BIOS & ARTIST STATEMENTS

KRISTI COLE | Artistic Director, Choreographer, Performer, Producer

Kristi Cole is a NYC based performer and choreographer with a BA in Dance and Political Science from The George Washington University. Her choreography has been presented in Washington, DC, and the tri-state area. As a maker, Kristi believes that art is a social platform to examine the world.

SHANNON FINNELL | Artist, Curator

While strongly believing that the key to social change is compassionate relationships that lead to genuine support, Shannon Finnell’s work attempts to embody that through the exploration and deconstruction of supportive gestures. Finnell is the Founder/Director of Arts Connective, an organization that aims to strengthen the international arts conversation.

Kimiko Tanabe | Performer

Kimiko Tanabe holds a degree in English and Dance from Colorado College. Aries by day, Scorpio by night, she is a lover of literature and understands the body as a vessel to tell stories. She is currently in process with Marion Spencer and Kristi Cole & Guests, Morgaine DeLeonardis, and Lena Engelstein.

MATTHEW BRENNAN | Artist

KEVIN QUILES BONILLA | Artist

My primary interest is simultaneously depicting the physical and metaphorical aspects of the human figure within the same image. The human, throughout history, is a hybrid of physical body, emotional energy, clothing, shelter, tools and surrounding environment. All these layers intertwine to complete the full entity and drawing is my chosen way of observing and contemplating on this.

Visually taking cues from multiple exposure photography and exploded diagrams, I draw the physical body existing in motion combined with personified passages of internal contemplation. Continuous study of figure drawing and fabrication techniques led me to this current body of work. It began as a combination of human anatomy and machinery parts within figures to represent self imposed structure. Over time, the mechanical components have become much more specific to the subject matter. As this progressed, organic forms were incorporated to the imagery to represent the more abstracted ideas floating throughout the body. 

I create this work because of my fascination with the diversity of behavior, style, and personality within people. I am in constant awe of what we are capable of, what we choose to focus on, and what haunts us throughout our days.  There is a constant push and pull of potential and decay within and around each human being and my art strives to make visual documents of this human process.

Bio:

Matthew Brennan is based out of New York City and has a BFA from Pratt Institute.  Since 2005, his drawings, paintings and sculptures have been exhibited in shows throughout the country.  Brennan’s artistic practice is rooted in drawing and he has been an active member of the figure drawing community within NYC.  Aside from personal artwork, he has made illustrations for the New York Times and has fabricated puppets and props for clients including The Jim Henson Company, Puppet Heap and The New York City Opera. These sculpturally based jobs have greatly helped his techniques for creating composition and dimension within a drawing.  Brennan had his first solo show in April of 2018 where he showcased four years of drawings based on the inspiration of fish translated to human movement.

JOHNNIE CHATMAN | Artist

In my self portrait series, I Forgot Where We Were…  I use constructs and idioms of the West and western landscape photography as allegorical elements to facilitate a conversation on black identity as it reconfigures itself against media, historical, and transglobal narratives.

Bio: 

Johnnie Chatman (B. 1990) is a lens-based artist residing in New York City. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Photography, Video & Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

Chatman's work has been featured in exhibitions across the United States including at Fraenkel Gallery, the De Young Museum, SF Camerawork and Claremont Museum of Art. He is a 2020 recipient of the En Foco Photography Fellowship. His work has been featured in publications including PDN EDU, All The Best Alice, Rucksack Magazine, The Bold Italic, VoyageLA and Zoetrope All-Story. He is also the founder of Terms & Conditions, a showcase of experimentation in moving image works.

ISADORA FROST | Artist

Life is a continuous negotiation with our habitats. Intervening with the body in the environment is the primary subject of my artwork. In those interactions, I use my body to challenge socially accepted behavior and to negotiate my positions within the world. That can take the form of reinventing the function of existing or constructed architecture, uncannily placing my body in nature, or testing the limits of my physical and psychological being, always relating to a specific aspect of the location.

With this work, I am exploring the idea of cramped city accommodations in New York City. Using an exaggerated version of a small private space and bringing it to the street, allows me to put on display the daily basis negotiation of a body in their tight personal space. This work was completed pre-pandemic, but it became even more relevant while the pandemic continues. Exploring the dynamic of bodies and private space in a moment that for long periods of time one had to remain and endure their homes indefinitely, is a perfect moment to display what it means to live in a cramped New York accommodation within these conditions.

Bio: 

Isadora Frost grew up in Brazil, where in 2009, she graduated from PUC Sao Paulo in Performance Art and Dance. In 2014, Frost completed a second degree in Fine Arts, minoring in Photography at The San Francisco Art Institute. In 2018 She acquired a Master degree in Photography, at Parsons School of Design, the New School. Frost mixes all those media she learned, resulting in a very complex multimedia practice. The relationship between the body, space and communities is the main theme of Frost’s work; she explores multiple combinations of body and landscapes. In 2013 she participated in The Arctic Circle Residency. Since 2018 Frost has been internationally featured in Brazil, San Francisco, New Zealand, New York, Russia, China and in 2019 she received an Award as a Theme Winer at the Helsinki Photo Festival in Finland.

