Amalia Galdona Broche
In Amalia Galdona Broche’s first exhibition with the gallery (2020), she wove, stitched, and braided “Companions of Concealment,” a hybrid of female and animal forms – a supernatural cosmology of ancestral beings who are intermediaries between humans and the spirit world, in death, birth, healing, and conflicts. For her second exhibition, “Vestments of Time,” Galdona Broche considers the effects and duration of her immigration: “I was a child of the Cuban Revolution during the Special Period, a time of extreme economic adversity. Through sculpture and time-based media, I explore the fluid nature of identity, faith, memory of identity, transculturation and immigration, highlighting labor-intensive processes such as collecting, tearing, breaking, joining, weaving, knotting and assembling textiles and found materials. Referencing Spanish, as well as West African belief systems, rituals and imagery, I navigate the complex and fluid nature of history and identity.”
Galdona Broche has spent equal time living in both Cuba and America. Childhood and adolescent memories recede as American culture ascends, a confusing and mournful loss for the artist as she confronts cultural accommodation. Galdona Broche’s observations and questions regarding the lived experience of immigration drive her new series of standing floor sculptures and mixed media wall works. On view in this exhibition are five, five foot, fleshy, corporeal forms, painted to mime bronze memorials and nine resin/textile wall works. The statuaries are genderless, but they assume aspects of the female form that suggest carriage – what is retained and released from birth to death. The sculptures are painted in code, dashes and circles, signifying the relentless nature of impermanence. Each sculpture is laden with multiple layers of folding skin and dredged faces, some sloughing off and regressing; others fresh, smooth, and ascendant. All the voluptuous, ponderous strata represent who we are, were, and are becoming – a brew of Dorian Gray complexity.
AMALIA GALDONA BROCHE ONLINE 2023 EXHIBITION CATALOG
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Amalia Galdona Broche was recently named Assistant Professor of Art in the Textiles Department, Rhode Island School of Design. She received her MFA from the School of Art; Visual Studies, University of Kentucky in 2021. Galdona Broche was awarded the prestigious International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award for 2021. Residencies include MASS MoCA Studios/Assets in 2019 as well as the New York Academy of Art in 2015.
Sarah Amos
“I wanted to use the thread like a web, sending out information while connecting both the print below and the drawing above… After working on large felts, I realized that the thread had replaced the drawing material and the felt had replaced paper. A new direction that I had always sought was amassing in front of me.” —Sarah Amos
Upon first glance it’s easy to mistake Amos’s 2D works for paintings, but upon close inspection they quickly dissolve into deeply textured, layered textile works. Defying classification, Sarah Amos’s large-scale mixed media works are more than the sum of their parts. A complex brew of dying, printing, stitching, sewing and layering – impossible for those less skilled, but in her hands, masterfully combined. She mimes the realm held sacred for painters, deftly composing mixed media works that found early inspiration from Hokusai’s ghost prints, Kabuki Theater, African ritual dress and sacred objects. Her innovation in print media has allowed Sarah to pursue media outside the constraints of a single-minded approach.
Chalk Lines, originally exhibited at the CUE Art Foundation, was reviewed by John Yau for Hyperallergic in November 2019.
“Amos’s work may be labor-intensive, yet it conveys neither labor nor the consumption of time, but a meditative joy. In this, you sense her rejection of the art world’s alignment with capitalism, and its use of outsourcing, infinitely repeatable means of production, and the exploitation of others to carry out one’s “ideas.” Again, I would stress that what transports the artist’s labor to another level is her chimerical ingenuity with her materials and painstaking processes. The ordinariness of her stitches becomes extraordinary in their configurations.”
