are always about to vanish.
Elevator Music 3: Studio Sounds
Curated by Dahlia Elsayed
Gallery Aferro, 2nd Floor Installation
October 21st – December 17th, 2016
Opening Reception October 21st 5-9pm
Visiting artists in their studios is a great pleasure for many reasons – seeing works in progress, learning about a process, hearing an artist talk about their ideas. But there is also a voyeuristic aspect to the studio visit – peeking at scribbled notes and sketches, opened books that are lying around, the sounds or smells, revealing the influences on work which may leave no trace in the finished product.
As artists we make things that go out into the world and often live in sanitized, pristine environments of galleries or institutions, disconnected from their physical space of creation. As a curator, Dahlia Elsayed is often equally interested in the conditions of the making of the work as much as the work itself. What does that studio look like? Smell like? Feel like? Sound like?
For this show Dahlia was interested in what artists listen to while working and how the soundscape of a studio might shape the work they make. The participating artists were asked to think about what they hear while working. Was there an artist/station/podcast on heavy rotation or some music they always come back to? Or is it just the ambient sounds of an environment and the sounds of making work? Is there any specific kind of soundscape conducive to working? And what do other studios sound like in different places?
The 14 artists represent a wide range of mediums and approaches, and are working in varied locations- from San Francisco to Istanbul, Brooklyn to Berlin. Elsayed wanted to bring the sounds of those studios into this intimate space, for a shared asynchronous visit to listen in on them working, to hear the invisible soundtrack behind the work we see silently months later.
Anne Louise Blechner, Copenhagen, Denmark
Suzan Batu, Istanbul, Turkey
Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, Berlin, Germany
Aiham Dib, Damascus, Syria
Shady ElNoshakty, Cairo, Egypt
Echo Eggebrecht, Pittsburgh, PA
Mitra Azar, Nomadic Practice
Lauren Kelley, New York, NY
Asuka Ohsawa, San Francisco, CA
Shaw Osha, Olympia, WA
Anne Marte Overaa, Malmo, Sweden
Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Brooklyn, NY
Michael Rodriguez, New York, NY
Vitus Shell, Monroe, LA
Cloud 9: Gallery Aferro’s 9th Annual Art Auction Fundraiser
June 17th, 2017
VIP Preview 6PM – 7PM
Auction 7PM – 9:30PM
Gallery Aferro excited to announce the 9th Annual Benefit Art Auction and Party on June 17th, 2017, with our honoree Ron Beit, of RBH Group. As President and CEO of RBH Group, Ron Beit is proud to support Gallery Aferro as an anchor in RBH’s portfolio of social impact investing in downtown Newark. “Eleven years ago co-owners Evonne Davis and Emma Wilcox approached me with a proposal to create a community-centric gallery and creative arts space in the heart of our downtown development portfolio.” Ron Beit says. “Through hard work and dedication to embracing local talent, as well as featuring the work of emerging and better-known artists in our region, Gallery Aferro was a key player in making Newark a top-10 Hotbed of American’s Arts and Culture, according to the 2017 report of the National Center for Arts Research. Thanks to the creative vision of Gallery Aferro and their role within the Newark Arts consortium, Newark now ranks higher on the arts vibrancy index than cities such as Seattle, Philadelphia, Cambridge, Portland, Chicago and Pittsburgh.”
The festive event features an exciting auction of hundreds of artworks by emerging and established artists, music by DJ John Butler, and catering by Clint Feastgood and the Mozzarella God, all proud NJ natives, and dozens of wonderful door and raffle prizes.
All proceeds from tickets and purchases make possible Gallery Aferro’s year-round exhibitions and wide range of public events, artist residencies, publications, public art, educational offerings, and innovative, community-responsive projects such as our mobile portrait studio. Founded in 2003, and located downtown since 2006, the gallery has received 5 back-to-back Citations of Excellence from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and has been described by Inside New Jersey magazine as offering “a dizzying array of contemporary art.” The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation has praised our “expansive vision, impact in Newark as well as regionally and even internationally”, and our “exemplary mentoring opportunities for young artists.” Radius magazine has described the gallery as a place where “exuberant extremes of age and background come together,” and Brick City Live has commented on our “community-minded, experimental, collaborative, and DIY ethos.”
For one night only unique artworks will be available at prices that will enlarge or establish your collection. Delight a friend, colleague or loved one with the gift of artwork. Bring someone who’s never been to the gallery, or to Newark, or someone you come with every year. Support the free exchange of ideas: Mom said to share! Dance and have fun.
