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2020-2022

María Luz Bravo

María Luz Bravo

 

María Luz Bravo (b. 1975, Mexico; lives and works in Washington, DC) is a Mexican photographer whose work highlights major social phenomena, focusing primarily on cities in conflict, political boundaries and community resilience and revolves around the use of space, both urban and architectural, in the contemporary urban landscape. She holds a Bachelor’s in Architecture from Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, Mexico and a Master of Arts in New Media Photojournalism from Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally in the US, Mexico, and Europe. María Luz Bravo’s 2014 series Reclaims was selected to be part of the XVI Photography Biennale in Mexico.

Artist statement

My body of work revolves around the use of space, both urban and architectural in the contemporary urban landscape to highlight major social phenomena, focusing primarily on cities in conflict, political boundaries, and community resilience.

In Mexico, I have photographed the effects of violence in Ciudad Juarez and the political boundaries of México City. In the US I have documented urban decline, racial segregation, and socioeconomic contrasts mainly on the East Coast and the South.

Jason Bulluck

Jason Bulluck

 

Jason Bulluck (b. Chester, PA; lives and works in Washington, DC) is an artist, writer, and teacher living in Washington, DC and working in both DC and Chicago. His work draws largely on the possibilities emerging from discourse between non-Western and Western world-building narratives. Bulluck holds an Masters of Fine Arts from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018), a Masters in Education from George Washington University (2010) and a Bachelors in Fine Arts from Howard University (2005). Bulluck has exhibited his work nationally at galleries including,  Take Care Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Sullivan Galleries in Chicago, Il and Conner Contemporary in Washington, DC.

Artist statement

I have situated my practice within discourses of critical geography, critical race studies, and Buddhist dialectics.

My work is grounded in early Indian, Mahayana and especially, Chan/Zen Buddhist psychology, epistemology, ontology as well as personal histories and those of the Americas and Africa. I am concerned with the provocations of black cultural theorists and the liberatory possibilities posed by engaging the work of a range of black radical thinkers, Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson, and that of Fred Moten and Hortense Spillers. I suspect that an end to anti-blackness can mean an end to much of human oppression. And I am further devoted to the range of interventions that might emerge from an even rounder dialogue. I have engaged esoteric Mahayana Buddhism in search of expedient means to deploy in a dialectic between epistemes West, Buddhist and otherwise subaltern. I suspect the possibilities of epistemic and ontological harmonies in the offing of considering the critiques of post-Marxists, critical geographers, and black radical theorists vis-a-vis an engaged and critical Buddhism.

My recent work involved the production of a series of Mahayana analog relational databases that encourage meetings of disparate philosophical traditions through material encounters with a range of objects. These are often minimalist objects that make formal gestures to be touched and considered as emerging in real-time as work made in concert with the artist, material, space, etc. The relational database has made so much of the world we now recognize possible, and while it, and more powerful database designs, pose great risks to liberatory projects, the relational database itself works well as a performative allegory representing the notion that what seems discrete in fact exists in relation to all other things.

This performative allegory offered by making objects, installations or performances help to make the consideration of some Buddhist tenets, such as interdependent origination and emptiness, perhaps more ontologically legible. I have been experimenting further with more complex databases that might offer opportunities to consider Buddhist thought in the context of material geographies and analyses of anti-black structures and histories.

Joey Enríquez

Joey Enríquez

 

Joey Enríquez (b. Simi Valley, CA; lives and works in Washington, DC.) makes prints and sculptural work that consist of clay monotype prints and digital renderings about location, movement through space, and the passage of time. Enríquez earned their B.A. in Art–Design from California Lutheran University (2018) and their M.F.A. in Fine Arts at the George Washington University (2020). Originally a graphic designer from Southern California, they transitioned from design to art in 2017 to explore a more interdisciplinary creative practice. Their most recent exhibition, desierto desierto at Gallery 102, unearthed family narratives and revealed erasure of indigeneity in the southwest deserts.

Artist statement

In my work, I investigate erasure of memory and experience, environmental decay, and movement through lineage across temporal spaces. I explore the effects of generational trauma and the development of contemporary social relations by looking to archives and catalogued narratives. My own movement through space is essential in the development of the sculptural objects I build and the prints that I create. I warp the site-specificity of each object and installation in order to create friction between the linear thinking of the canon of recorded history and the reality of the spatial relations we establish. Disrupting fact and fiction, past and present, I point to power dynamics, such as race, gender, and environment, that have been put in place to silence marginalized experiences and endanger the future survival of silenced identity and experience.

With my most recent sculptural work, I questioned the record of my maternal family history and the erasure of their, and subsequently my own, mexicanx identity. Through adapting and altering the process of adobe brick making, I fabricated a sculptural ruin, "if you cant find your own, store-bought is fine" (2020), based on the real ruin of a wall at my great great grandmother?s property in New Mexico. Here, the murder of my great great grandmother and one of her daughters had been lost in time?while a newspaper article recorded the event, it remained unspoken about by future generations of my family after assimilating into white American society. Mostly relying on the abstraction of my own memory as time passes, I constructed and stacked each brick with a sense of desperation. I became compelled to forge a ruin before my memory faded and became no longer legible. Juxtaposing a murder with a captivating, monumental ruin-like adobe wall fragment, I emphasize the invisible acceptance of glossing over traumatic histories of oppression, cultural death, and erasure of identity in my work.

