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159sutton · 3 years

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October 2021

Flood Plane Recent works by Kelly Goff and Leah Dyjak

Opening Friday, October 15, 2021, 6-9PM

159 Sutton presents a two-person exhibition of recent artwork by lens-based artist Leah Dyjak and sculptor Kelly Goff. The artists align in their practice of conducting embedded, place-based research in watery lands, namely coastal cities, wherein human infrastructure fails and crumbles into the ocean. Flood Plane is a place that explores the porous membrane that separates sustainability from collapse. Viewings Saturday November 6, 2-5PM Thursday November 11, 6-8PM Saturday November 20, 2-5PM Thursday December 2, 6-8PM (Closing Reception) and by appointment (contact 159sutton [at] gmail [dot] com) LEAH DYJAK is an interdisciplinary, lens-based artist whose work combines performance, labor, film, and photography to explore how generations of human use affect the ecologies of place. Dyjak’s images and site specific installations often push the edges of perception by manipulating surfaces with either the lens or in physical space. Their work challenges our understanding perceived boundaries and charts matters in-flux. Their current work and research is being conducted in disappearing lands in Southern Louisiana with a specific focus on infrastructure failure and the attempted control of the Mississippi River. Dyjak received their MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Their work is in multiple private collections and has been acquired by Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University. They are a recipient of a Goldfarb Fellowship at the internationally renowned Djerrassi Resident Artist program in Woodside California. Recent publications include The Architectural Review, London UK and The Leonardo Journal of Art and Science, MIT press. Dyjak is summer faculty at the Anderson Ranch and is represented by the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown Massachusetts. Their work has been exhibited widely in places such as the Houston Center of Photography, Blue Star Contemporary, and The Front Gallery in New Orleans. KELLY GOFF is a Curaçaon-American artist with a focus on sculpture, installation, and public projects. His work is driven by place-based research domestically and abroad including work done in Key West, FL, the Alaskan wilderness, Bhutan, Nepal, the Ecuadorian Amazon, rural Colorado, and in his homeland, the Caribbean island of Curaçao. Goff received his MFA in Sculpture with Honors from RISD and is Chair of Visual Art at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. His work has been exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at the Boston Children’s Museum and Bromfield Gallery in Boston and group exhibitions in New York City at the Governor’s Island Art Fair, Work Gallery, Davidson Contemporary, and Galapagos Art Space. He is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship; St. Botolph Club Foundation Grant; full fellowship for Residency at the Chulitna Lodge Residency, Lake Clark Alaska; a full fellowship for residency at the Vermont Studio Center; and an Andrew W. Mellon Research Award, among others.

this is the first opening since February 2020 (wow) *please wear a mask when visiting*

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159sutton · 4 years

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February / March 2020

Home Life Paintings and other new works by Alejandra Lindstrom Peralta February 21 – March 7, 2020

Opening Friday February 21, 6-9PM

Alejandra is a mixed-media artist from Providence, RI. Her home and personal belongings serve as the inspiration for interior scenes and still lifes filled with color and patterns. @alejandraeloiza

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159sutton · 4 years

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January/February 2020

January / February 2020

Wintergarden January 10 – February 14, 2020

Opening Saturday January 11, 5-7PM

Wintergarden is a three-person show of Providence-based visual artists. In the midst of post-solstice frosted grey days, the works exhibited in Wintergarden explore how color, expressed through a variety of material processes, can offer a flame of pleasure. Gleaning energy from the studio in place of the sun, these works express a particular seasonal caretaking and optimism akin to Victorian wintergardens and glasshouses—intended to nourish plants for medicine and gratification during dormant cycles.

