The Ephemera Project is a crowd sourced archive of the people we love and the objects that hold us together. It is evolving into a powerful collaboration based in memory, self-reflection, and vulnerability. There are notes from loved ones and objects that signify time passing - moments in history, mementos of a vacation and a subway ride. Simple reminders of people we love and homages to life experience. The Ephemera Project seeks crowd participation in order to be inclusive. It welcomes stories and objects as diverse as we are, from all ages and around the world.

My original idea for collaboration with Maine MILL was to work with their collection to add historical context to the ephemera that I had already collected. Following the October 25, 2023 Lewiston shootings, the show expanded to include ephemera from the memorials that we are working together to archive and preserve at the MILL.

https://www.tanjahollander.com/mainemill

Artwork by B. Ingrid Olsen ‘21

The eighty-first edition of the Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States—features seventy-one artists and collectives grappling with many of today’s most pressing issues. This Biennial is like being inside a “dissonant chorus," as participating artist Ligia Lewis described it, a provocative yet intimate experience of distinct and disparate voices that collectively probe the cracks and fissures of the unfolding moment.

The exhibition’s subtitle, Even Better Than the Real Thing, acknowledges that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is complicating our understanding of what is real, and rhetoric around gender and authenticity is being used politically and legally to perpetuate transphobia and restrict bodily autonomy. These developments are part of a long history of deeming people of marginalized race, gender, and ability as subhuman—less than real. In making this exhibition, we committed to amplifying the voices of artists who are confronting these legacies, and to providing a space where difficult ideas can be engaged and considered.

This Biennial is a gathering of artists who explore the permeability of the relationships between mind and body, the fluidity of identity, and the growing precariousness of the natural and constructed worlds around us. Whether through subversive humor, expressive abstraction, or non-Western forms of cosmological thinking, to name but a few of their methods, these artists demonstrate that there are pathways to be found, strategies of coping and healing to be discovered, and ways to come together even in a fractured time.

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This installation intermixes two series, Dura Pictures and Indexes. Each work in the Dura Pictures series presents one photographic image physically embedded within another, what the artist describes as placing a “moment in time within a different moment in time, just like memory does of the past in the present.” The photographs were made in the artist’s studio and record B. Ingrid Olson’s own performative interactions with handmade props and assorted materials, such as mirrors or printed matter set within constrictive ad hoc spaces. The images alternate between showing a first-person vantage point with a torso or toes breaking into the picture plane, and offering a mirrored reflection of the artist, often only partially seen.

Proto Coda, Index is a single artwork with thirty constituent parts—each is a replica of one of the thirty reliefs made by the artist between 2016 to 2022. With concave interior surfaces and irregular hanging heights, the forms each suggest a container for a specific body part, like a piece of armor or a casting mold. The reliefs mark the entire length of the wall, serving as placeholders for an absent body, both fractured and multiplied.

Artwork by Carly Glovinski ‘21.

Rooted in observation and fueled by a curiosity about the history of objects and handicraft processes, Carly Glovinski makes work that explores the make-do, resourceful attitudes associated with domestic craft and a reverence for nature. The elements of time and place are embedded in work that mines her surrounding coastal New Hampshire and Maine environment for inspiration and looks to the repetitive cycles of seasonal blooms and celestial orbits.

Most recently, Glovinski has created installations based on varieties of flowers that she grows in her own garden or has collected from friends and travel. Often used as ceremonial markers, flowers are present at events both good and bad: to celebrate, to mourn, to apologize, and to offer love, joy, comfort, and healing. Almanac is Glovinski’s largest pressed flower work to date. Spanning 100-feet, the work envisions the late April through mid-September northeastern New England growing season, through hundreds of painted and cut out blooms of dozens of flower varieties: cold hearty daffodils, violas, and bleeding hearts, to irises, Queen Anne’s lace, morning glories, and cosmos. By observing, tending, and preserving these flowers, the installation becomes a visual record of time and seasons passing, as well as a commentary on the labor of care.

Corey Daniels Gallery is pleased to present Life Forms Preview in collaboration with the 12 artist collective made up of Jackie Brown, Lynn Duryea, Leah Gauthier, Kazumi Hoshino, Elaine K. Ng, Bronwen O’Wril, Ashley Page, Veronica Perez, Celeste Roberge, Naomi David Russo, Ling-Wen Tsai and Erin Woodbrey. 

We’re thrilled to be the first venue to show work by all 12 artists, giving the public a precursor to their upcoming 4 year exhibition program throughout the state of Maine. Each artist is pushing the boundaries of contemporary sculpture and the work will be organically integrated throughout the gallery.

Works by Susan English, Julie Gross, and Aubrey Stone.

