I am thrilled to invite you to opening receptions this September at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Howard Yezerski Gallery and Samsøñ.
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery
Reconfigure
time + date:
Friday
September 1st
6pm – 9pm
Exhibition dates
September 1st to October 1st
location:
450 Harrison Ave.
Boston, MA
for more information and visuals:
Please check out this insightful piece to learn more about my process and background as an artist.
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to present Reconfigure, an exhibition of painters Ariel Basson Freiberg and Lavaughan Jenkins, focused on deconstructing the human form. Both artists utilize the physical properties of paint as a means of obscuring and distorting the figure, often using their own image as a base. Their work opens conversations about identity, memory, and sexuality with a playful use of color and medium.
Ariel Basson Freiberg‘s paintings are intense, acidic statements about female sexuality that offer the viewer temptation and denial in a single image. Freiberg’s women emerge from a saturated background in undeniably erotic poses, but with all of the key information concealed with thick smears of paint: faces, genitals, anything that might expose her subjects. She embraces the inherent quality of paint as a sensual medium-described with words like silken, smooth, thick, creamy-and uses it as a means of suggestion without indulgence.
_________________________________________________________________________
Howard Yezerski Gallery
Trespass Daughter
time + date:
Friday
September 8
5pm – 8pm
exhibition dates:
September 8 – October 10
location:
450 Harrison Avenue
Boston, MA
for more information and visuals:
Trespass Daughter is the visualization of daughters reaching into history– bringing erased identities into visual fields of color and paint. Trespassing into patriarchal spaces, which they know they should not enter, has and continues to be essential for all women in our multicultural world.
For this exhibition, a group of intimate paintings focuses on the interaction of the psychosexual body with vibrant acts of censorship. As daughters, we are viewed, and therefore view ourselves, as trespassers from birth. In this context, trespassing is not an overt action but a state of being. To reconcile this state of being, we both censor ourselves and are censored by the world around us. Exposed, erased, obscured, the body rides in-between worlds. The body’s vessel carries sexuality in public space while it continues to intersect with the private space of mind and home.
The physicality of paint colliding with the body demands immediacy and urgency from the viewer. In some works, the figure is deep in a color field and the gesture of color appears to have been thrown or smeared onto a screen. The gestures act as an ideogram, both a composite of an idea and a will. In addition, the work expresses color as an event, similar to color experiences of a flicker of warm sunlight through soft rhythmic leaves.
It is still transgressive for women to articulate their sexual desires and identity in any form they choose. Some of the paintings explore traditional beliefs of the gendered gaze but the physicality of the gestures contaminate the framework of those expectations. Authenticity and clarity is found in the contradictory forms cohabitating the body of imagination.
________________________________________________________________________
Samsøñ
Immigrancy
time + date:
Friday
September 8st
5pm – 8pm
exhibition dates:
September 8 – November 11
location:
450 Harrison Ave / 29 Thayer Street
Boston, MA 02118
T +617 357 7177
T +617 357 7177
F +617 357 5559
immigrant (n.), expat (n.), asylum seeker (n.), refugee (n.), tourist (n.), fugitive (n.), exile (n.) homelessness (n.)
All of the above are words used to describe people and situations related to the individuals who come to live in, are moved, travel throughout, or escape from, a foreign country or condition. The noun we assign to each differing situation has a distinct connotation and stigma attached; we see manifestations of these differing connotations in legislation, in travel bans, in fetishized radical fantasies of revolution, and in the selection of words themselves (e.g. the use of ‘expat’ for people of European descent and ‘immigrant’ for people of color). Despite their situational differences, all peoples navigating immigrancy hold a powerful position, in that, as Christian Viveros-Fauné states in “Confessions of an American Refugee” on Affidavit, they are “invaluable and threatening to the new leaders in the U.S. Not only are immigrants among America’s most defenseless residents-making them the easiest to scapegoat-they also bear inconvenient witness by their very presence to a history of authoritarianism that complicates the power-hungry narratives of [our political] figures […]Artists must take a cue from America’s most vulnerable residents: its refugees. Before you get back to work at your studio or office, assume, like many of America’s most defenseless immigrants, that everything you treasure- home, family, well being your own hard-fought place in the world-can be taken away from you tomorrow.
Confirmed artists include Carlos Jiménez Cahua, Frohawk Two Feathers, William Pope.L, Lalla Essaydi, Ariel Basson Freiberg, Jeffrey Gibson, Anicka Yi, Carlos Martiel, and Josephine Halvorson.
Current exhibitions:
Through September 17th:
Boston Center For the Arts
REAL/IDEAL (Turning Utopia into Reality)
curated by David Guerra
Upcoming
Amplified Heart
September 14th – January 2018:
Boston College O’Neill Library, Level Three Gallery.
This exhibition is sponsored by Art, Art History, and Film Department
and the Boston College Libraries.
Spring 2018:
University Hall Gallery, UMass Boston
Ariel Basson Freiberg 