Molting
Gallery Aferro Main Gallery
Curated by Kayla Carucci, Alex Scott Cumming, and Jacob Mandel
October 15th – December 19th
Opening Reception October 17th 7pm – 10pm
Molting relates the psyche to free will by means of non corporeal identification. The show displays artists’ self portraits through representation of the ephemeral, the immaterial, and the objective. These representations are a process of association; i.e. through housing, environment, culture, subculture, relationships, and their various manifestations. A choice is an act of free will, consciously or subconsciously, and carry an imprint of the will. The paradox of free will and the psyche, a universal object originating before the human individual, creates non corporeal phenomena through which the artists may convey themselves. Molting is exposing the responsibility for change in our world.
Alexandra Desipris
Kevin Durkin
Manuela Eichner
Jessica Ellis
Gilbert Hsiao
Ryan Patrick Martin
Kelli McGuire
Tomo Mori
Alicia Papanek
Molly Soda
Vaughn Spann
Ceaphas Stubbs
Andrea Garcia Vasquez
Ken Weathersby
Juno Zago
SOUL BABY
Artwork by Laurie M.
Gallery Aferro Liminal Gallery
October 15th – December 19th
Opening Reception October 17th 7pm – 10pm
This current body of work by the artist is a very intimate series titled SOUL BABY. It contains original works, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional, oil paintings and drawings. The actual SOUL BABY is an unrealized physical being that has been portrayed obsessively at the core of who the artist considers them self to be.
SOUL BABY is subtle on the surface but reveals an inner intensity through very specific titles concerning health issues existing within the artist’s family (multigenerational schizophrenia, Asperger’s, mental illness). This body of work questions how quality of health translates into (dis)connectedness and altered perceptions of family relationships, childhood, love, longing, loss, trauma, natural wonders, and pure beauty.
In these works, Laurie draws on the unconscious, meditating on the qualities of primal self and the complexity of all that feeds those meditations in oil paint. Laurie created the first work in this series, titled “At Peace”, when all of her life seemed aligned and she was joyous. Not long after that declaration, Murphy’s life went into a health spiral that would forever impact her “expected” future. The resulting paintings describe profoundly personal experiences that also reference topics unexplored in Laurie’s works prior to dramatic changes in her health.
The inspiration in SOUL BABY originates from life combined with an appreciation for traditional Realism as well as an affinity for the Abstract Expressionists and Surrealists. This inspiration is a paradox, stylistically. This new work draws on the paradox of raw emotions associated with the yearning for truth and beauty within a physically painful existence. This “duality” is a reminder of complications of the heart and often conveys the disconnection of male and female relationships. Visual metaphors convey life events that are too difficult to express in any other way. Highly rendered focal points often contrast with an unconscious, reoccurring theme of an unfinished, skewed horizontal background.
Sancocho
Curated by Jo-El Lopez
October 15th – November 15th
Opening Reception October 17th 7pm – 10pm
Gallery Aferro proudly presents the group exhibition Sancocho. This exhibition works to expand the presence of the Hispanic and Latin Diaspora to the Newark downtown area art scene and expose artists to a broader audience. Sancocho (San-co-cho) is a traditional soup (often considered a stew) made with different methods and mixtures of ingredients depending on region. Its combinations of flavors, simmered until everything is tender and practically dissolving into an appealing broth, with the end result being a wholesome and soul feeding meal. It is this same method of joining different styles and art methods that we are achieving with this show.
Both revelatory and enlightening, this exhibit visually influence the imaginative existence of humanity and culture. Brimming with flavor, with human symbolism and different art techniques, all while commenting on social/political issues and themes. Join us.
