ART CITIES: N.York- From the Fringe

After their 2016 University of North Carolina Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition at Weatherspoon Art Museum, 7 women artists, present their work at A.I.R. Gallery. Ivana Beck, Amanda Crary, Carmen Neely, Kate Robinson Sheena Rose, Alex Soler and Richelle Soper, working across mediums draw with a diversity of materials, construct spaces that combine the delicate and the rough.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: A.I.R. Gallery Archive

The artists in the exhibition “Fringe”, through a diverse and eclectic series of works grounded in the voices that defined each of these young women all over the world, the voices that ground them tie them inextricably to home. Ivana Beck finds ways to describe her fragile relationship to family and country as an immigrant from Serbia. Growing up on a farm in Virginia, Alex Soler describes her most formative relationship being with her horse. Those tactile, sensory, and non-verbal impressions are imbedded in her sculptural language. Amanda Crary creates an artifact of meal shared with family through cyanotypes that capture the fleeting quality of those quiet moments, her work tries to hold onto the intangible and succeeds in freezing time. With humor and flamboyance artist Carmen Neely’s mixed media paintings unravel a private language that she cultivated as a child bringing inanimate objects and scribbles to life. Kate Robinson similarly opens up a Lemuel Gulliver’s world of fantastic fragile precarious structures. Sheena Rose’s work explores racial, cultural, and sexual identities constructed from her home in Barbados. Richelle Soper uses her own body as a point of departure, her strange and suggestive rubber tube reliefs punctuate the buoyancy and deceivingly playful aspects of this show and the common drawing vernaculars these woman share regardless of their medium. In various literal and abstract manifestations, this exhibition reveals melancholy, humorous, and defiant reflections on the points of departure that tether them to this time.

Info: A.I.R. Gallery, 155 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, New York, Duration 4-20/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.airgallery.org