Congratulations to Zalika Azim, Shelly Bahl, Mimi Bai, Julian Chams, Dain DeltaDawn, Sareh Imani, Mei Kazama, Nsenga Knight, and Gustavo Prado, BRIC's summer 2019 BRICworkspace artists-in-residence!

Come by BRIC on August 1 between 6PM and 9PM to meet the artists and see their works-in-progress at BRIC's Open House/Open Studios Event.

WHAT IS BRICWORKSPACE?

BRICworkspace provides emerging and mid-career artists with essential resources and support as well as critical feedback and exposure of their work. The residency offers free studio space in the Artist’s Studio at BRIC House (647 Fulton), the Project Room at BRIC House, and in classroom space at Saint Ann’s School (33 Clinton St), all located in Downtown Brooklyn. The artists were selected by a panel of BRIC’s curatorial staff and past residency artists based on their work’s relevancy to Brooklyn’s diverse community, their artistic goals, and their ability to create work that is reflective of their innovation.

GET TO KNOW OUR 2019 ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE:

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Zalika Azim (born in 1990) conceptualizes her practice through photography, installation, performance, collage, and sound. Exploring the complexities of personal and collective narratives, her work investigates the ways in which notions of memory, displacement, and the body are negotiated in relation to nationhood and the American landscape.

During her residency at BRIC, Azim will expand her practice by using printmaking techniques, specifically letterpress methods. She plans to produce pieces that incorporate text to landscape photographs and therefore speak to the dynamics between space and human occurrences within. Azim also looks forward to working on a new photo-sculptural work, a series of wallpapers, and several non-image based works on paper.

Azim recently had a solo exhibition at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, titled in case you should forget to sweep before sunset. She has been included in group exhibitions at RE: Art Show at Pfizer Building, Brooklyn; International Center of Photography and The 8th Floor, both NY; Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana, Cuba.

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Shelly Bahl (born in 1970, India; raised in Toronto) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores cultural hybridity, old and new forms of colonization, the global transmission of iconographies, and the surrealistic experiences of women who lead enigmatic trans-cultural lives.

At BRIC Workspace, Bahl plans to develop the storyboard and scroll format narratives from her recent mixed-media installations and works on paper such as International Woman of Mystery II: Amru Sani and Remove the Stain From Her Skirt. She will also continue researching historical characters like Amru Sani and Sneha Anne Philip, both transcultural figures who disappeared mysteriously, using the material to create fictional narratives in text, drawings, photographs, and video.

Bahl has had solo exhibitions at Bronx River Art Center, M.Y. Art Prospects, and White Box, all NY; Design Exchange Museum, Toronto, Canada; and Gallery 198, London, UK. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art, Bullet Space, and Aicon Gallery, all NY; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; and Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, India, among others.

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Mimi Bai (born in Xi’an, China)’s work encompasses an individual practice focused on objects, text, and drawing and a collaborative practice that takes the form of installations and sets. She examines how interactions between people, or between individuals and their social environment, are shaped by larger ideological, political, and cultural values.

During her residency at BRIC, Bahl will explore several different ideas layered in the form of drawing, printmaking, and small objects. One is the concept of camouflage as a metaphor for cultural assimilation--based on her own childhood experience of immigrating to the U.S, she will explore both external manifestations of “fitting in” and the internal shifts that shape our sense of identity. She will also work with a ghost character inspired by her first Halloween costume, a being in between past and presence, memory and forgetting, me and not me.

She has participated in group exhibitions at Artists Space and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both NY; and Space 538, Portland, ME, among others. Bai has been an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design's Artist Studios Program, NY; Sculpture Space, Utica, NY; and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE.

(Photo by Sam B. Jones)

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Julian Chams (born in 1989, Colombia) creates assemblages that include both natural and manmade elements. Chams’ work explores the space between the personal and the systematic; he uses photography to capture the mundane sensory data of daily life and recontextualizes it into seductive, tactile sculptures.

For BRIC Workspace, Chams will create a series of sculptural and fabric pieces using gathered materials including photos printed on fabric and personal items. He will group and rearrange these materials intuitively to reflect his internal state as well as perceived surroundings. Chams will also expand his preceding series of tactile sculptures, this time using tapestries and fabric as well as plastic, vinyl, and wax, sometimes embroidering text and other drawn elements onto the pieces.

He has had solo exhibitions at Wave Hill and AC Institute, both NY; Parallel Gallery, Kansas City, MO; and ars antiqua galleria, Barranquilla, Colombia. His work has been included in group shows at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Consulate of Colombia, both NY; La Esquina and 50/50, both Kansas City, MO; the 15th and 16th Salon Regional de Artistas-Zona Caribe, Colombia; among others.

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Dain DeltaDawn is an interdisciplinary artist and curator who makes work about the landscape of queerness and how we perceive it through disseminating information like diagrams and tutorials.