Stephanie Garon

Stephanie Garon

 

Stephanie Garon is an artist and educator whose work functions as abstracted expressions of a time, place, and way of life that capture paradoxes: formalism and fragility, permanence and impermanence, and nature and nurture. Garon earned both her Bachelor of Science (1994) and a Masters of Science (1996) from Cornell University and received a Post Baccalaureate degree from Maryland Institute College of Art (2010) where she now teaches. She is set to receive her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in Studio Art Summer Low-Residency (MFAST) in 2023. Her work has been exhibited internationally in London, Colombia, and South Korea, as well as across the United States. Her writing, a critical aspect of her artistic process, has been published in international literary journals and her chapbook will be published in 2021.

Artist statement

As a five year old, I tagged along with my father to "hamfests,” radio operator gatherings held in county fair parking lots. Cars would pop open their trunks like overflowing treasure chests filled with electronic wares: old radio boxes, computer boards, cables, monitors, soldering irons. It was an oasis in the heart of wooded valleys.

My father would sell or trade items he no longer needed. My job was to display them on a tattered blanket and haggle to make the sale. The setup became my stage as I pranced about, reorganizing after each barter session. In my mind's eye, we were a traveling show.

Years later, when I find myself welding and smelling the rusty steel odor of the studio, I am driving down those dusty roads again.

My work explores the limits of nature and connection through juxtaposing industrial elements with natural materials I collect. The decomposition of the natural forms provide drama and philosophic markers of fragility: green pine needles fade to brown, cement made from melted snow crumbles, and wind switches orientation of metal sculpture around trees. Rich in associations, the work functions as abstracted expressions of a time, place, and way of life that capture paradoxes: formalism and fragility, permanence and impermanence, and nature and nurture.

My work invites the viewer to contemplate how we, as people, build structures and interact with the natural world around us. Like the items I’d curate at the hamfests, my art embraces the delicacy of transforming materials to define my visual voice.

Lionel Frazier White III

Lionel Frazier White III

 

Lionel Frazier White III (b. Washington, DC; lives and works in Washington, DC) is a Washington, DC, native; arts educator; and interdisciplinary conceptual artist who works in painting, drawing, wood sculpture, installation, and mixed media collage. White’s work explores themes of forced and coerced labor and their effect on family pathology, erasure, displacement, reassertion, and gentrification. White holds a Bachelors in Fine Arts from the George Washington University Corcoran School of the Arts and Design (2018) and is a graduate of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts high school in Washington, DC. His work has been exhibited at the DC Commission on Arts and Humanities, Prince George's African American Art Museum and Cultural Center, Torpedo Factory |Connect The Dots, Rush Arts Galleries, and Area 405. White was a 2019 Halcyon Arts Lab Cohort 3 Fellow in Residence in Washington, DC.

Artist statement

I am a third and fourth generation DC native who has a conceptual socially engaged practice. The themes in my work focus on gentrification, infrastructure, rememory, reassertion, and how they affect long-time DC residents. I communicate these themes through mixed media collage, installation, and performance.

I create collages by painting, cutting, stacking, and altering copies of archived images from family, friends, and historical documents taken in DC. I hold picture parties to share this practice with others. Through my work, I hope to activate memories and the sensory emotional feelings attached to them. By understanding our relationships to these images and the feelings they trigger we learn the importance of our memories and how collective memories contextualize history. As we share stories we find commonalities that express cultural nuances.

My work shows how these stories are being obscured and erased as a result of gentrification. Performance serves to stage interventions that reassert the presence of longtime DC residents. Both performance and photographic artifacts are used to understand the relationships of persons, places, and things, and show how they all define one another. The goal is to reassert and juxtapose social histories and narratives up against currently gentrified spaces to illuminate the problematic nature of gentrification. The framework of my practice is inspired by “March On,” a collaboration between Bryony Roberts, Mabel O. Wilson, and Marching Cobras and Tricia Rose’s book Black Noise. “March On” is a performance art piece that looks at the historical significance of black marching bands, and how its performance magnifies the politics of black bodies as they navigate gentrifying space while confronting a culture of hyper-surveillance. In Black Noise, Tricia Rose describes the nature of rap as a continually evolving relationship between black cultural practice, social and economic conditions, technology, sexual and social politics, and the institutional policing of the popular terrain. My practice focuses on how black bodies navigate and contest with the politics of space. For example, in the urban environment, infrastructure like apartment complexes causes the nature of community interactions to be different than in the more spaced-out suburbs. I focus on understanding the changing nature of space and maintaining resilience against forces that would erase black people and their legacy.