Judd Schiffman's large wall mural scenes are constructed from individually glazed ceramic pieces, fixed to the wall in a rhythmic sequence. The characters are animals or creatures, the boundaries they live within are rocks or feathers or other abstract shapes. Within their frames, the stories suggest something archetypal: lessons to learn, or experiences memorialized. Through a collaborative process with his wife Athena and daughter Frances, the artist composes narratives reflecting the inner life of the contemporary family, exploring rites of passage, and grappling with the complexities of being a father. Schiffman's work investigates themes of masculinity, discovery of self, sexuality, and family, and all the nuanced guilt, confusion, and elation that exist in tandem.

In Heather Leigh McPherson's vibrant low-relief works, cast epoxy acts as both a painting support and container for the textiles and drawings embedded within. It selectively renders drawings transparent, emphasizing the shallow depth of a single piece of paper and turning recto and verso into one body. McPherson’s work visually vibrates and flows, capturing the motion of a liquid in the form of a solid and exploring materials’ capacities to act and be acted upon. From more referential bits and pieces—religious imagery, cartoon facial expressions, hands reaching—these works unfold to visualize flickering experiences of wisdom and stupidity that spring from the eyes, the mind, and the body.

Scott Alario's recent experiments include multi-panel photographic vignettes. The photographs are printed on canvas and floated in handmade frames. The frames' design and construction draws inspiration from kids’ divided dinner plates, creating intentional boundaries between related images. The emphasis on the materiality of the images as objects, as well as the pictures' container, revisits a theme in Alario's work with his immediate family: a desire to control an experience versus the messiness of a lived one. Something equally age-old shows up in the content of the imagery: the infinite versus the finite, shown visually in the photographs as nods to the cosmic.

show dates: Jan 11 - Feb 14 2020

bios:

ALARIO (b. 1983) photographs depart from a process in which he, his partner, and their children work together to stage perform and edit each work. Alario's experimental approach to portraiture includes the use of multiple exposure, color separation, and macro lenses, to document the movement and actions of the young members of his family: "I’m looking for: unseeable squirming, shifting, and growth, arms flailing in ecstasy, or light slowly moving across our walls." Alario received an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013 and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 2006. His work has been discussed in The New Yorker, American Photo, Collector Daily, Time Lightbox, and Vice.com,and is included in the collection of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI, among others.

McPHERSON (b. 1984) makes painting, sculpture, and animation. Recent solo exhibitions include Tip of The Nose at GRIN Providence, High Bottom at Actual Size Los Angeles, 30 Special Colors at Greenlease Gallery in Kansas City and Anytime Concept at Vox Populi in Philadelphia; she was also included in the 2016 deCordova New England Biennial. McPherson has been on the full-time faculty of Providence College since 2009, where she teaches courses on painting, studio research, and contemporary art history. McPherson holds a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's from Rhode Island School of Design.

SCHIFFMAN (b. 1982) is a Providence, Rhode Island-based artist working primarily in ceramics. He has lectured at Harvard University Ceramics and Brown University, and participated in residencies at the Zentrum Fur Keramiks in Berlin, Germany and Arch Contemporary in Tiverton, Rhode Island. Schiffman received his MFA from the University of Colorado in 2015, and his BA from Prescott College in 2007. Schiffman’s work has been exhibited in New York City, Los Angeles, CA, Portland, OR, Boulder, CO, Beacon, NY, Providence, RI, Fall River, MA, and Berlin, Germany. In 2016, he received an emerging artists award from the National Council for the Education of Ceramic Arts. Schiffman is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Ceramics at Providence College.

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159sutton · 5 years

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November / December 2019

November 2019

Atlas of Dreams

New work by Nafis White November 20 – December 13

Opening Thursday November 21, 6-9PM

Atlas of Dreams is an exhibition of new work that centers landscape, ancestry and the interstitial space between dreams and consciousness using accumulation, intricately woven materials, carefully selected ready-mades and densely layered surfaces. White centers the portal as device, using sculpture as a vehicle by which material is intertwined, cast and knotted linking concepts of power and display using color, scale, time and beauty.

