Curatorial
Carapace Pierced
December 8 - January 28, 2024
Accompanying events included a collaborative music performance featuring Ari Finkel, Chris Kaczmarek, and Water Bug.
A solo exhibition of recent work by Margaret Pinto.
Carapace Pierced explores the theme of armored bodies, investigating the relationships between fear, protection, vulnerability, and violence. Visual reference is drawn from medieval armor, riot gear, cages, and fencing, as well as myriad forms of armor in the natural world such as crab shells, thorns, and insect casings. This work simultaneously celebrates and interrogates the outer shell as a potent metaphor for emotional states of separation from our environment.
Depictions of nets and veils are interwoven into this content. These permeable barriers present a secondary mode of containment by obscuring, concealing and trapping their subjects. Translucent, layered and complex surfaces are an invitation for viewers to look more closely, delve deeper into the spaces and objects around them and address the unconscious “veils” which obscure their own view of the world.
A Pot Nudged into Oblivion
October 7 - November 11, 2023
MAPSpace, Port Chester, NY
Accompanying events included a virtual artist panel, a performance work by Meriel Pitarka, and a collaborative sound performance featuring Stephan Goodwin, Chris Kaczmarek, and Joshua Marquez.
"...So many of us are breathless,
you know, like me
kneeling to collect the pottery shards
of a house plant my elbow has nudged
into oblivion. What if I sigh,
and the black earth beneath me scatters
like insects running from my breath?
Am I a god then? Am I insane
because I worry about the disassembling of earth
regularly? I walk more softly now..."
- Jamaal May, Respiration
In this exhibition, eight artists handle modes of fear and fragility while either upholding or peeling away facades of fortitude. Mechanisms of warning are scratched, punched, scrawled, and lovingly arranged. Knee-jerk reactions and masterful plans share the room, mocking one another's attempts. To fear loss is to document, sear into memory, to reincarnate. Certain terrors set familiar triggers into action — a cycle ensues. It gets into the bloodline, passing from one young buck to the next. What if inside this cycle exists a fractal pattern of ferociously-protective enfolding around those slightly more scared? Hundred-year-old tree rings huddled to one another, curve after curve. To name an amorphous fear sets its edges apart from all else, making it small against the world. There are some rules of engagement: you may lay like settled snow if at the feet of a brown bear, but a black bear will require your most monstrous form. Featuring work by Annika Earley, Shabnam Jannesari, Elena Kalkova, Zahra Pars, Meriel Pitarka, Cynthia Reynolds, Hannah Eve Rothbard, and Jen Schoonmaker.
Ferality in Nameless Realms
July 21 - August 18
United Colors, Kansas City, KC
United Colors Gallery presents Ferality in Nameless Realms, an offsite ICS exhibition co-curated by Jenn Cacciola and SK Reed featuring twenty-two artists working across disciplines, half from the larger New York area and half from the Kansas City region. Cacciola, based in New York, and Reed based in Kansas, paired artists from their respective locations to share virtual studio visits and create small collaborative works with one another. These collaborations will be shared alongside solo work by each artist, giving the viewer a glimpse of the individual inclinations at play in the generative long-distance work.
The impetus of the project acknowledges that artists and curators are navigating a late-capitalist environment, where resources are constantly shifting and little can be predicted. In response, there is a need to follow our natural tendencies towards care and community-building, which often work against most profit-driven systems. The show’s title draws inspiration from Sara Swain’s essay, Feral Hospitality:
‘Feral Hospitality’ may initially seem like an oxymoron. Hospitality, after all, is associated with home, welcoming, and belonging. Feral, by contrast, conjures all that is unhomely, unwelcomed, and does not belong. From the Latin ‘fera’, meaning wild, it designates the ‘nature’ that we left behind in order to become human (92).