#galleryaferro
A Retrospective
Dolores Stewart
Curated by Evonne M. Davis
Gallery Aferro, Main Gallery
April 28th – May 27th, 2017
Opening Reception April 28th, 5-9pm
NOTE: THE OPENING WAS POSTPONED FROM APRIL 22
For Immediate Release: Gallery Aferro launches a 2017-18 quartet of solo shows by multiple generations of women artists of color, beginning with an extensive retrospective of ceramic sculptures by Dolores Stewart.
Born in 1932, Stewart’s work reflects life. She uses her recollections of her children’s youth, and those of her own happy childhood to create moving sculptures that evoke the African-American family experience. Her observations of people derive from her own family members, but also from history, mythology, and the changing social conditions of the world around her. With several distinctive styles in use, her visualization of her pieces allows her to approach each one with fresh insight into the story that she is telling.
A 1952 graduate of Newark’s Arts High School, the first magnet arts school in the nation, Stewart continued her study of art at iconic institutions: The New School as well as the DuCret Art School, the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts, the Arts Student League, and most recently, with an ongoing engagement with the Visual Arts Center of NJ.
She has exhibited throughout the region, winning prizes frequently at the Plainfield Outdoor Show, the Parkway Festival of Art, Art in the Atrium, and at galleries in Atlantic City, Westfield and Summit, NJ. Her work is in significant collections throughout the northeast, and has been exhibited at the Newark Museum, the Montclair Art Museum, and the Morris Museum. She is a past member of the Tweed Gallery in Plainfield, NJ, and has been featured in multiple television stories, including the Steve Adubato Show on Channel 13, NJTV, and NBC Nightly News, and is included in two books on women sculptors. Most recently, she was included in a multiple location project by Women in Media, “Women in the World: a Visual Perspective”, curated by Adrienne Wheeler and Gladys Barker-Grauer at Rutgers University-Newark’s Paul Robeson Art Galleries.
She states that “My sculptures are a true dramatization of the American culture. More specifically, my technique lends itself to capturing the soulful nature of the human spirit.” Now an octogenarian, Stewart resides in Plainfield, New Jersey and is the mother of two sons, and grandmother to three grandchildren.
Backwards View
Emma Wilcox
Curated by Evonne M. Davis
Gallery Aferro, Liminal Gallery
April 28th – May 26th, 2017
Opening Reception April 28th, 5-9pm
Emma Wilcox is a photographer concerned with environmental justice, land usage, eminent domain, and the role of individual memory in the creation of local history. Her solo exhibitions include Where it Falls, The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA and William Patterson University Galleries, Wayne, NJ, 2012, Emma Wilcox, 2010 at Gitterman Gallery, New York, NY, Salvage Rights, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, 2009 and Forensic Landscapes, Jersey City Museum, 2007. She is the recipient of a Harpo Foundation Grant, a NoMAA Creative Grant, a NJ State Arts Council Fellowship for photography, the Camera Club Of NY residency, the Newark Museum Residency and was a core participant in Night School at the New Museum in 2008. Her work has been reviewed and featured in Art In America, American Suburb X, and the New Yorker’s photo blog, Photo Booth, Women in Photography, Low Life, Black and White Magazine, and others. She has written for Bomb Magazine, Zing Magazine, and Influence. She participated in Emerge 7, Aljira, Newark, NJ and AIM 29, Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY. She is also co-founder, with Evonne M. Davis, of Gallery Aferro, a Newark, NJ alternative space. She lives by the river.
Wilcox writes “The work here isn’t new, consisting of images made from roughly 2005 – 2012. It hasn’t been much exhibited in Newark, which it depicts primarily though not exclusively. A “backwards view” has various meanings; either a retrograde, uninformed opinion, or accessing what is past, either visually or intellectually. It feels appropriate given events both local and national to consider what it is to remember, and to retain a record, whether visual, textual, or otherwise. What do you remember that has disappeared from view?”
She is interested in the density of the landscape: chemically, visually, textually. This density of markings includes human bodies, geological timekeeping, stories told in bars, news archives, and EPA documents. She makes photographs at or near night, on foot or via helicopter, and within a 5-mile radius of Newark. She makes photographs of things that can always be found, and are always about to vanish.
Only Home
Kevin Durkin
Curated by Jacob Mandel
Gallery Aferro, Main Gallery
February 11th – April 1st, 2017
Opening Reception February 11th, 7-10pm
Kevin Durkin creates work that centers around an abstract sense of nostalgia and memory. The work resurrects moments that may not have occurred, may never occur, but still feel vaguely familiar, landing somewhere between reality and fantasy. Years go by and the concept of home is manipulated and transformed until it can, at times, feel unrecognizable. It may no longer be a place you know, but a brief moment in time, when even a sound, or a flash of color can bring you somewhere you’ve been before.