Monica Aramayo
Ray Arcadio
Karlos Carcamo
Shauna H. Figueroa
Carlos Jesus Martinez Dominguez
Bryant Javll Lebron
Jo-El Lopez
Cesar Melgar
Josama Mala Palabra
Luisa F. Pinzon
Grey Sea
Esmeralda Vazquez
Joe Velez
Elevator Music 2
Curated by Spencer Frohwirth
Aferro Publication No. 24
Played on Loop at Gallery Aferro’s Vintage Elevator Installation
2nd Floor, 73 Market Street, Gallery Aferro
September 5th 2015 – July 1st 2016
Andrew Wilkinson
Lorin Roser
Spencer Frohwirth & Jacob Mandel
Laura Plana Gracia
Maggie Dubris
Sam Sebren
Echo
Gallery Aferro Main Gallery
September 5th – October 3rd
Opening Reception September 12th 7pm – 10pm
The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and Gallery Aferro partnered in 2014-15 for Artist Box, a unique initiative that brought artists from the Newark-based art gallery to NJSO performances in Newark throughout a season. Echo is a unique experience in that it will be a visual arts exhibition inspired by music. There has always been a relation between the visual and the sonic arts, they have always been an integral part of human culture and society. But what would an artwork look like that’s halfway between a song and a painting? A sound and a photograph? A sculpture and an echo? How does music and noise inform the way we create and define ourselves visually? The artists will find the line between the sonic and the visual. Gallery Aferro is giving the artists a space for experimentation and artistic interpretation inspired by New Jersey Symphony Orchestra’s performances. Echo is a dynamic and immersive exhibition experience blending two of the most important and influential cultural mediums.
Alex Scott Cumming
Andrew Demirjian & James Proctor
Alexandra Desipris
Sophia Domeville
Dominique Duroseau
Jacob Mandel
Anne McKeown
Vaughn Spann
Amanda Thackray
Adrienne Wheeler
Made by Juno
Juno Zago
Gallery Aferro Liminal Gallery
September 5th – October 3rd
Opening Reception September 12th 7pm – 10pm
João (Juno) is primarily a figurative artist given that self-portraits are in the forefront of his interests, though he is confident his work cannot only be about this. To disregard other interests would be wrong, especially since so much of what he wishes to accomplish in his work has less to do with figurative representation and the ideas driving him. Self-portraits are not his only vehicle. Outside of those confines his work manifests via patterns, shapes, and colors, and he believes that this has to do with his interests in periods in art history such as Cubism and Modernism, through artists like Pablo Picasso, Sol Lewitt, and Agnes Martin.
The penchant for the self is not left completely out of the equation however, because his work dwells in it a way or another. The figurative confines of the self-portrait are broken by both visual abstraction and more objective ideas. With this particular body of work, Juno is also inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi. This is a philosophy that explains that an object’s repair should be a part of its visual history instead of something to be concealed. Thus when a piece of pottery breaks, it is put back together with lacquer or glue containing powdered gold, so when the object is whole again, its cracks become part of what makes it a beautiful object.
On a physical level, Juno is creating collages that are driven by the hoarding of his old and tattered clothing. He then tears, rips, cuts and stitches them using embroidery thread painted golden to mimic the appearance of kintsugi and create large pieces on canvas that are visually concerned with composition, shape and color. On a metaphysical level, these compositions document important moments in his life: like break-ups, work experiences, and body consciousness.
www.junozago.wix.com/buildinghp
Superfood
April 11th – May 23rd, 2015
Opening Reception April 11th, 7 – 10pm
Curated by Doris Cacoilo and Meredith Goncalves
Gallery Aferro, Main Gallery
_gaia is a collective of women artists and activists creating art, events and opportunities in the visual and media arts, performance and design. Its members actively promote and support the work of local women artists while developing programs that encourage collaboration and create community to help emerging artists in need of studio space, facilities and resources. In pursuit of raising awareness _gaia concentrates on activism, from issues in the local community and the art world to global issues affecting the lives of women.
Superfood
The ninth edition of _gaia‘s Wonder Women Residency explored Superfood. A generation after the birth of the Kraft cheese single, we turn to the newly fetishized landscape of Superfood. With this in mind, Wonder Women invited artists to reflect on what is Superfood to women in their role in food communities, economies, and families. We challenged these artists to explore possibilities with women at the center of food cultivation, cooking, feeding, and nurturing. With this in mind the work spans in its’ investigation of medically enhanced drinking water, food as comfort, food as personal identity and food as prescription. Utilizing an array of mediums, the works will engage, inform and question these complex landscapes via painting, video, sculpture, interactive installation and relational aesthetics.