YUKO NISHIKAWA | Artist

Beans, Pinecones, Umbrellas is my expression of joy through mobiles whose wonky colorful dots sway and giggle as we walk and stir the air around them. Since there is no audience to invite in the time of COVID-19, I made an imagined tea party and around a large wooden dining table, there sprouting imaginary conversations and thoughts. In this image the mobiles look to be flying out of me, like butterflies.

These airy mobiles, in colors that remind me of wool yarn samples, are made with paper pulp clay which I formulated by recycling used packages, my design sketches and old diaries. These paper cookies are connected to metal arms with loops and hooks so that they can be unassembled and recycled back into paper clay again. 

I mixed paper pulp the same way I would mix paints. I blended blue paper pulp and red paper pulp, and a bit of yellow paper pulp to make a muted purple paper clay. I combined them at their different blended stages too to make varying textures and color effects. Mushy pulps would make homogeneous colors, while crumbly pulps would have a stippled effect. Finely blended pulps would become a smoother surface when dry, while coarser pulps would become bumpier like oatmeal cookies. 

Before any of these mobiles were materialized, I made an acrylic painting on paper to visualize the colors and the feeling these mobiles would project. This image became a reminder of my initial abstract idea for the mobiles while I was building them. Now looking back to this painting and, especially with how the texture and the forms turned out, I’m quite happy. These mobiles look like the painting came alive.

Bio: 

Brooklyn-based designer and artist Yuko Nishikawa specializes in fantastical lighting installations, whimsical decor accessories and collectible objet d'art. With an Interior and Industrial Design background, she handcrafts one-of-a-kind lamps, chandeliers, sculptures, vases and tableware. She received her B.F.A. in Interior Design from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in 2002. Since, she has developed furniture and objects for Calvin Klein Home, Anthropologie, and Donghia and worked as an interior designer for Jeffrey Bilhuber and Alexandra Champalimaud. In 2018 she established her own design and art studio.

What shapes our movement and image in the everyday space? What power impacts the individual in public, and in private? What histories frame us? And what culture claims or rejects us? Using installation and performance-based strategies as resources for re-signification, my current work deals with representations of the colonial subject, constantly traveling on unsolid grounds. I do so through the intersection of structures such as space, language, history and politics, with a body like mine transiting between Puerto Rico (the colony) and the United States (the mainland). Ultimately, my work seeks to unearth the construction of a queer, historic heritage, using my body as the political repository, colonized by multiple structures of power: As a Puerto Rican, as a diaspora migrant, as a person with a disability, and as a queer man.

Bio:

Kevin Quiles Bonilla (b. 1992) is an interdisciplinary artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He received a BA in Fine Arts – Photography from the University of Puerto Rico (2015) and an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons The New School for Design (2018). His work has been presented in Puerto Rico, The United States, Mexico, China, Belgium, and Japan. He’s the recipient of an Emerging Artist Award from The John F. Kennedy Center (2017). He has recently presented his work at The Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, The Shelly & Rubin Foundation’s 8th Floor Gallery, Dedalus Foundation, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum’s Project Space. He has been an artist in residence at Art Beyond Sight’s Arts + Disability Residency (2018-2019), Leslie-Lohman Museum’s Queer Performance Residency (2019) and LMCC’s Workspace Residency (2019-2020). He explores ideas around power, colonialism, and history with his identity as context. He currently lives and works between Puerto Rico and New York.

LUKE ALAN DAVIS | Artist

What you are viewing are portraits of an act. An act of self-creation: ripping, cutting, layering, adding, removing, displaying & obscuring. All to piece together versions of myself. The images within the collages are of spaces of familiarity – the Oklahoma terrain & interiors of my father’s living room, as well as, that of my maternal grandmother’s bedroom & tv room. They are an act of queering the space, while also reiterating our bond to each other. 

Working within these intersections of my being, I hope to call into question the very performance of identity, which already blurs the lines of authenticity & artificiality. The pieces are a way of harnessing the power of mythmaking: I act – you stare – we perceive.

This series was finalized during the first 3 months of the lockdown in NYC, but resonates differently now through this extended period of social distancing. There is an isolation within them that begs to belong.

Bio:

Born in Weatherford, Oklahoma, Luke Alan Davis is an emerging, interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. After high school, he danced professionally with prestigious ballet companies such as Tulsa Ballet and Nashville Ballet. He was also a founding member of contemporary dance collective NewDialect. He now has a Bachelor of Fine Arts for photography from Parsons School of Design. Intrigued by the theatricality of everyday life, Davis’ photo work is equal parts documentation and daydream, that is made through a self-producing process as director, performer, and spectator. His works fall into the creative spheres of nostalgia, performance, and identity. It is driven by the idea that memory is both real and imagined.