— John Yau, Poet/Art Critic, Hyperallergic, Nov. 2019
Sarah Amos was recently awarded the prestigious 2024 Vermont Prize. The Hall Art Foundation, Burlington City Arts (BCA), The Current, and The Brattleboro Museum and Art Center (BMAC) collaboratively launched the Vermont Prize in 2022. The Prize is an annual award given to a Vermont visual artist juried by a representative from each institution along with with an invited juror. In 2024, Phong H. Bui, artist, curator, and co-founder and publisher of The Brooklyn Rail was the invited juror. Amos also received the 2020 Joan Mitchell Center Artists-in-Residence, rescheduled to 2021; and the 2020 Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Recent and past exhibitions include the CUE Art Foundation, New York in 2019; the Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia; Fisher Museum of Art, University of Southern California; Penn State University, Pennsylvania; and Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
Originally from Australia, Sarah Amos lives and works on the East Coast. She left Australia to attend the Tamarind Institute of Lithography in New Mexico where she became a certified Tamarind Master Printer in Lithography. In 1998 Sarah became the Master Printer for the Vermont Studio Center Press, a position she would hold for 10 years. Amos was an Adjunct Professor at Dartmouth, Williams and Bennington Colleges teaching Printmaking and Drawing. Press include Hyperallergic, Artforum, Art & Object, Art New England and Widewalls
Lien Truong
Fragmenting historic paintings, art, film and the gaming industry, Lien Truong’s mixed media paintings inform “our collective notions of heritage.”
Creating a powerful fictive of female authority, Lien Truong presents Asian female protagonists who are forceful, autonomous counterpoints to Western misogyny. Four new paintings – a segue from Truong’s “From the Earth Rise Radiant Beings,” exhibited at Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College in 2021 – will be on view in our Inaugural Exhibition. Continuing her focus on the generational trauma and resilience of Asian women lived and portrayed throughout history, the new paintings address the mythical stature of archetypes – more specifically, The Maiden, The Mother, and The Crone. Truong employs herself and her family matriarchs from Vietnam as symbols, through figure, landscape and objects, in the new works – “details that consider the magical, resilient nature of the Asian female body, that has had to endure war and trauma.” In her manifestations, resilience is inherited, adapted, and resistant to prevailing cultural alienation.
In addition to large canvas works, Truong took on six double-sided paintings that present as cultural opposition to American dogma: “The smaller works take two images that critically look at the culturally complex inventions within American soil, alongside ingrained white supremacist ideologies, memory, with a focus on ritual, magic, masquerade, and fire.”
Truong’s oeuvre can be viewed as Asian Futurism, born from the violent histories descended from Orientalist ideologies. Her work tests the hybridity and historic hierarchies of global painting techniques, materials and philosophies as she fragments paintings, art, film, and family. She subverts color and values, staging a background layered with singed panels of painted floating silk and blended gestures of oil paint, amidst interpretations of historic textile patterns, and emblematic and hegemonic iconography.
Lien Truong is an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She graduated with a BFA in 1999 from Humboldt State University and an MFA from Mills College, Oakland in 2001. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery; North Carolina Museum of Art; Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, Texas; the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; Nha San Collective, Hanoi, Vietnam; Art Hong Kong; S.E.A. Focus, Singapore; and Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA. She is the recipient of several awards including the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, Whitton Fellowship, and fellowships from the Institute for the Arts & Humanities and the North Carolina Arts Council. Residencies include the Oakland Museum of California and the Marble House Project, Vermont. Public collections include thethe Weatherspoon Art Museum, NC; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University Art Museum, CA; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Van Every Smith Galleries at Davidson College, NC; Linda Lee Alter Collection of Art by Women at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; DC Collection (Disaphol Chansiri, Chiang Mai, Thailand); North Carolina Museum of Art and the Post Vidai and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Vietnam).
Linda Sormin
Linda Sormin’s sculptures are a journey through personal archeology. Her open-ended ceramics enfold many voices and labors, from the donated memorabilia of friends and strangers in distant places, to the hands of those assisting, to the dumpster diving, searching for the discarded. The complex membranes of pinched clay provide a porous conduit bridging and breaking bonds, entwining stories and histories among those who define themselves through their separations.