Featuring eight new Afro-Victorian works of art titled Oculus, pairing African and African American hair styling traditions with Victorian Era hair working techniques, White centers divergent themes ranging from topography, botany, interconnectivity, body as site, abstraction and meditation finding harmonious confluence between process and intuition. White will create an active, site-specific sculpture during the exhibition, wherein the public is invited to add plastic cast hair baubles to a large-scale work Untitled (All In, after Tony Feher), paying homage to the late artist, utilizing many hands to generate new pathways in thought and practice. Flanking the entrance to the exhibition is Strand (Double Helix), two large, vertical sculptures composed of rope, hair, cotton, beads and other inclusions, referencing the DNA structure, ancestry, resilience and embodied knowledge through complex knot-work.

The Atlas of Dreams is inspired by the writings of Howardena Pindell in her book titled The Heart of the Question – The Writings and Paintings of Howardena Pindell and in particular her essay titled The Aesthetics of Texture in African Adornment as well as Arnold Rubin’s essay titled Accumulation - Power and Display in African Sculpture. White expands upon the author’s concepts regarding accumulation, highlighting the dynamism and strength of the experiential, ancestral and contemporary using pattern, texture and color to create resonant objects that defy gravity.

See http://www.nafiswhite.com/ for more info

Textures of Time

New works by Morgan Evans-Weiler November 3-16, 2019

Opening and Concert Sunday November 3, 2019 3-6PM

Join the artist for an opening reception and a concert, featuring compositions performed by J.P.A. Falzone, Laura Cetilia, Ashley Frith, Morgan Evans-Weiler and more.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1361008500724105/

ABOUT THE WORK:

Historically, we have imagined units, containers, and chains to help us make sense of the world and our engagement with it. Things, bodies, and objects have been linked together throughout the building blocks of life. More recently though, our thinking brings us to the potential of the line. At each moment we are putting lines out into the world, hoping for crossings, connections, and knots to be created in our sympathetic and empathetic engagements. The line embodies a commitment to processual thinking. The line attempts to create a way of thinking in which all objects become verbs—we imagine assemblages of motions, connections, and resonances. Built into lines is the potential of our traversing the world, thus we have put upon lines a sense of our temporal concerns. Our directions are agitated by a sense of temporal mobility. This is especially present in considerations of a simultaneity. Each of us in our process is creating lines of flight that are always already in simultaneous connectivity. But our awareness of this is infinitely limited. We are unable to comprehend a simultaneity beyond the ego—we can’t imagine the possibilities of nowness outside of ourselves. The nowness is not just the present moment, but all of the presents that contain within them the meshworks of potentiality that have produced them. Into this place of virtuality, we fold ourselves unknowingly. This is where the inquiry in ‘Texture of Time’ begins. What is it for material, motion, and time to be bound up in a practice of life? How do we imagine the visual affect of a simultaneous now of empathetic connection that exists through our practice of putting out lines? By drawing on and cutting into paper; through making connections and constellations of motion, Morgan Evans-Weiler engages with the process of putting lines out into a world of temporal uncertainty and listening into our connected sociality. Through this accumulation of paths and trajectories, further imaginings of the resonance of traversals and simultaneity can be engaged. For Evans-Weiler, ‘Textures of Time’ is a practice. A practice that can potentially reveal something to us about the totality of a passing-feeling process. Each work is enmeshed in an engagement of social everyday being—each drawing is a patchwork of passage. Works in this way are not ‘works’ in the traditional sense, they are resonant surfaces of a vibrational, affective tone. ABOUT THE ARTIST: Morgan Evans-Weiler (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Ithaca, NY. His work is concerned with issues of time, process, materiality, and the social considerations of cartographic lines. His visual work has shown throughout the U.S. at Rhizome D.C. (Tacoma Park), Washington Street Art Center (Boston), Midway Art Gallery (Boston), Reflection Gallery (Hancock, MI), and Oliver Art Center (Frankfort, MI). His compositions have been performed at venues such as Conrad Prebys Hall (San Diego) and Rhode Island School of Art and Design Museum and by ensembles such as Skogen (Sweden), a.pe.re.od.ic (Chicago), and Extradition Ensemble (Portland, OR). As a performer, he has been featured at venues such as Jordan Hall, Issue Project Room, MIT List Museum, and many others. He is the founder of the New England experimental ensemble, Ordinary Affects, which has performed alongside Jürg Frey, Eva-Maria Houben, Christian Wolff, and Magnus Granberg. Ordinary Affects has received grants from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts and Pro Helvetia, and has been in residence at Avaloch Farm Institute. In 2016, along with Jed Speare, Evans-Weiler founded the concert/book series ‘Standing Waves.’ This series has produced a dozen concerts and three books of artist writings by artists such as Aki Onda, Bonnie Jones, Derek Baron, Sarah Hennies, and Jake Meginsky. Evans-Weiler’s music and performance is featured on record labels such as Another Timbre, Edition Wandelweiser, Elsewhere, Suppedenaum, and Weighter Recordings. He is currently an MFA candidate at Cornell University.

