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

Disembarked Curated by Sarah Walko

This Short List of artists from the BRIC Contemporary Artist Registry focuses on individuals who are making mythological work that combines rituals and narratives surrounding home and identity from a feminine perspective.

Merav Ezer's work is about living a nomadic existence, exploring necessity and a quest for home within the body and nature. She makes architectural constructions that fuse the body and space, the physiological and physical experience. Home as a metaphor for her is about protection, security, freedom and adaptation.

Mary Mattingly's work also explores a world of nomadic roots with a prophetic expectation that in the future more of the world's population will be nomadic. Her work takes the form of wearable environments, and combines fantasy and science.

Hyo Jeong Nam's work is all made from thread that appears transformed into hair. Her process is a time oriented, meditative, repetitive act, and her concepts surround the idea that everything is affected by everything else. The thread is the symbol.

Santina Amato's work combines performance, video, sculpture and is often site-specific exploring female identity in physical and psychological ways. Through rituals and patterns of performative gestures, her works are instigative, sometimes eerie, and contain multiply layers of stories.

Aisha Tandiwe Bell's work is narrative based, reflecting ideas of identity, portraits of stereotypes of women, and definitions of freedom. In her work she often addresses what she calls "a burden of freedom". She is influenced by Du Boisian "double consciousness" and Jacques Lacan's "shape shifting subconscious".

Aricoco's work centers around home as well. When she was a child she staged runaway-from-home rituals, packing her favorite toys. Her work speaks to a restless temperament, wanting to always be in motion and on the move in an effort to find a place of belonging but never really feeling like one belongs anywhere. Her sculptures are often like cocoons and have an interior transformative quality to them.

Nadia Sablin's work is film and video. Although presented like a documentary, her work has a theatrical presence to it as it addresses memory, language, home and feminism. She creates glorified domestic scenes that are biographical, psychological portraits and also elevates the beauty and sacredness of older women in our society.  

About the Short List Curator

Sarah Walko is Executive Director of Triangle Art Association in DUMBO, a not-for-profit arts organization whose mission is to support emerging and mid-career international and national visual artists, encouraging dialogue and experimentation through workshops, residencies and exhibition opportunities. Walko is also a multimedia artist and writer. Her fiction and non fiction essays have been published by While Whale Review Literary Journal and Hyperallergic where she is a regular contributing writer. Her visual artwork has been published by The Dirty Goat, Redivider, Blood Lotus, Apple Valley Review, 2 River, A Capella Zoo, Awosting Alchemy, 5×5 Literary Magazine, Bathhouse, Conceptcion Books, Cincinnati Review and Host Publications. Recent group exhibitions include Preternatural at the Museum of Nature in Canada, Codex Dynamic in New York, Wonder Cabinet in New York and Necessary Shift at the Elizabeth Foundation in New York. Walko has participated in many artists residency programs including IPark and the Elizabeth Foundation.

This past year she was invited visiting artist at Savannah College of Art and Deisgn and Roger Williams College where she recently had a solo exhibition You and I do Not Come Lightly to the Blank Page. El Cadaver Exquisito, a feature length experimental documentary collaboration film she created with with director Victor Ruano and Rossemberg Rivas, is in festival circuits and her film Lux/Nox, co written and directed with artist collaborator Malado Baldwin, is in post production. She is currently working on new sculpture/installations, film and a novel. Walko recently curated A Cage Went in Search of a Bird at Radiator arts and The World and Its Things in the Middle of Their Intimacy currently on view at Fridman gallery in New York.