During his residency at BRIC, DeltaDawn will continue video works that instruct viewers to “unlearn” by manipulating the format of short knitting and knotting tutorials. They will use a range of sources from excerpts of seminal texts, pop music lines, and original prose for these videos. Other key elements are handmade costumes and objects in weaving, felt, and spun yarn that constitute cartoonish alien-creatures transcending race or gender.  

DeltaDawn’s work has been included in exhibitions at Public Address, ChaShaMa, and LMAKgallery, all NY; Lillstreet Art Center and ACRE Projects, Chicago, IL; among others. Previously, they were a Media Arts Fellow at BRIC and a mentor in NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentorship program.

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Sareh Imani (born in Iran) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work incorporates sculpture, video installation, and performance. She is interested in the reparative potential of art and science, intimacy and distance, instructions and poetics. Her work explores fragmentation and integration, using both the human body as a nexus for being made whole, as well as the role of collective memory and social change.

During her residency at BRIC, Imani will work on her multi-channel video installation Kindred Stitches that addresses parenting and gardening, absence and longing, aging and mortality. Videos include Imani’s own FaceTime conversations with her parents about her father’s cactus resuscitated using surgeon’s techniques, juxtaposed non-hierarchically with other pieces like the scene of a surgery room, conjuring disparate themes like regeneration and dismantling of symbols. Imani also looks forward to experimenting with new installations strategies like projecting video onto sculptures and objects instead of screen.

Her work has been included in group exhibitions at 17 Essex Gallery, Arnold and Sheila Aronson Gallery at The New School, Westbeth Gallery, 25 East Gallery at Parsons School of Design, all NY, among others. Imani is currently participating in the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program at the Bronx Museum, NY, and has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME.

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Mei Kazama (born in NY) is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist whose work investigates genealogy, belonging, and alternative modes of reality. She searches for new and immanent ways of relationality through (re)understanding the body, bodily actions, and bodily interactions within her work and seeks an alternative world of possibility and of sociability determined by those who do not have a voice here and now.

For BRIC Workspace, Kazama plans to create a multimedia shrine that honors queer relationality and reconsiders genealogy, of which she has shown a preliminary version in her most recent exhibition, LIVING ROOM SOUP.The shrine will act as negotiation between her Japanese upbringing with the notion of lineage and the need for alternative concepts of relationship as a queer person.

Kazama has had recent solo exhibitions at Wilde Gallery, Williamstown, MA; Fuyumedo Gallery, Kagaku Sanwakyozaisha, and Hyakkokumachi Gallery, all Aomori, Japan. She has also participated in group exhibitions at LaGuardia Arts Gallery, NY; the Hiratsuka Sculpture Garden, Andes, NY; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; and Lichtenstein Gallery, Pittsfield, MA.

(Photo by NB Zhong)

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Nsenga Knight (born in Brooklyn, NY; Based in both Brooklyn and Cairo, Egypt,) creates social practice projects, geometric drawings, text paintings, prints, and photographs. As a first-generation Black American Muslim woman, she seeks to make critical contributions to conversations on the status of Black America, American society, politics, culture, and Islam in the 21st century.

During her residency at BRIC, Knight will create a series of prints and drawings entitled Irregular Black People/Irregular Muslims. It refers to Gordon Parks’ 1963 photo series for Life magazine,“Black Muslims,” and Frank Stella’s mid-60’s Irregular Polygons paintings, exploring each series’ response to radical shifts as well as the influence of Islamic geometric art on Stella’s work.

She was recently awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and will be included in BRIC’s fall 2019 group exhibition, Beyond Geographies: Contemporary Art and Muslim Experience. She has had solo exhibitions at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Project Row Houses, Houston, TX; and California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, CA. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn Historical Society,, all Brooklyn; Drawing Center, both NY; and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; among others.

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Gustavo Prado (born in São Paulo, Brazil)  uses off-the-shelf materials for work in varied formats, adapting them to enable viewers to recognize his source material while understanding potential deviations from the intended use. Through processes of combining seemingly disparate materials and subject matter, Prado tests cultural assumptions of what can or should belong together.

He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Richard, NY; Lurixs Gallery in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Nara Roesler Gallery, São Paulo, Brazil. His works have recently been featured in group exhibitions at BRIC, andthe Bronx Museum both NY; the Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; and Itaú Cultural, São Paulo. He has presented a large installation at the Coachella Music Festival, Indio, CA, and created a permanent public art installation for Casa Firjan Institue, Rio de Janeiro.

(Photo by Leandro Viana)

Every year BRIC hosts a series of residency programs that enable artists of all disciplines the opportunity to use BRIC’s resources to further develop their craft and careers. For more information, check out our artist opportunities.