Feral-ness often connotes a negatively framed separation of humans from nature, whereas Swain suggests that in becoming “human,” or in trying to make a life for ourselves within a capitalist and colonial system, we have left behind parts of our natural selves that are rooted in communal care and desire for connection. This as a different type of hospitality that is activated outside the physical home, through meeting others in a co-inhabited space where certain dynamics of ownership can be absolved. Swain encourages, “We must design strategies to live together, making and remaking hospitable places, as they continue to be unmade.”
The long-distance work between the artists and curators of this exhibition suggests a complicated realm of togetherness necessary for navigating the instability of the present. The insistence on making community regardless of concepts of space ownership and belonging is reflected throughout the history of countless artist-led movements.
Featuring work by Adina Andrus, Sibley Barlow, Summer Brooks, Tiana Nanayo Kuʻuleialoha Honda, Ruth Jeyaveeran, Elena Kalkova, Hannah Lindo, Tristan Lindo, Garry Noland, Brittany Norgia, Elinore Noyes, Natalie Jauregui-Ortiz, Allison Panzironi, Heidi Schultz, Chico Sierra, Kirsten Taylor, Emily Teall, Miyuki Tsushima, Sarah Valeri, and Robert Zurer in the main gallery, and an installation by Mary Clara Hutchison (KS) and Patricia Miranda (NY) in the Container Gallery.
Greater Gravity
May 23 - June 24, 2023
Ice Cream Social Art Space, Port Chester, NY
In Greater Gravity, the home is considered a space that both protects and restricts. Eleven artists carry out acts of archiving, guarding, cleaving and mending. Artists as bio-parents, foster parents, and the parent-ed, explore the capacious spectrum of these titles. Larger diasporic traces are found among intimate, domestic emblems and daydreams. The inescapable nature of belonging to a place is acknowledged; so too is the necessary work of defining the boundaries of one’s “place”.
The home is both cradle and crucible. A bed and a cage. A stove and a window. On shelves and in drawers are stacked tchotchkes, recipes, and lessons to be unlearned.
Greater Gravity features large scale site-specific installations, time-based work, hard and soft sculpture, photography, painting, fiberwork, and etchings. Artists include Ophelia Arc, Anny Chen, Michelle Chun, Seth Ellison, Dalit Gurevich, Jac Lahav, David Ma, Margaret Pinto, Rose Silberman-Gorn, Shai Tingo, and Mary Tooley Parker.
The Body’s Guest
May 8 - 14, 2023
Offsite Ice Cream Social Exhibition at Studio 9D, Chelsea, New York, NY
“Go, soul, the body’s guest,
Upon a thankless errand;”
- The Lie, Sir Walter Raleigh
The Body’s Guest explores both problematic and necessary modes of multiplicity within the self. The self, when fractured, is forced to reconcile, regenerate, and form a state of plasticity for the ever-modified structure. The “other” within soothes, quietly shuts the door, listens, rattles, reverberates, and becomes “they”. They counsel, entangle, feed from the reserve stocks, and sing the siren’s call.
The small group show includes painting, assemblage, sculpture, fiberwork, and analog + digital drawings. Featuring James Parker Foley, Carol Radsprecher, Farwah Rizvi, Alexandra Rutsch Brock, Nikki Schiro, Carter Shocket, Remy Sosa, Oakley Tapola, Carrie Wilmarth, and John Wright ii.
Did You Too See It, Drifting, All Night, on the Black River?
September 11 - November 6, 2022
Offsite Ice Cream Social Exhibition at Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT
Did You Too See It, Drifting, All Night, on the Black River? includes works on paper, fiber, printmaking, painting, installation and large-scale sculpture. The room speaks of what is active while we are dormant, and what is dormant while we are active. Certain personal, political, cultural, and scientific undercurrents only reveal themselves with the occasional grip of a passing riptide. In a (semi) post-pandemic atmosphere, the public awareness roused while daily distractors were withdrawn, is now steadily slipping away. A global, communal quiet once nurtured a conscious motion that now seems tapered—creating a distant, static terror for what is coming. In parallel, our personally redemptive memories and relationships form their own ever-running undercurrents and are accessible at all times. Here, there is a sense things are on the precipice of waking.