You know, the real world, this so-called world, is just something you put up with like everybody else. I’m in my element when I’m a little bit out of this world: then I’m in the real world – I’m on the beam. Because when I’m falling, I’m doing alright. When I’m slipping, I say, ‘Hey, this is interesting.’ It’s when I’m standing upright that bothers me… As a matter of fact, I’m really slipping most of the time. I’m like a slipping glimpser. - Willem de Kooning

A slipping glimpser. Someone who slides along a beam of light, finds the eternal in the transitory, and communicates it to the rest of us – to de Kooning, that is what it meant to be an artist. It’s almost impossible to find a better definition.

Art at Americas Society presents the first exhibition in New York City to center the artistic production of the Asian diaspora throughout Latin America and the Caribbean from the 1940s to the present. Focusing on postwar and contemporary art, the exhibition showcases the work of thirty artists from fifteen countries working in a range of artistic mediums including painting, sculpture, performance, photography, and video, to shed light into strategies and themes that resonate across a wide array of Asian diasporic practice in the region.

The exhibition embraces and performs the multiple and interrelated meanings embedded in the notion of appearance, inspired by Japanese Brazilian artist Lydia Okumura’s 1975 print by the same title. From acts of appearing and becoming visible—including different types of apparitions—to the idea of impressions and physical resemblance, artists in the show grapple with the complexities of negotiating (in)visibility, revisiting and remaking family archives and stories, and engaging and reconfiguring spiritual practices. The show also addresses abstraction as a formal strategy linked to language, the senses, and the body in the context of the Americas’ postwar art.  

Accompanying the show, we present a series of public programs:

- Ghost Stories x Asia Art Archives in America: A conversation with the Asianish collective.
   Wednesday, October 2, from 6 to 8 pm ET

- The Appearance: A conference presented by Americas Society and Asia Society.
   Tuesday, October 29, from 2:30 to 8 pm ET

- Art at Americas Society's Performance series: Dictée/Exilée by Suwon Lee.
   Wednesday, November 20, from 8 to 6 pm ET

The special exhibition “Platypus and Unicorn” at Boan1942 (Boan Inn, Tongui-dong) focuses on life forms that raise doubts about the human classification system. Who is the being that calls for change in the rigid categories that humans have established between life forms, such as species and species, male and female? This exhibition seeks to delve into the gap where the boundaries of classification become unclear and encounter the existence beyond it, thereby drawing a flexible system based on contact and connection.

The creatures drawn on cave walls by our distant ancestors and named by Adam in the Bible were organized into categories of species like a pharmacy drawer after extensive observation since the advent of taxonomy. Under this system, the species drawn as if they would remain forever took root in the shape of a tree through Charles Darwin, and they have numerous branches that constantly branch out and sometimes break off due to extinction. Then, by paying attention to the very small units of life that were excluded under the name of 'chaos', the base of the giant tree was divided into only three branches: archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes. Recent research is questioning the iconography of the tree itself by focusing on the movement of genes that transcend distances between species. In this way, our classification system is a process of deconstruction and reconstruction that is repeated as we encounter various beings and make adjustments.

The sense that humans can recognize and distinguish between living things has clearly played an essential role in survival. However, this sense often turns into an attitude of 'fixing' life to imperfect categories and forms of humans, and overlooks its dynamism and variability. In a poorly constructed hierarchy, some beings are banished to extinction. Therefore, we must constantly check what level the boundaries of classification give to the diversity of life and what beings they deny.

The four artists participating in the exhibition question the human attitude of categorizing life through encounters with different life forms. Artist Kim Hyo-jin captures the dynamic gestures of survival that static classifications such as plants and animals overlook on canvas. The artist focuses on the various ways in which life preserves itself and draws an imaginary ecosystem that transcends existing hierarchies. Artist Jeong Hye-jeong uses barnacles that mix inside and outside as “passages” to summon the various ecological spaces and times that she connects by drifting attached to other bodies. The traces spread out in the exhibition hall become the cornerstone for encountering the sticky world beyond the body classified as “barnacles.” Artist Baek Jeong-gi points out the point where the distinction between species becomes ambiguous by calling various species as one water. The water that moves through dozens of names makes us sense that life flows and circulates beyond the boundaries of the body. Writer Erin Johnson added love letters exchanged between biologist Rachel Carson and her same-sex lover Dorothy Freeman to a scene of studying plants with fluid sexual expression. Plants whose reproductive methods are different for each individual and therefore difficult to classify or conclude, scholars who study and preserve these plants, and the regretful words of love of a biologist facing death are mixed together to sing of the possibility of 'namelessness.' In this way, the participating writers capture the turning point from the boundary of classification to connection.

Ecology writer David Quammen says that “the walls of boundaries that classify life are porous, like Gore-Tex or woven fabric.”1) We recognize that the boundaries we build as humans are not thick walls but flexible “membranes,” and we meet and mingle with each other by penetrating them like liquid. When we focus on recognizing and encountering rather than classifying existence, we can see coexistence, not loss and renewal resulting from belonging and exclusion. In this way, old trees are covered with spider webs, and you and I are tangled messily. Life is the movement of moving through these spider webs and reaching each other.