Born in Thailand, working in North America, Europe and Asia, Sormin is influenced by kinetic energy, complexity, and disparate social/cultural/visual forces. While migration and identity form the backbone of the work, it’s the disruptive dissonance within her balletic balance that breathes life. The technical considerations of how Sormin’s work evolves are never far from the stories within. Multiple firings, various clays, smooth and rough surface, glaze, contrasting color, and cast away materials, are all integral elements in forming the non-linear narratives of discrete sculpture, and immersive installations.
Linda Sormin is Associate Professor of Studio Art at New York University, Steinhardt. Prior to NYU, Sormin was Professor of Ceramic Art at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University (2016 – 2019), and Associate Professor (2006- 2011) at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been extensively exhibited throughout Europe, the United States and Asia, including Jogja National Museum, Yogyakarta, Indonesia; CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark, Middelfart, Denmark; and West Norway Museum of Decorative Art, Bergen, Norway. Collections include the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, Alfred, NY; Arizona State University Art Museum; CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark, and others.
Demetri Broxton
Demetri Broxton’s first exhibition at PSG was in 2018, where he debuted embellished boxing gloves that unfold a complex narrative centered on the mythic stature of Black boxers, from Jack Johnson onward. Born in 1878, Johnson’s fame and legendary lifestyle was antithetical to the circumstances of Black Americans living under the extreme yoke of Jim Crow. Broxton’s narrative is also personal; his grandfather was a boxer during WWII. At this time, matches were often mixed-race. The boxing ring was the only environment where a Black man could lay hands on a white man and not forfeit his life. By their inherent form, Broxton’s gloves function as muses that summon multiple stories of struggles lost and won.
For this exhibition, Broxton will debut one majestic ceremonial boxing robe embellished with amulets of power, transgression, healing, peril, and protection in addition to several sets of boxing gloves. When defining his own ritual objects, Broxton often cites the sacred art of the Yoruba people in Nigeria, where ceremonial objects and costume are ornately beaded and adorned. The Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans, Louisiana, one place where Broxton traces his Louisiana Creole heritage, used similar beading techniques retained from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to design and embellish their traditional costumes.
Echoes of the erasure and colonization of diasporic Black people resound throughout Broxton’s sculptures, while providing equal weight to the triumphant voice of hip hop and graffiti, as revealed in the beaded lyrics on the face of the gloves. The formality and tradition of Broxton’s structure and techniques give breadth to the layers of complexity, and his use of materials speaks directly to ancestral history. He also understands his work as an ongoing investigation of cultural continuities from Africa to America, with particular attention to how ancient cultural forms find their way into mainstream culture.
DEMETRI BROXTON 2023 ONLINE EXHIBITION CATALOG
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Demetri Broxton‘s work as the Education Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco is synonymous with his passion for educating and writing about the ideas inherent in every work of art. Born and raised in Oakland, CA, he earned a BFA at UC Berkeley in 2002 with an emphasis in painting. Upcoming and current exhibitions include Crafting Radicality: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift, de Young Museum, San Francisco and Second Skin, the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, CA. His work is included in museum collections nationally. Recent press includes Artforum, Culture Magazine, and L’Officiel.
Julia Couzens
There’s a centuries-strong tradition of artists working with fiber to wrap, stretch, contort and otherwise manipulate over, into, and around inanimate objects forming figurative and abstract sculptural forms. Sheila Hicks, Shinique Smith, and Outsider artist Judith Scott are among them. Julia Couzens’s hybrid practice expands upon this legacy of exploring the many aspects of working with fiber and textiles.
Receiving her MFA from the University of California, Davis, Julia Couzens began working with fiber in the 1990s. Conversant with Modernist sculptural traditions, she pivots craft and domestic textile traditions into drawing, painting and sculpture. Couzens views her studio practice as a collaboration with anonymous others as she stitches, bundles, and sutures fabrics that have history, or in lay terms, used, discarded, worn, damaged mercantile goods. Layering her collection of materials, she composes intricate fabrications into “metaphorical objects of memory.” With wire armatures these floating gestural riffs on tapestries punctuate the environment like elaborate woven satellites.
