New Look. Same BRIC.

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New Look. Same BRIC.

Periodically, BRIC invites well-known artists and arts professionals to create a Short List of some of their favorite artists in the BRIC Contemporary Artist Registry.  

The selected artists for this Short List all address our complex yet fundamental physical and psychological relationships to space. Each artist engages with space in both an intimate and universal manner. The artists use deceptively simple means. Through the use of a strong, singular gesture and often minimal aesthetic, they create a profound impact and heighten our understanding of these spaces.

Pablo Carpio pushes the boundaries of painting into sculpture and installation, essentially condensing the space between the depicted and the lived. He often "builds paintings" using everyday objects as subject matter and as materials, challenging our interactions with the virtual representations of these objects and spaces.

The intricate, small scale architectural models by Petros Chrisostomou are playful, surreal, and puzzling. Common objects such as wigs, shoes, and glasses are freed from their everyday use and are elevated, becoming protagonists in the theatrical spaces created.

Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze looks at diasporan populations who span multiple places, times, and cultures. In her drawings, she translates the complex desire to be someplace definitive into tangible and literal forms, such as bridges. Her layered works are simultaneously architectural, map-like, and figurative, examining the interconnections between each.

Karyn Olivier manipulates our social and individual interactions with familiar spaces, objects, and with each other. Blurring the lines between fiction and ease, perception and reality, she shapes our emotional links to nostalgia of these spaces in a way that can be simultaneously unsettling, funny and mournful.

Often drawing upon the vernacular of his rural childhood in Vermont, Abraham McNally uses architecture as vessels for memory, creating narratives that integrate the psychological space of the past with the process of constructing a world with his hands in the present.

Alejandro Duran creates sculptural installations in pristine landscapes using discarded plastic waste found on site, that is one uniform color. Addressing our destructive relationship to nature and our interconnectedness across borders, he uses beauty to create a disturbing dissonance. Inspired by the patterns of

Hangul and the formal elements found on site, Eun Hye Kang twists our notions of how we read and negotiate space. Using soft yarn as a means to "draw" space, she creates negative volume through movement, gravity, and density. The minimal, abstract installations are echoes of her intimate, physical relationships with these spaces.

Conflicting characteristics of communal activity in designated "play spaces" are explored in the often humourous and sometimes macabre works of Louisa Armbrust. Using graphic iconography and playful composition, she challenges our ideologies and acceptance of rules and behavioral limits found in work, learning, and leisure activities and in the spaces where they occur.  

ABOUT THE CURATOR:

Erin Gleason is an artist and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Drawing from over a decade of professional experience in the fields of architecture and branding, Gleason examines the creative exchange between urbanism and art practice – specifically the interface between the built environment, policy, economics, community, and creativity.

Operating at the intersections of social practice, design, and art, her approach is both participatory and reductive. Gleason's work ranges from drawing, printmaking, and installations, to curating, writing, and public art commissions. She frequently collaborates on projects with architects, landscape architects, poets, scientists, musicians, and filmmakers, among others.

She has exhibited and curated in the US and internationally including BRIC Rotunda Gallery (New York), FiveMyles Gallery (New York), The Pier Art Center (Scotland), Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (Scotland), and Shetland Museum and Archives (Scotland). She has won commissions for a number of public artworks including the Poetry Paths Initiative in Lancaster, PA and the Arts & Theatres Trust in Scotland.

Gleason is Partner/NY Director of Muse Salon Collaborative, a social enterprise that fosters cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration through an international arts network while developing new models for economic and cultural sustainability. She is Co-Founder of Crown Heights Film Festival, Creator/Editor of the online forum Cultural Fluency, Co-Editor/Producer of the publication FIELDWORK (ASN Mutual Press), and recipient of a number of grants including Brooklyn Arts Council awards and a Russell Trust Award for research in Greenland. She was a 2013 Lori Ledis Curatorial Fellow at BRIC in Brooklyn. Gleason studied Fine Art, Imaging Science and Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania, and received her MFA in the Art/Space/Nature Programme at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.