Durkin’s work goes there and beyond, creating landscapes of places we have yet to go, but might feel just as comfortable. Having dealt with various forms of loss of the concept of a home, his work comes from the most personal of places, while at the same time bringing the viewer an undeniably universal experience.
Kevin Durkin is a multidisciplinary artist working in Newark, New Jersey. Durkin was born February 18, 1988 in Portland, Oregon. Raised in Northwestern New Jersey he went on to study graphic design at The Art Institute of Philadelphia. While there he found himself creating more conceptually, working with non-commercial themes in digital art pieces. Taking that process a step further he switched to analog, utilizing painting and drawing as a way to grant himself more freedom from the constraints of the digital medium. He has been an artist in residence at Index Art Center in Newark, New Jersey since 2014.
Respond In Kind
Jacob Mandel
Curated by Evonne M. Davis
Gallery Aferro, Liminal Gallery
February 11th – April 1st, 2017
Opening Reception February 11th, 7-10pm
Jacob Mandel’s work focuses on ideas, introspection, memory, and emotions. Through his practice he reflects on experiential phenomenon using photography as a parallel to the way we see the world. His work is influenced by a passion for the history of photography, and a constant engagement with attempting to define his perception of the world around him. Mandel believes photographic processes can be used to subvert expectations of what a photograph can or must do. Through that contradiction of purpose he believes his artwork mirrors our own understanding, and misunderstanding, of the world around us. Experimentation is crucial to Jacob’s artistic practice and pushing the boundaries of his vision is something he strives for constantly. Jacob also combines media and images, layering content, ideas, textures, and processes. This is another way in which he works to create artwork that acts as a mirror to perception while creating a type of visual poetry. Mandel feels that diversity of experience is crucial to one’s ability to empathize and understand other cultures. The layering of media and images in his work is his way of engaging in social awareness. Creating an immersive experience, walking the line between photography, installation, poetry, and illustration, Jacob illustrates his own meditations on understanding and creating one’s identity and introspective consciousness. This work, though deeply personal and specific to his life, creates an allegory for experience that isn’t tethered to one singular type of experience. Through presenting these ideas, Jacob encourages the viewer to look upon themselves and attempt to understand their own place amongst our shared reality.
Elevator Music 3: Studio Sounds
Curated by Dahlia Elsayed
Gallery Aferro, 2nd Floor Installation
October 21st – December 17th, 2016
Opening Reception October 21st 5-9pm
Visiting artists in their studios is a great pleasure for many reasons – seeing works in progress, learning about a process, hearing an artist talk about their ideas. But there is also a voyeuristic aspect to the studio visit – peeking at scribbled notes and sketches, opened books that are lying around, the sounds or smells, revealing the influences on work which may leave no trace in the finished product.
As artists we make things that go out into the world and often live in sanitized, pristine environments of galleries or institutions, disconnected from their physical space of creation. As a curator, Dahlia Elsayed is often equally interested in the conditions of the making of the work as much as the work itself. What does that studio look like? Smell like? Feel like? Sound like?
For this show Dahlia was interested in what artists listen to while working and how the soundscape of a studio might shape the work they make. The participating artists were asked to think about what they hear while working. Was there an artist/station/podcast on heavy rotation or some music they always come back to? Or is it just the ambient sounds of an environment and the sounds of making work? Is there any specific kind of soundscape conducive to working? And what do other studios sound like in different places?
The 14 artists represent a wide range of mediums and approaches, and are working in varied locations- from San Francisco to Istanbul, Brooklyn to Berlin. Elsayed wanted to bring the sounds of those studios into this intimate space, for a shared asynchronous visit to listen in on them working, to hear the invisible soundtrack behind the work we see silently months later.
Anne Louise Blechner, Copenhagen, Denmark
Suzan Batu, Istanbul, Turkey
Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, Berlin, Germany
Aiham Dib, Damascus, Syria
Shady ElNoshakty, Cairo, Egypt
Echo Eggebrecht, Pittsburgh, PA
Mitra Azar, Nomadic Practice
Lauren Kelley, New York, NY
Asuka Ohsawa, San Francisco, CA
Shaw Osha, Olympia, WA
Anne Marte Overaa, Malmo, Sweden
Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Brooklyn, NY
Michael Rodriguez, New York, NY
Vitus Shell, Monroe, LA