Julia Couzens received the The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, New York and the Art Matters Foundation Award, New York. Collections include Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; The Frederick Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA; University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, The Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco, CA. Exhibitions include Armand Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, Las Vegas, NV among others.
Helen O’Leary
Subverting our notion of painting into an unconventional organization of formal and organic relationships, Helen O’Leary assembles elegant formulations of broken wood and stretched fiber into the gestural lyricism of reimagined sculptural paintings. O’Leary describes herself as a painter who tells stories from the archeology and ruins of deconstructed materials within her studio. Growing up in Ireland and relocating to the United States, her sculptural paintings become the memoir of two countries, an idiosyncratic aggregate of fragile gridded fragments. Her accumulation of stretchers, panels, frames, & linen are cut into small pieces, retaining staples, glue and any number of sundry material for re-assemblage into the unconventional enigmatic paintings on view. “Throughout my career, I have been constructing a very personal and idiomatic formal language based in simple materials and unglamorous gestures, a framework which functions as a kind of syntactical grid of shifting equivalences. The ‘paintings’ that emerge from this process know their family history, a narrative of greatness fallen on hard times”.
Helen O’Leary was born in County Wexford, Ireland, and received her BFA and MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1991 she has been a Professor at the School of Visual Arts at Penn State University. O’Leary was recently awarded a John S. Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, as well as the 2018–19 Rome Prize and Italian Fellowship from The American Academy in Rome. Additional awards include two Pollock-Krasner awards, and a Joan Mitchell Award for painting and sculpture. Exhibitions include the National Gallery of Art, Limerick, Ireland; Glasgow Museum of Art, Glasgow, Scotland; The MAC, Belfast, Northern Ireland; Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia; and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY. Her work is represented in national and international collections. O’Leary lives and works in New Jersey and Ireland.
Toshiaki Noda
Toshiaki Noda was born in Arita, Saga Prefecture, Japan, a region noted for its remarkable porcelain ceramics dating back to the 1600s. His parents are ceramic dealers in this treasured craft, where Toshiaki lived in an incomparable aesthetic culture influencing his studio practice today. He studied printmaking at California State University, Long Beach where he received a BFA in 2008. His printmaking education combined with his aesthetic and technical training in Japan lends a unique vision to his ceramic practice.
Unlike the smooth, consistent surface of the treasured Imari wares, Toshiaki uses the plasticity of clay to push boundaries of form, and the alchemy of glaze to explore texture. Noda discards traditions, instead expresses temporal degradation, a throwaway culture through tears, cracks, crust – a sculptural manifestation of waste. With spontaneity and curiosity as his guide, his sculptural planes contort with tension. In his first exhibition at PSG we’ve combined several series of ceramics that have textural and structural adulteration tying the works together in a unique visual field.
In 2017 Toshiaki Noda was selected from 2,744 applicants for The New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship in Sculpture. Noda lives and works in New York, where he was employed as a studio assistant for Jeff Koons for several years. Recent exhibitions include Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo as well as exhibitions in Milan and New York.
Ramekon O’Arwisters
Ramekon O’Arwisters abstract sculpture dives into the abyss and the beautiful. With large sharp ceramic shards knotted together using shredded fabric and black zip ties, the sculptures stand as cultural totems, embodying the couture of drag, Black culture, African American quilting and religion. Growing up in Jim Crow South during the Civil Rights Movement, O’Arwisters had a safe haven, quilting with his Grandmother where he was “embraced, important and special.” These early memories prompted his nascent series of unique crocheted/ceramic sculptures titled, Mending. Employing ordinary household, or decorative pottery, broken and discarded, O’Arwisters combined traditional crafts into a dimensional woven tapestry, stripping both cloth and ceramic of their intended function.
In his 2019 series titled Cheesecake,O’Arwisters transformed the sculpture from something broken, needing mending, to fully determined and self-aware. Being Black and Queer, the full complexity of the moniker Cheesecake, used to objectify an attractive, sexualized man or woman is not lost to O’Arwisters. Instead he embraces it, subverting the demeaning implication in describing his said, “objects”. Combining lacy, embellished fabrics with ceramics contributed by students and faculty from California State University at Long Beach, O’Arwisters sculptural hybrids embody both danger and seduction in his bold ‘coming of age’ works.