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159sutton · 5 years

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September 2019

The Strike Was Broken: Redacted Historical Marker Rubbings by Shaun Slifer A series of wax rubbings of historical markers in the manner of erasure poetics.

Soft Opening: Friday, September 13, 2019, 6-8PM https://www.facebook.com/events/378582582799540/ Opening + Discussion with Artist: Sunday, September 15, 2019, 2-4PM (artist talk at 3PM) https://www.facebook.com/events/536551660417903/

The Strike Was Broken is on view through September 27, 2019. Gallery visits by appointment ([email protected]) or Tuesdays 3:30-7PM (during Scratch Farm CSA pickup, hosted by 159 Sutton).

Within our shared landscape, historical markers with dismissive and/or oppressive language have the same psychological effect as towering bronze statues of men who we’re not sure we want to revere. Memorial statues and historical markers are not, in and of themselves, our history. Rather, they are a conversation about our history, and that conversation should be evolving, challenging, changing. This is my starting point.

These works are part of a continuing project for understanding and critiquing the language of state-sanctioned history. I’m focused especially on plaques that feature language which could divert our understandings of colonialism, genocide, state oppression, and military violence and which create truncated or misleading accounts that marginalize popular revolts and disregard whole communities.

Using a method of intentional erasure/omission which mirrors that of many “official” histories, I only include words from the original plaques which reveal their underlying narratives. The completed rubbings interrupt the provisional authority of the historical marker by disrupting static, languid interpretations of the plaque’s original narrative.

Each finished piece is a wax relief rubbing that I’ve created on-site. My process is deliberately visible, public, and accessible: I carry a roll of durable Tyvek paper, handmade crayons, a short ladder, and a high-vis fluorescent vest. As a public performance, I create these rubbings during daylight hours, wearing a simple costume that gives the suggestion of a municipal worker.

See https://justseeds.org/event/the-strike-was-broken-new-work-by-shaun-slifer/ for more information.

ABOUT THE ARTIST Shaun Slifer (b.1979) is an artist, non-fiction author, and museum professional based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He regularly works in collaboration with other artists, non-artists, and in collectively structured groups including the now-disbanded Howling Mob Society, and currently with Justseeds Artists' Cooperative (of which he is a founding member) and the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum (where he is the Creative Director).

He’s excited when he’s digging up untold histories, illuminating the stories held within objects, exploring tiny upstart museums, printing on his refurbished antique platen press, celebrating urban-adaptive flora and fauna, and documenting (and sometimes making) DIY municipal signage.

Shaun has exhibited internationally in a variety of museums, galleries, and nonprofit spaces, as well as non-authorized public settings. He has presented on history, creative practice, and grassroots media at numerous universities and conferences in the United States and Europe.

He currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA, with roots in Nebraska and Tennessee.

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