The artists:
Melissa MacAlpin
Sarah Nelson Wright
Lillian Ribeiro
Kate Eggleston
Cathleen Marie Thérèse Parra
Stephanie Tichenor
Claudia McNulty
Panda Suwann
Alyssa Lawler
Jacquelyn Strycker
Activate: Market Street 5
The Glass Chronicles
Mollie Thonneson
April 25 – May 18, 2015
85 Market Street, Curated by Jo-el Lopez
The Glass Chronicles began as an exercise in seeing how many times removed Mollie Thonneson could continue to create artwork based on a single image. From the original photograph of broken windshield glass scattered on a sidewalk She has created a realistic oil painting, six stylized acrylic paintings, a silk-screen print edition and twelve fabric pieces. Each new artwork is used as the reference for the next one. The different mediums are allowed to have their own voice and tell their own story yet they continue to express the same explosive energy that broke the glass in the first place.
Mollie Thonneson has been painting and constructing fabric sculptures for over thirty five years. Her work has shown nationally and internationally. She is the inventor, designer, and manufacturer of TAG the Art Game, a game that helps people overcome their fears about art making. Thonneson studied Illustration at Art Center College of Design in California from 1979-1981. She and her late husband, Joseph Franklin, designed and manufactured high end lamps, mirrors, and accent tables from 1990 – 2000. Thonneson moved to the East Coast in 2007 and earned her BFA in painting and drawing from New Jersey City University in 2012. Thonneson lives and works in Jersey City, NJ with her partner Alan Walker, their daughter Tulsi.
Activate: Market Street 5
February 20 – May 2, 2015
Opening Reception February 20, 7 – 10pm
Storefront Windows on Market Street
Sunil Garg A Comfortable Illusion of Order @ 75 Market Street
The installation was created for its location, a former furniture store display window in Newark, NJ. It evokes planar forms of pieces of furniture in a seemingly chaotic state illuminated at night by a program of lights.
Garg’s work uses accessible materials such as, paper, wire mesh, expandable foam, discarded plastic bags, and packaging, to create forms that interrogate and respond to the conditions of the environment they are placed in. His work is intended to adapt to its environment and change depending on environmental and visual points of view and also challenge viewers’ preconceptions and biases.
Robert Lach A Forest @ 77 Market street
Nesting is both a joyous time for birth, comfort and rest, and a fight for survival from the elements of the natural world. Nature provides beauty and tranquility but also potential danger and destruction. It can be a nightmare.
Lach builds nests and nest-like structures based on the architecture of birds, animals, and insects. Viscerally attracted by their nostalgia, ware, and uselessness, Robert mimics their design, form and structure patterns using locally gathered objects, trash, and recycled materials.
Heather Johnson
Selected works by Kayla Carucci and Evonne Davis
February 20th – May 23rd @ =Space
Maxblau Building, 89 Market Street, 4th Floor, Newark, NJ
Johnson grew up moving from place to place. Dramatic cultural transitions defined each move: Hawaii to suburban Chicago; Rio Grande du Sol, Brazil to Heber City, Utah; Woking, Surrey, England to Houston, Texas. This process, along with an entrenched fondness for motorcycles and long road trips, has inspired her investigation of rootlessness, of moving through space without connecting to it. Heather’s work examines spaces from the perspective of an outsider looking in, positioning the viewer to gaze intimately at things that are temporary, generally ignored, or distorted by memory.
Employing a range of media, Johnson’s work reenacts the act of searching, of hunting for clues from the past to build new connections to the present. Drawing on source material such as maps, engineering schematics, official documents, newspaper articles, internet ephemera, and the personal stories of friends and strangers, Heather often uses labor-intensive processes to render richly layered images of things often forgotten or taken for granted. Johnson looks for relationships between different types of experiences, searching for evidence in the landscape of patterns and cycles that reveal our own fragile natures, as humans, in relation to it. It is her hope that the work inspires questions about where we are, physically and psychologically, in relation to what surrounds us.
Born in 1969 in Wahiawa, Hawaii, Heather Johnson has shown her work in galleries, museums and in the public realm throughout the United States, in Europe, Japan and Mexico. In 2001, she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and has completed residencies at McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, Winthrop University in South Carolina and BoxoHOUSE in Joshua Tree, CA. Johnson has curated several exhibitions and collaborative projects, including Cracks in the Pavement: Gifts in the Urban Landscape, involving artists from around the world, Love Letter, a collection of collaborative site-specific works presented in New York and Paris, and most recently, In Search of the Frightening and Beautiful, a project-in-progress of landscape interventions around the United States and Mexico. Johnson lives a nomadic life aboard her Yamaha 250XT.