Bitten, his new series of sculpture, takes off and embellishes upon Flowered Thorns, 2020-21. With Flowered Thorns, O’Arwisters exaggerates sharp ceramic shards to align with the biblical reference of Adam and Eve, the symbol of original sin derived from sexual pleasure. Bitten continues with soft and sharp elements as he laces implements of punishment and threat throughout the sculpture: black zip ties, rope and clamps. O’Arwisters recontextualizes the danger as an erotic entanglement of sexual fantasy and play, placing the sculpture on a new metaphoric plane.
RAMEKON O’ARWISTERS 2023 ONLINE EXHIBITION CATALOG (A Chorus of Twisted Threads) (Click for full screen, Press Escape to return to page)
Ramekon O’Arwisters is the 2021 recipient of the McLaughlin Foundation Award for The Project Space at Headlands Center for the Arts, Artist-in-Residence program and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for 2020/21. Past artist-in-residence programs include the de Young Museum Artist in Residence; The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; the Djerassi Resident Artists Program; Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence Program and the Vermont Studio Center. Grants and Awards include Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, NY; the San Francisco Foundation; the San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Initiatives Program; Black Artists Fund, Sacramento; and the Eureka Fellowship awarded by the Fleishhacker Foundation in San Francisco. Museum exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, FIGHT AND FLIGHT: CRAFTING A BAY AREA LIFE; American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), Making in Between: Gender Identities in Clay (MIB:GIC); and San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, Queer Threads. O’Arwisters is the founder of Crochet Jam, a community arts project infused with folk-art traditions that foster a creative culture in cooperative relationships. Born in Kernersville, North Carolina, O’Arwisters earned a M.Div. from Duke University Divinity School in 1986.
Gail Wight
Gail Wight’s wit and humor usually suspend our disbelief with her elegant reformulations. The Spider and the Fly, Wight takes fly wings she collected from succumbed flies, and magnifies them many fold. She then composes exquisite botanical gardens that are breathtakingly complex. “Working primarily in sculpture, video, interactive media and print, I attempt to construct biological allegories that tease out the impacts of life sciences on the living: human, animal, and other. The interplay between art and biology, theories of evolution, cognition and the animal state-of-being are themes that have, over the last two decades, become central to my art.”
Wight’s continued interest in deep time manifested in earlier exhibitions where she created complex photographic mandalas from tiny rodent fossil remains, Ground Plane, 2012. With The Spider and the Fly, Wight expanded upon the fossil record creating future relics where flies became flowers. “The fossil record for insects dates back approximately 400 million years. Often, when I find an expired fly on my studio windowsill, Iʼm comforted by the knowledge that these small creatures will most likely be glancing their way around spider webs long after the human-centric environment outside my window has disappeared. Thereʼs a lovely concept in biology called “convergence”, which attempts to explain the emergence of similar characteristics among vastly different plants and animals. In The Spider and the Fly, I toy with the visual manifestations of convergence, and hint at potential psychological similarities.”
Gail Wight is Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University where she focuses on experimental media. Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues including: the Natural History Museum, London, UK; the National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK; and Foxy Productions, New York City, NY. Wightʼs art has been featured in: Art & Science Now by Stephen Wilson; Ingeborg Reichleʼs Kunst aus dem Labor and Art in the Age of Technoscience; Sherry Turkleʼs Evocative Objects; thing world: International Triennial of New Media Artedited by Zhang Ga and Fan Diʼan; and Bioart by William Myers as well as many other books and catalogs. Collections include: MoMA, Yale University, San Jose Museum of Art, Sevilleʼs Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo; Rene di Rosa Foundation; and Berkeley Art Museum among others. Wight was nominated as a Visionary Pioneer of Media Art by Ars Electronica in 2014.