Antonio McAfee | Old Bad Air
Rachel Guardiola | A Hand Without A Horizon is Taller than its Other
For its first exhibition of 2018, Hamiltonian Gallery is pleased to present two new bodies of work by multi-media artists Antonio McAfee and Rachel Guardiola. The exhibitions will open with a reception on Saturday, January 13 from 7 - 9 pm; both artists will be in attendance.
In "Old Bad Air", artist Antonio McAfee presents a series of haunting images that use 19th century black and white portraits of people of color as source material. These spectral portraits have an unsettled presence due to the collaging, stripping and manipulating McAfee enacts upon the images during their creation. Collectively, the images are a revisiting of the storied and traumatic past of people of color in the United States; a history with, as author Ralph Ellison phrases it in his classic novel "Invisible Man", the putrid whiff of "Old Bad Air". That troubled history, much like the figure in McAfee's images, demands exhumation, re-examination and re-framing in order to continue its evolution into the present day and beyond.
"A Hand Without A Horizon is Taller than its Other" is artist Rachel Guardiola's ongoing project that explores humanity's relationship to the wilderness through a fantastical narrative that charts the activities of a series of fictional characters on an earth-like planet. In this installment, Guardiola performs as a time-traveling surveyor and a horticultural pirate that conduct experiments and mysterious rituals as they traverse mysterious topographies including icy desert landscapes and lush, hidden forests. Using lens-based media, Guardiola fleshes out an alternate universe in which her characters discover and re-cultivate a distant, post-industrial wasteland.
Photographer Antonio McAfee (b. 1983, Baltimore, MD) holds a BFA in Fine Art Photography from the Corcoran College of Art and Design (2007), an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (2009) and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Arts and Culture Management from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa (2011), for which he was awarded a Fulbright Grant. McAfee has exhibited extensively in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, DC, and has two forthcoming solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Baltimore, MD and DC Arts Center in 2018. He lives and works in Baltimore, MD.
Rachel Guardiola (b. 1985, Bethpage, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist who often utilizes lens based technology to construct mythologies of future past terrain inspired by periods of her own navigation through extreme landscapes. Guardiola has exhibited internationally in the United States, Iceland, Denmark, France, Italy and Senegal. She was an artist-in-residence at the AIR Gallery Summer Residency at The Governor's Island, New York, NY (2017), Arctic Circle Art & Science Expedition in Svalbard (2016), Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT (2016). She holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2015) and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2007).
January 13 - February 17, 2018
Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 13, 7-9pm
Artist Talk:
Wednesday, January 24, 7 pm
Hamiltonian Artists:
Antonio McAfee
Rachel Guardiola