AHL Forum: Artists Kira Nam Greene / Jaena Kwon / Kyoung eun Kang / Leekyung Kang
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
6:30 – 8:00 PM
Place: DAVID&SCHWEITZER Contemporary
56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206
Artist: Kira Nam Greene
Born in Seoul, Korea, Kira Nam Greene lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and BA in International Relations from Seoul National University. Greene’s work explores female sexuality, desire and control through lush still-life paintings of food, surrounded by complex patterns and abstract design. Imbuing the feminist legacies of Pattern and Decoration Movement with transnational/multicultural motifs, Greene creates colorful paintings that are unique combinations of realism and abstraction, employing diverse media such as oil, acrylic, gouache, watercolor and colored pencil, etc. More recently, Greene’s interest in food has expanded into examining ethical aspects of modern food consumption and the proliferation of advertising imagery on our visual culture in a series of paintings of mass-produced and brand name food products. In this latest series, Greene combines typical Pop Art tropes with her signature transnationalism, subverting the marketing slogans out of context among highly crafted patterns rooted in older cultural traditions. Greene has shown her work widely at venues such as Sheldon Museum of Art, Brown University, Salisbury University, Wave Hill, Bronx Museum of Art, Noyes Museum, Accola Griefen Gallery, Lodge Gallery, Kiechel Fine Art, A.I.R. Gallery and Jane Lombard Gallery. Her work has been covered in publications such as Artnet News, Art F City, Wallpaper, W Magazine, Lincoln Star Journal, Art21 Blog, Hyphen Magazine, The Korea Daily and New York Art Beat.
Artist: Jaena Kwon
Born in Seoul, Korea. She earned an MFA from Yale University in New Haven, and a BFA from Seoul National University in Seoul. She has exhibited at the Giam Pietro Gallery, Connecticut, Tenri Cultural Institute, New York, 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, New York, 2016 SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, SongEun Art Space, Seoul, and SongEun Art Cube, Seoul. She is a recipient of the 2014 Boston Young Contemporaries prize and the 2014 Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize. Her work has been featured in many publications including Whitehot Magazine, Korea Times, KyungHyang Article, and Nobless Magazine. She currently works in Brooklyn, New York.
Artist: Kyoung eun Kang
Born in South Korea, Kyoung eun Kang lives and works in New York. She received a BFA and MFA in Fine Arts from Hong-ik University in Seoul, South Korea and from Parsons The New School for Design, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at BRIC project room, Brooklyn, NY; Here Arts Center, NY; PRIMETIME, Brooklyn, NY; and at the Contemporary Museum of Hong-Ik University, Seoul, South Korea. Her group exhibitions include those at the Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Australia; and National Museum of Contemporary Art, South Korea. She has received awards and fellowships from BRIC, the NARS Foundation, Artist Alliance INC,the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Artist: Leekyung Kang
Lives in Providence, RI and studies in RISD Master of printmaking program (expected graduation in spring 2017). Before she came to the US, she received her Master and Bachelor degrees in Fine Arts from Seoul National University’s Painting department. Kang’s work creates the illusion of dimensions by capturing the unseen architectural space between the 2nd and 3rd dimensions through both traditional installation and digital medium. Influenced by her formal training as a painter, Kang’s work focuses on pictorial elements, usually in the architecture context with linear perspective, with gradual transformation of 3-dimensional forms that challenge the perception of space. These works investigate opposing values such as reality/virtuality, seen/unseen, and represent/non-represent, exploring the overlapping area between those extremes. Kang’s works do not really belong anywhere between these conflicting values, but generate mixed-reality, and engendering perceptual ambiguity.
Kang participates in several residencies in the US such as the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Hill House Artist Residency, the Anderson Center residency, and at Franconia Sculpture Park. Her work has been shown at numerous galleries at New York, Providence, Boston and internationally as well.
Guest Critic: Keith Schweitzer (Director/Co-Founder of The Lodge Gallery)
Keith Schweitzer is the Director/Co-Founder of The Lodge Gallery, located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Schweitzer was named as a “Young New York Art Dealer To Watch” by artnet in 2015. He is also Director of Public Art for Fourth Arts Block, the non-profit leadership organization for Manhattan’s officially designated Cultural District in the East Village (Rockefeller Foundation Cultural Innovation Fund Award 2012, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) ArtWorks Award 2013). He was a founding member of No Longer Empty, serving as Director of Exhibitions and Curator from its inception in 2009 through 2011. Working with a focus in New York City for more than 12 years, his high-profile collaborative exhibitions, events and installations frequently combine internationally recognized artists, institutions and organizations with local emerging artists and neighborhood-specific themes.
Guest Critic: Paul D’Agostino, Ph. D. (Artist, writer, translator and curator)
Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, translator, curator and professor living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he is Director of Centotto Gallery. You can find him as @postuccio on Instagram and Twitter.
