Novel Ideas

Novel Ideas

Feb 7–May 3, 2020

• Main Gallery | February 7, 2020 – May 3, 2020
• Featuring artists Emilia Azcárate, Ann Clarke, Arturo Herrera, Hye-Ryoung Min, Benedikt Terwiel

The Novel Ideas group exhibition provides a platform for artists whose practices are dedicated to books. These works explore the importance of books as medium, source, subject, etc. – to the history of art and to artists, be they sculpture, print, photography, one of a kind artist books in the tradition of book arts, digitally based works, and more.

Emilia Azcárate bio

Emilia Azcárate holds a degree in Plastic Arts from the Central Saint Martins School of Art in London. She has conducted workshops and residences in Venezuela and Trinidad, for more than a decade, and now lives and works in Madrid. Azcárate has exhibited her work widely with solo exhibitions at the Farías Fábregas Gallery (Caracas); Caracas Peripheral; Casa de América (Madrid); Caribbean Contemporary Arts 7 (Trinidad); the Alejandro Otero Museum; and the Mendoza Room (Caracas). Additionally, her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions and biennials, including the Museum of Modern Art of Ecuador; the Sao Paulo Biennial; the Prague Biennale; the Havana Biennial; and the Jésus Soto Museum of Modern Art.  Her work is in the Cisneros-Fontanals Collection (CIFO), Alejandro Otero Museum; Berezdivin Collection, Puerto Rico; Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas; Banco España Collection, Madrid; and Coca Cola Foundation, Spain, among others.

Ann Clarke bio

Originally from Rochester, NY, Ann Clarke is a fiber artist who received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She holds a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting and printmaking from the University of Michigan. Clarke has spent the majority of her professional career in academia as a higher education administrator and faculty member at Syracuse University. In 1998, she joined SU as a faculty member in Fiber Arts/Material Studies. In 2008, she was named the Dean of Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, and returned to faculty in 2016..

Her recent works explore reconstructed narratives – memory and meaning. Eye portals are a reflective look at the past and how it informs us of the present. The exaggerated scale of these eye portals, that dome and protrude from the wall are like eyes in the past breaking through the wall, or one’s past peering into the present as thoughts made manifest. Their size and color, odd, and perhaps unnerving while the lush tufted construction evokes the promise of comfort never provided. The portals become readable as eyes as one increases one’s distance from the gaze. I see these as portraits of specific people from history and lives lived.

Clarke’s knitted rug series is similarly influenced by the intersection of past and present, informed by the experiences of her mother’s life and her changing relationship with time. I refer to the series as History Lessons.  All are connected by the use text, readable and not — a found letter, old study notes and archived images of papers from historic figures long gone — juxtaposed with figurative images from past and present reflecting a constantly fluid expression of time.

Arturo Herrera bio

Venezuelan artist Arturo Herrera received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BFA from the University of Tulsa. Herrera’s solo and project-based exhibitions have been held at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; daadgalerie, Berlin; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Americas Society Art Gallery, NY; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Switzerland; Art Gallery of Ontario; ICA Philadelphia; The UCLA Hammer Museum, Museum of Modern Art, NY; and The Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Artpace San Antonio, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the DAAD, Berlin. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Arturo Herrera has developed a multilayered body of work that includes collages, sculptures, photographs, cut felt pieces and wall works. Herrera uses a fragmented language – whose lingering references range from popular culture to art history – to decontextualize inherent narratives without eradicating the coded referentiality of the image. The resulting works shift in between the explicit and the implicit.

A pliability of meaning is played out through the ambiguity of figurative and abstract forms. These forms do not enforce a specific message. Instead, they address the fragmentation and  recomposition  of mass-culture elements to explore the impact  of the adulterated language of abstraction into the collective gaze. (Source: Corbett vs. Dempsey)

Hye-Ryoung Min bio

Hye-Ryoung Min is a South Korean photographer living and working in NYC. She received her MPS from School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Her work explores the intersection between human relations and the inner self. Whether she is observing the mundane lives of strangers on the street; the comings and goings of her neighbors as seen through the windows of her home; the fleeting expressions of her niece; the evolving landscape of a city or the more than seventy diaries, which she has kept over the past twenty-six years, Hye-Ryoung continues to find in different subjects a reflection of her deeper self. Her first monograph ‘Re-membrance of the Remembrance’ was published by Datz Press in 2018.

Among other shows, her work has been exhibited at: The Bronx Documentary Center; NEWSPACE Center for Photography; the Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography; The Center for Fine Art Photography; Griffin Museum of Photography; Photoville in US; Benaki Museum in Greece; Seoul Museum of Art; Sejong Art Center; Gallery Lux and Gallery Comma, in Seoul; GoEun Museum of Photography in Busan; Benaki Museum in Greece. Her work has been exhibited at the following international photography festivals: Mt. ROKKO International Photography Festival in Japan; Kuala Lumpur International Photo Awards in Malaysia; Athens Photo Fest in Greece; TIPhF, Tirana International Photo Fest in France and Albania, and Photoville in Brooklyn NY.

She was an Artist in Residence at Woodstock Byrdcliffe in 2015 and at FotoVisura Lodge in 2014. She has been awarded Winner at Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50, En Foco’s New Works, Conscientious Portfolio Competition and Seoul Photo Festival Portfolio Award; Honorable Mention at the International Photography; the Rising Artist Award Finalist at the Seoul Museum of Art; Finalist at Kuala Lumpur International Photo Awards; Winner at TIPhF, Tirana International Photo Fest ; Semi-finalists at The Print Center Annual International Competition. Her works are included in the Permanent Collections of The Center for Fine Art Photography and GoEun Museum of Photography.

Benedikt Terwiel bio

Benedikt Terwiel lives and works in Berlin. His work has been shown in recent solo exhibitions at Kunstraum Tosterglope and Meinblau in Berlin, as well as at MGLC – Studio and GalerijaGGalery in Ljubljana.  Select group exhibitions include:  post_minimal conceptual_now, Kunstsammlungen der Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Museum unter Tage (2019); mensch in moll, Inter Port, Berlin (2019); Norm und Standart, DENKRAUM BAUHAUS, Weimar (2019); Schrein der Freundschaft, BKV – Potsdam e.V. (2018); watching a movie is watching the object, Spätkauf Theresienwiese, München (2018); Transition, Haus am Kleistpark (2018); aufzeichnen…, Vincenz Sala gallery, Berlin (2018); andNaNaNaNa, CCA Andratx, Mallorca Spain.

He is the recipient of fellowships at CCA Andratx, Mallorca Spain (2018); Working grant, StiftungKunstfonds (2014); Berlin Senate Grant (2011); DAAD Grant, USA (2009); Erasmus Fellowship, Barcelona, Spain (2004).