Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson

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Painting

Artists' Statement

For the past ten years, artists Geddes Levenson and Annie Blazejack have been collaborating. Together they experiment with painting as a way to conjure up impossible places. The world of paint is infinitely malleable, and they set loose a series of industrious explorers to manipulate their painted environment, opening portals, eating brush strokes, and merging with cosmic landscapes.

The partially obscured or dissolving figures in their paintings are almost always women, and generally engaged in some kind of mysterious work. Perhaps only a foot or hand is in view, or perhaps the figure is camouflaged with her background, but she is still an agent of action, a portal through which the viewer can enter the painted plane. 

The environments of the paintings are often fractured or distorted, developing a tension between recognition and confusion. Their fragmented nature raises questions of scale and solidity. Blazejack and Levenson’s vivid color pallet and confident brushstrokes lure viewers into the unfamiliar; a painted space with it’s own system of rules and physics.

Artist Links

www.AnniesAndGeddes.com

Vickie Pierre

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Multi Media

Artist Statement

My work is informed and inspired by memory, popular culture, surrealism and the decorative and ornamental arts. This inspiration has manifested itself in years of collecting a myriad of materials that suggests a sense of beauty, design and the natural world.

My practice includes various techniques and materials. Often times the materials that I employ are vintage, mass-produced objects (including Avon perfume bottles and Syroco decorative wall art) that serve as muses for my two-dimensional works such as paintings, drawings and collages or as integral elements within my assemblages and installations. With the guidance of these appropriated source materials, my continued focus is on the exploration of self-identity, with references to my Haitian culture and mythology, while concurrently considering feminine tropes and historic and contemporary cultural politics. 

The combination of these re-contextualized objects along with the titles and texts, stemming from song lyrics, constructs a narrative that continues the inner dialogue of identity and socialization. Alternately, the compositions of the assemblages and paper works allude to biological and botanical structures, while maintaining base aesthetic sentiments of femininity, beauty, romanticism and sensuality.

When my work is observed, my hope is that the public will initially be drawn in by the playful whimsy of the "characters" and design elements. However, in engaging further with the work, I would like viewers to contemplate their own experiences with culturally loaded imagery or objects and consider how that may influence their understanding of identity formation and identity politics in the broader culture.

Artist Links

www.vickiepierre.com

Nick Mahshie

Artist Statement

Nick Mahshie builds installations, creates adornment for the body, and invents visually stimulating environments for his audience to explore. These are spaces where drawing, painting, screen printing, and collage intersect to create the saccharine landscapes of his imagination. As a Miami native, his work reflects the pop culture, clichéd tropical aesthetic and organic resilience that define the Caribbean-American landscape. 

Simple and readily available materials allow him to prolifically create installations and wearable art with ceremonious appeal. Inspired by the fantasy of carnivals and the necessity–bred resourcefulness of his Cuban elders, he assembles cardboard, reconstructed used garments and painted surfaces to create work that is both visually saturated and socially engaging to an audience far beyond the art-consuming public. The size of his most recent installations summons the public to gather beneath kaleidoscopic canopies and within protective habitats, eliciting a feeling of transformation and healing possible through the collective reimagining of what a shared public space is and can be.

Nick holds a Masters of Design in Fashion, Body & Garment from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago under the direction of artist Nick Cave, and a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. He lived for five years in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he is better know as visual and performance artist Tranqui Yanqui.

He is the recipient of the 2017 RumChata Fellowship Award, and his artwork has been recognized by national Argentine newspapers such as La Nación, Clarín, and The Buenos Aires Herald, as well as international publications such as The New York Times and Time Out Magazine. He has been exhibited in ArteBA 2010 (Appetite Gallery), Fundacion Telefonica, and Fundacion OSDE (Buenos Aires), as well as Le Petit Bain (Paris), StarkArt (Zurich), and the Children’s Museum of the Arts (NYC).

He recently launched Tranqui Prints, a platform to develop his textile and installation design while working to build a shared workshop for other printmakers in Miami.

Artist Links

www.nickmahshie.com

@tranquiyanqui

@tranquiprints