MARÍA DEL MAR HERNÁNDEZ GIL DE LAMADRID | Artist

Using documentary and performative strategies, my current practice approaches the diasporic experiences as a migrant and the representations of traumatic experiences after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. I explore the ideas of identity, mediated representation, language, colonial history, and the artist’s body transiting back and forth from the island to the mainland. Through my practice, I seek to explore and process pain and trauma, to voice what it means to feel alienated and displaced, in the present world as a diaspora migrant. It is because of these circumstances that I metaphorically produce actions of resistance, emotion, and reclamation of power in my work.

Nos veremos pronto is a selection of my mother's letters wherein she narrates her personal experience living in Puerto Rico, post-Maria. Collecting and preserving her letters for four years since moving away from home, I have compiled her words highlighting her living experience on the island: adjusting to numerous new realities, the sudden tremors and the fears she felt. This work is a response to the recipient - my mother - and serves as an outlet to express a reality that was never shared.

Bio:

María del Mar Hernández Gil de Lamadrid is a visual artist and photographer based between Puerto Rico and New York City. Using photography and video as a creative and conceptual process, her work approaches issues of identity, mediated representation, colonial history, and climate change in a Caribbean context. She completed a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, and is a Master of Fine Arts in Photography, from Parsons School of Design, The New School, NYC. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including Governing Bodies, Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, NYC, Apparatus of Discomfort, Photoville, Brooklyn, and Yokosuka Peace Art Exhibition & International Biennial of Prints, Japan. She was a recipient of the Parsons Graduate Travel Award, which enabled her to travel to China for two weeks to execute a project proposal and participate in "Unfixed" at the Pingyao International Photography Festival. Most currently, she participated in The Spruce Art Residency in Indiana, PA and in the group exhibition We Are Here To Serve You, Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, NYC.

ARIANA SARWARI | Artist

Sahr-e-Seer, an ongoing project, examines the familial dynamics of a multi-generational household. I explore my alienated experience as a first-generation Afghan-American, and the nuances surrounding my cultural identity, exposing moments when I feel out of place in an environment I simultaneously belong to and am disconnected from. I hone in on Afghan social gatherings and how the experience of those situations differs between Afghan immigrants and the first-generation Americans who come after them. 

Bio: 

Ariana Sarwari is a New York-based artist and educator. She is currently using video to explore the relationships and interactions that occur within her Afghan immigrant family, evaluating her place within her family’s history and the Western culture that she was raised in. In addition to her artistic practice, Sarwari remotely runs the Spruce Art Residency located in Indiana, Pennsylvania. She received her MFA in Photography & Related Media from Parsons School of Design at The New School in 2018, and has most recently exhibited at Gallery Petite in New York, at the Auckland Festival of Photography in New Zealand, the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China,and at the India Photo Festival in Hyderabad.

GRAY SWARTZEL | Artist

With excess and sensuality, the body becomes mirror, becomes alter, becomes altar, becomes double. Through my work, I play with the conflation of the real and the ideal through lens-based media works. I Investigate fantasies surrounding my matrilineage as told through a lens stimulated by art historical appropriation, compulsive masculinity, and mortality. 

The notion of blood harmonizing is central to my work. My mother recognized it in the impromptu bluegrass interludes drifting among the pipe smoke from the living room where her father and extended family would play. For her, their seamless voices and instruments were a calm refuge, an escape from a struggling, dysfunctional family in the American South. These stories prompted me to visualize the psychic, transient qualities of my relationship with my matrilineage, considering how performance has helped my mother to actively participate in my queer culture and sensibility.

This particular work came about as a result of the isolation presented by our new quarantined world. Unable to continue my collaborative ways of making work, I decided to investigate textiles, as my parents and both sets of grandparents worked at a mill called Chatham in western North Carolina. I began collaging using my mother’s old magazines as well as my own pictures. The resulting pattern was then woven in a mill in the mountains of NC, fusing the then and now, queering the past and present. The image you will see is the digital version prior to weaving, as I do not have access to it because of covid. However, there are some details showing the woven final. 

Bio: 

Gray Swartzel is a New York based artist who uses lens-based media & installation to navigate lived performativity, intersectional identities, and the real vs. the ideal as he interrogates his queer body in relation to the social construction of motherhood. Working specifically with his biological mother in the American South, Swartzel constructs new realities that toy with connectedness and isolation as well as the poetics of mortality. Swartzel holds a BFA and a Minor in Women's and Gender Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill, an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and has shown at The CICA Museum in South Korea, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, The Archaeological Museum of Messenia in Greece, The Buffalo International Film Festival, Art Madrid, and others.