Decade
Hosted by SFA Projects
Organized by AHL Foundation
Venue: SFA Projects
Address: 131 Chrystie St. New York, NY 10002
Date: April 13, 2019 – May 5, 2019
Gallery Hours: Thursday through Sunday, 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 13, 6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artists: Sarah Bedford, Jen Hitchings, Buhm Hong, Eunjung Hwang, Butt Johnson, Kakyoung Lee, Leeza Meksin, Jj Manford, Kimo Nelson, Andrew Prayzner, Naomi Reis, Zahar Vaks, Heeseop Yoon.
Curated by: AHL Foundation’s Guest Curator Sun You
The AHL Foundation is pleased to present Decade, an exhibition curated by Sun You at SFA Projects from April 13th through May 5th, 2019
For the group exhibition Decade, guest curator Sun You asked a question to an invited group of artists. You asked each artist to respond by contributing two works made within a 10-year window. The works reflect on changes over time, including evolution in studio practice, materials, politics, philosophy, personal life or just life.
In the last 10 years, I moved from Cambridge to New York. I was single and now I’m married. I was doing a lot of labor-intensive sewing in my Sunset Park studio. I dropped the labor and now use the sewing supplies as sculptural readymades in my Dumbo studio. An artist collective I help run is having it’s 10 year anniversary this year.
How has the decade been for you?
Sun You
About the curator
Sun You is a New York base artist, curator and gallerist. You heads President Clinton Projects, a curatorial project and co-runs an artist collective gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York, and is a co-founder of An/other NY, an Asian American Collective of artists, curators and writers who organize exhibitions and public events to advocate for Asians and Asian-Americans in the arts.
You has put together exhibitions covering a large range of mediums and concepts. These include themes of artist migration and gentrification (Location, Location, Location, 2013), feminism and physical flexibility in new sculpture (FOUR x HIGH, 2017), everyday materials in art making (glorious modest, 2017), intergenerational inspiration among artists (Fabulous You, 2016), blurring the line between a gallery, studio and commercial shop (Tops, 2012) and many more.
About the artists
Sarah Bedford
Inspired by polaroids of Ikebana floral arrangements that her grandmother created in the 1970’s, Sarah Bedford’s recent still life paintings explore this poetic form of rearranging nature in domestic settings, while also investigating concepts of ecology, constructed nature and memory in the digital world. Using her own photos from her day job as a florist in Manhattan, Bedford over-draws images on her iPhone while commuting, then re-arranges floral, ceramic sculptures and artworks created by friends into colorful, painterly tableaux at home. Re-imagining these images via drawing and painting in studio with flat, bold color, pastels, dried flora and spray paint, she artfully creates a personal mono-sphere that merges the digital, natural and handmade into an “arrangement” of her own. Within this quiet triangle of canvas, contemplation and appropriation she aims to capture life in all of it’s fleeting beauty. Sarah Bedford received a BA from Cooper Union, attended Skowhegan and received the Wallace E Truman Award in painting from the National Academy of Fine Arts as well as a fellowship at the Lower East Side Print Shop in Manhattan. She previously showed at Bellwether Gallery and currently shows at Mrs Gallery in Maspeth, Queens. Born and raised on a ranch in Eastern Montana she resides in Greenpoint Brooklyn with her family.
Jen Hitchings
Jen Hitchings, born 1988 in New Jersey, is a Brooklyn-based artist and curator. She received he BFA in Painting & Drawing from SUNY Purchase College in 2011, and has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (2013) and Studio Kura, Itoshima, Japan (2014). Solo presentations of he work have taken place at MEN Gallery (New York, NY) and PROTO (Hoboken, NJ) in 2018, and recent group exhibitions have taken place at Cindy Rucker, Pierogi, Ideal Glass (New York, NY), Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington, MA), and Newark International Liberty Airport (Newark, NJ). She was a recipient of the Queens Council on the Arts’ New Works Grant in 2018. Hitchings is also co-director of Transmitter in Brooklyn, NY and her work is represented by PROTO.
Eunjung Hwang
Born in Seoul/South Korea. Lives and works in New York, USA. Eunjung Hwang received her MFA in Computer Arts at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Selected solo exhibitions: “Three Thousand Revisits” University Art Museum, Albany, New York (2011), “Eunjung Hwang” LA Center for Digital Arts (2008) and “Creature Feature”, Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul (2007). Selected festivals & group exhibitions: Transmediale10, Berlin, Germany (2010) “Analog Animation”, Drawing Center, New York (2006) and International Media Award for Science and Art, ZKM, Germany (2005)
In 2006 Eunjung Hwang received the New York State Council on Arts Grant and in 2004 the principal prize of the 50th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. She was a resident fellow at Villa Ruffiex, Sierre, Switzerland (2014) and Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany (2009-10)
Butt Johnson
is a pseudonymous artist based in Brooklyn New York, and working primarily in drawing.