Activate: Market Street 5
Till The Break Of Dawn: Blue
Karlos Cárcamo
March 28 – April 18, 2015
85 Market Street, Curated by Jo-el Lopez
Karlos Cárcamo’s work combines his interest in modernist abstraction, art history, and urban culture. Incorporating a process that subverts the formal language of abstraction with a hybrid vocabulary of forms influenced by the constructed nature of urban culture. Cárcamo creates work that samples from past art historical sources as a way of re-contextualizing the codified language of abstract art to address issues that relate to our everyday world.
Till The Break Of Dawn: Blue consists of shaped mono-chromatic paintings with police batons, solarized images of handcuffs on paper, and a sculpture made from Public Enemy vinyl records. All the work in the installation touches on aspects of police violence through a mix of materiality, form, iconography and color.
The installation title is both a slang reference to staying up all through the night and a play on the many meanings of the color blue. As insignia for police, the psychological state of sadness and a reference to art historical uses of the color blue by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, and Yves Klein.
Karlos Cárcamo is a multidisciplinary artist with interests in art history, urban culture, and modernist abstraction. His work often touch on themes related to high and low culture, its influence on art and how the constructed nature of urban culture can be used as a vehicle to understand the world at large. He has a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Hunter College, both in New York. He has exhibited extensively including at the Brooklyn Museum; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; MoMA PS1 and Queens Museum of Contemporary Art, both Queens, NY; El Museo del Barrio, Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, and Artists Space, all NY; Jersey City Museum and Aljira Center of Contemporary Art, both NJ; and Museo de Arte de El Salvador. He was awarded a residency at the Lower Eastside Printshop in 2009 and was part of the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace Program in 2000. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, and the Village Voice, among other publications. Karlos Cárcamo is represented by Hionas Gallery in New York. www.hionasgallery.com
Pebble Drinkers
February 20 – March 28, 2015
Opening Reception February 20, 7 – 10pm
Gallery Aferro, Main Gallery
As artists, we choose a voice that is not necessarily lingual but nonetheless navigates narrative terrain. We are both collectors of experiences and storytellers making compositions based on the reflection of those experiences. We are a community that supports one another in our pursuits as mythmakers, anecdote entrepreneurs, role players, biographers, documentarians, and myriad other roles.
Demosthenes, the Greek orator, was said to practice his enunciation with pebbles in his mouth. In order to fully narrate we, perhaps, must drink our pebbles. Given this theme, we propose an exhibition of narrative artists called “Pebble Drinkers.” Each artist playfully explores and reshapes traditional narrative, allowing for shifting perspectives and altered viewings. Pebble Drinkers is a group exhibition consisting of mixed media, painting, and sculpture.
Rachelle Beaudoin uses performance, video, and wearable objects to interweave narratives from icons of female sexuality, creating an uncertain and discomforting new space. She uses humor and sarcasm as an entry point into issues of gender, power, and class. Appropriating and subverting stereotypes gives her characters, who at first glance appear superficial, depth and space. She is currently investigating the conflation of “hotness” and empowerment through pieces that focus on physical fitness and beauty.
Brittany De Nigris builds ephemeral narratives through sculptures, video, and performance with what she refers to as an “immediate landscape.” In this space, place is not just a backdrop but rather inspiration, form, prop, and participant. Natural elements intervene to activate man made materials and it is this conversation that becomes a portal for the transmission of ideas. Her work often springs from minute observations that become focal points for larger meaning, emphasizing the impermanence and continuation of all things. Place is material.
Corwin Levi makes mixed media work that resembles maps, charts, or texts. There are recognizable moments interwoven throughout the pieces that imply a narrative scheme. As viewers look and read through these moments, though, they start to realize that the pieces do not explain in diagrammatic fashion but are Gordian knots, impossible to unravel. For the viewer, it’s a tight, concentrated, intense study. The eye never rests, looking, reading, looking, reading, in an endless cycle. There is no way out, only in, over, through, and back in again.