Featuring work by Amy Amalia, Adina Andrus, Sibley Barlow, Kristian Battell, Jenn Cacciola, Nicki Cherry, Bradlee Hertrick, Natalie Jauregui-Ortiz, Ruth Jeyaveeran, Susan Luss, Patricia Miranda, Taya Naumovich, Dana O'Malley, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Allison Panzironi, Anna Victoria Regner, Lane Sell, Manju Shandler, Kayo Shido, Matthew Shively, Lilian Shtereva, Emily Teall, Sarah Valeri, and Robert Zurer.
Terrarium
March 5-May 6, 2022
Ice Cream Social Art Space, Port Chester, NY
Accompanying events included 4 virtual artist panels, 2 school workshops, and 1 live art performance.
“Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping.”
— Julia Margaret Cameron
Terrarium features work from 24 artists, spanning across a spectrum of sizes and mediums, including painting, photography, sculpture, fiber, and site-specific installations. The exhibition examines growth in all of its confounding forms, inside and outside of containment, managed and wild, protected and exposed. The works speak of growth that sometimes requires destruction or thorny discoveries. They emphasize the natural world’s proclivity to reconstruct, and the marks that changes leave behind. New presences, species, ideas, or generations may emerge, but they always retain a familiarity and irrevocable connection to what preceded them. There, a cyclical and self-nourishing system persists.
Lace and weavings engulf the unique cage gallery space at Ice Cream Social, even sprawling through to the outside of their container. Suspended paintings are backlit by window light while some hang low to the floor, thus encouraging the viewer to explore at an intimate level. Bright and saturated colors create a color scheme evocative of poisonous jungle amphibians, which are balanced with fleshy neutrals in neighboring works. Solid sculptural figures invite viewers toward the interior of the cage. The space even provides a rare opportunity to view the reverse side of some works, through the chain-link walls. The resulting vision is an unfurling collection that is both revealing and secret-bearing.
Terrarium features work by Amanda L. Andrei, Adina Andrus, Steven Baboun, Sibley Barlow, Kristian Battell, Jenn Cacciola, Nicki Cherry, Lindsy Davis, Natalie Jauregui-Ortiz, Ruth Jeyaveeran, Susan Luss, Patricia Miranda, Jumana Mograbi, Taya Naumovich, Dana O'Malley, Allison Panzironi, Anya Rosen, Tavia Sanza, Manju Shandler, Kayo Shido, Lilian Shtereva, Theo Trotter, Sarah Valeri, and Robert Zurer.
Convective Currents performance art event by Susan Luss and Theo Trotter. Photography by Isaac Rivera.
Additional Projects
2023
Co-Organizer of the 1st-Annual Port Chester Arts Festival, which provided free arts programming at art spaces across town, including exhibitions, open studios, workshops in art/dance/theatre, artisan booths, public art initiatives, displays & performances by local students, raffle baskets, and more.
2022-Pres
Co-Curator with P2P Curatorial Collaborative
2018-2021
Co-Curator of Openings Artist Collective
2019
Curation of The Lovely Wild Group Exhibition, The Church of St. Paul the Apostle, New York, NY (Co-curated with Frank Sabatte)
2015
In the Instant, Everything: A Photography Exhibition, Exhibit Collaborator, Participating Artist & Presenter, sponsored by Crossroads Cultural Center, Crossroads Auditorium, New York, NY
The Light of the Resurrection at the Peripheries of the World: Art of Fr. Ruggeri, Exhibit Collaborator & Presenter, sponsored by Human Adventure Corporation, NY Encounter 2015, Metropolitan Pavilion, New York, NY
2014
The Rediscovered Face, Exhibit Collaborator & Presenter, sponsored by Human Adventure Corporation, NY Encounter 2014, Metropolitan Pavilion, New York, NY