Erin Johnson works with concepts of collectivity, dissent, and queer identity. She delves into the idea that categorizing systems, including science, are objective and infallible—that certain lives are superior to others, and that society is immune to them—while calmly intersecting with the invisible ideology of white supremacy. Cherishing the experience of collective “togetherness,” the artist does not dictate how we should look at her work, but simply evokes communal experiences by showing intimately connected bodies in a soft and natural way. Her works, which loosely hold objects, temporarily gather them, and then allow them to flow freely, are like “porous epidermis.”

A four person show featuring artworks by Meg Alexander, Amy Sudarsky and Stephen Mishol.

All our knowledge hast its origins in our perceptions … In nature there is no effect without a cause … Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments … Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass. Leonardo DaVinci

One of the roles of artists and scientists is to observe and describe the world.

What are the limits of our ability to see? How do we change that?

What do we learn by being deeply engaged, by looking as if for the first time?

And looking again, and again.

The artists in this exhibition are engaged with making an artwork as it progresses, observing/looking in real time, over time. The artwork itself makes these demands of the maker: How do we see? How do we not see? How do we remember what we see? This process of inquiry for both scientists and artists attempt to answer these questions as part of their respective practice. 

Alexander creates images and objects that are inspired by natural forms and systems. Her drawing projects are rooted in close looking at the objects, fields, and surface patterns that are her subjects. Whether working from direct observation (rocks, plants) or from imagination (as with her Hill/Hole series), Alexander’s interest in investigating how we perceive the world around us is evident. Her work is characterized by a methodical, almost scientific, process. She tends to work on a body of work over months or years, using drafts, sketches, studies, and variations as a means of pin-pointing what’s driving her curiosity. This focused, labor- and time-intensive process gives her work its emotional yet timeless character.

Alexander is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural

Council and was awarded an SMFA/Tufts University Alumni/ae Traveling Fellowship. Alexander exhibits regularly in Boston and New England; her work is included in many private and corporate collections throughout the world. She lives and works in Concord, MA and is represented by Ellen Miller Gallery, Boston, MA.

Winston Wächter Fine Art Seattle is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition with Brooklyn-based painter Audrey Stone. By Two is a series of paintings that engage the physical and figurative aspects of mirroring, as softly and attentively gradated compositions reflect each other through literal symmetry and stark visual balance. Through diptychs, paired paintings of the same series, and individual paintings with distinct compositional halves, Stone paints thin bands of gradually shifting color that complicate the divide between geometric abstraction and soft edged painting. The luminous “Ceiling” and “Safe Passage” series’ illicit the transportive framing of a window into formless sky, while the multi-panel “Way Down” and “Bend to Bend” present reciprocity through glowing parallels. In all of Stone’s paintings, colors melt into each other while retaining solid, distinct forms continuously ascending to a fever pitch of harmony.  

“The recurrent compositional element of symmetry provides inherent strength and harmony, akin to pulling the Lovers card in the Tarot, signifier of the bonds of relationship. That card is also associated with healing, and as I look around at a world that feels ever more divisive and oppositional, my desire is to offer a space to experience a sense of union and uplift. I hope these paintings are reflective of love, in my mind the most powerful antidote and perhaps the only solution to troubled times.” — Audrey Stone

Audrey Stone’s work has been exhibited widely across the United States, as well as in Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, England, France, and Japan. She has shown in group exhibitions at the Andy Warhol Museum, the Arkansas Art Center, the Columbus Museum, Kentler International Drawing Space, Schema Projects, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her work is in the collections of the Charles Schwab Print Program, NYU Langone, Cleveland Clinic, Credit Suisse, Fidelity Investments, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Sotheby’s London, and the Amateras Foundation in Sofia, Bulgaria. Stone lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Artwork by Carly Glovinski ‘21.

You Don’t Know Me brings together the work of four contemporary artists whose practices are based on the careful remaking of particular things. Through an alchemical process of observation, gestation, and creation, both the artist and the observed change - bringing a new, transitional object into form – a thing in suspension between being and becoming.

Carly Glovinski makes work that explores the make-do, resourceful attitudes associated with domestic craft and a reverence for nature and the great outdoors. The elements of time and place are embedded in her work and marked by repetitive processes and attention to detail. The past bumps up against the present in work that embraces a slip in perception.

Rachel Grobstein creates miniature sculptures and paintings based on objects from everyday life. She often works in series investigating artifacts, souvenirs, and collections. Her work isn’t aimed at replication; she’s interested in capturing specific gestures - tactile and material qualities that are often transformed in the process of making. Her work invites close scrutiny through a radical shift in scale.

Duncan Hewitt sees particular things - things that look back at him. He remakes them, most often carving and painting wood. This involves close observation and a process of making that is quite old. At the same time, the works are off kilter- something new felt in suspension between it is and it isn’t - no longer what they seem to be.

Justin Richel has an interest in artifice, simulacra, and trickster mythologies. His most recent body of work delves deeper into the inquiry of painting itself by asking the seemingly simple question, ‘What is painting?’ - answering this question in painstaking detail, with surprising results.