Leeza Meksin
is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, public art and multiples. Born in the former Soviet Union, she immigrated to the United States with her family in 1989. Her work investigates (the often false) binaries of male/female, hard/soft, public/private, and highlights parallels between conventions of painting, architecture and our bodies. Meksin has created site-specific installations for The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Brooklyn (2018-19), The National Academy of Design, NYC (2018), The Lenfest Center for the Arts, NYC (2017), The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City (2016), The Kitchen, NYC (2015), BRIC Media Arts, Brooklyn (2015), Brandeis University (2014), and in a National Endowment for the Arts funded project in New Haven, CT for Artspace (2012). She is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging
Artist grant (2015) and in 2013 co-founded Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery and curatorial collective in Brooklyn, NY. In 2015 Meksin was appointed to the faculty at Columbia University School of the Arts, where she serves as the Director of New Genres and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Visual Arts Program. Meksin is
currently working on a large scale commission for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum to create a site-specific temporary sculpture for 2019-2020
Kimo Nelson (b. 1980 Honolulu, HI)
Kimo grew up moving between the US, SE Asia, and the Middle East. He moved back to the US and attended college in Oregon, spending summer months working as a professional river guide in Utah and Arizona. His extensive travel and wilderness experience continues to be the foundation for his work. Kimo studied painting and drawing at the Oregon College of Art and Craft and environmental studies at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR. He went on to study at the Rhode Island School of Design where he received an MFA in painting with honors in 2012. Kimo is a 2018-19 artist in residence at the Sharpe-Walentas studio program in Brooklyn, New York. He has been an organizer and participant for the Signal Fire artist residency program based in Portland, OR. Kimo has exhibited nationally at galleries and nonprofit spaces including Danese/Corey Gallery and Gallery 532 Thomas Jaeckel in New York, NY, Projekt 722 in Brooklyn, NY, WAS Gallery in Washington DC, Disjecta in Portland, OR, and Chase Young in Boston, MA. Kimo currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Andrew Prayzner
Andrew Prayzner is an artist, educator, and co-director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY. He has twice been a resident at Yaddo and holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BFA from the University of Hartford. Based in Brooklyn, NY, he has participated in numerous national and international group exhibitions including the Aldrich Museum (Ridgefield, CT), Housatonic Museum of Art (Bridgeport, CT), The Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Scotty Projects (Berlin, Germany) and Hearst Gallery (New York, NY). In the summer of 2015, Andrew was a resident at Studio Kura in Fukuoka, Japan. He concluded the residency with a solo exhibition of nocturnal drawings titled One Hundred Views of Nothing. In 2016, a solo exhibition titled Horizontals was presented in the project space at Morgan Lehman (New York, NY). He is currently working on a series of paintings that explores the viral language of Internet memes, and in particular, how signifiers shift between the dissemination of the images from subsequent platforms.
Naomi Reis
Born in Shiga, Japan, Naomi Reis has exhibited at Youkobo Art Space (Tokyo), Mixed Greens (New York, NY), STANDARD SPACE (Sharon, CT), Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Wave Hill, among others. She received a 2018 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, and was a 2015 NYFA Finalist in Painting. She was a founding member of the artist-run gallery Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, and co-founded the collective AN/OTHER NY, a nomadic workspace for emerging Asian art practitioners to learn with a group of peers through workshops and public events. Her work has been supported by numerous residencies including Yaddo, the Lower Eastside Printshop, and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.
Heeseop Yoon
Yoon was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. She holds her BFA from Chung-ang University, Seoul, Korea and MFA from City College of NY, NY. She is known for her large-scaled line drawing installations and also very intricate black and white drawings. She has had solo and two-person shows at Triple Candie, March Gallery, and Bose Pacia, all NY; Arario Gallery, Seoul; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ. She has exhibited in museums and art centers internationally, including Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, IN; OZ Arts Center, Nashville, TN; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IW; MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; The Bronx Museum, NY; Seoul Arts Center, Korea; China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), Australia and Media Art Center, Beijing, and has participated in several residencies such as the Lower East Side Printshop, Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation; Skowhegan School of Painting, and Artist Alliance Inc., all NY, and Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Germany. She has also made her first public mural installation in Italian Market in Philadelphiain 2015. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Zahar Vaks
(b.1983, Tashkent, Uzbekistan) Is a visual artist based in New York, NY. He earned his BFA from Tyler School of Art, and his MFA from The Ohio State University. He has shown in New York, Philadelphia, Columbus, Las Vegas, Houston, Vienna, and on the island of Svalbard in Norway. In 2018 Zahar was invited to participate in the Rauschenberg Residency. He attended the Galveston Artist Residency from 2012-2013. Currently he is a co-director of Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG), an artist-run curatorial collective and exhibition space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