A.V. Ryan’s sculptures use the form and properties of rubber inner tubes to create sequences of abstract forms. Using varying degrees of inflation and deflation as well as folding, binding or propping, she explores the moods and postures of the form – the torus – within a single material manifestation – rubber. Lightness and heaviness, lift and fall, a play of folds suggest the fleeting presence of the body while her treatment of the surface brings out a range of reflective and tactile qualities that suggest skin. Narrative here is silent and implicit.
Piper Grosswendt makes artful, abstract compositions playing through a language of color, shape, and visual perception. The compositions are so striking that it is a secondary reaction to focus on the reality that the paintings are on second-hand linens rather than stretched canvases. The traditional myths surrounding abstraction are uprooted, as are our perception of the value of our discarded bed sheets, as we look at both the paintings and the narratives behind both art history and the history of the linens themselves.
Becca Kallem works with cloth and fabrics as well, drawing what appear to be beautiful fabric still lifes. The drawings, though, are not still lifes but rather draperies copied from old master narrative paintings–without the rest of the painting to provide context. In addition to cloth imagery, she excerpts and repositions other elements of masterworks to create new, personal narratives about identity, perception, and communication.
Jesse Harrod uses gaudy, industrial chintz fabric in her work. The materials she works with contain poorly rendered images such as flowers printed on cheap cloth. She thinks of the motifs as alive with a narrative history. She explores gender, home, colonialism, industry, insincerity, surface and the need to be something you are not through sexuality and growth. She asks: how do domestically designed, foreign produced fabrics relate to today’s industrial and post-colonial global diaspora? How might recurring enlarged images of childish flowers conjure messages related to sexuality and class? She finds answers in the layered history of cloth itself: a scrap of fabric produces a story of colonial, gendered, and class-based oppression. Simultaneously, she makes work investigating how a “hobbyist” or “bad taste” aesthetic may relate to queer identity, as well as to second and third wave feminist thought.
Greg Stewart finds inspiration from “out of place” things in the world because of their potential to create new possibilities and generate reflective thinking. He refers to these things as “acts of mobility,” a spark that drives our limitless imaginations. The presence of mobility in language is driven by our use of narrative to create imaginary circumstances and events. The impetus for Stewart’s projects stems from his interest in human geography: the study of how we situate or arrange ourselves in the world. His work imagines a reality constructed out of a necessity to move from place to place. Most recently, he built small mobile shelters equipped with portions of a library, a cooking station, vegetable gardens, fruit trees growing on roof tops, and an outhouse.
Stephanie Williams is a tinkerer and doodler whose work navigates autobiographical narratives related to memory and misconception derived from the many facets of identity. She tells this story by examining these facets individually over its whole. Through self-directed processes influenced by close examination and disassembly of sensorial fragments, she curates a context governed by our bodies’ amalgamated experience. Her work does not necessarily rely upon a catalogue to sort these pieces but instead examines a human need to identify. Through this “portraiture”, she improvises installations and characters that meld together sewn pieces that reference body topography, supported by precarious stilts, armature, and simple mechanisms that when reoriented, do not quite fit back together as neatly nor predictably. The work suggests an insular nature, providing context in which a collection of fragments parallels our understanding of the world.
Josama Loss Of Innocence
85 Market Street, Curated by Jo-El Lopez
Throughout Josama’s travels, he became largely influenced by Hip-Hop culture, primarily graffiti art and MCing. It was during the “die hard” era of New York’s graffiti scene where ten year-old Josama would lay his foundation as a visual artist. Within one year, Josama was keeping black books full of designs to be used for murals. Due to the near extinction of the graffiti train culture, Josama took a back seat to the declining art form and transcended his passion for the visual arts through oil painting. Josama immersed himself with his newfound love and began studying the works of various Renaissance masters, Mexican muralists and contemporary paintings.
The combination of Josama’s vagabond lifestyle, artistic upbringing and devotion for hip-hop culture, are the factors responsible for his unique artistic expression. Josama’s work can be defined as a living dreamscape that cross-pollinates historical moments with pop-culture iconography and everyday street life. Infusing elements of symbology, psychology and spirituality, Josama’s pieces are engaging and evoke a thought provoking analysis of the imagery conveyed.