show #55:

NO PLACE LIKE

Curated by AN/OTHER NY (Asuka Goto, Nicole Maloof, Naomi Reis, Crys Yin,  Heidi Lau, Sun You)

Featuring: Mitsuko Brooks, Naomi Cohn, Yewen Dong, Valery Jung Estabrook, Mariano Del Rosario, Maria Fragoso, Em Kettner, Amanda Konishi, John Lee, Padma Rajendran, Dana Robinson, Jia Sung, Taro Takizawa, and Connie Zheng

Opening Reception: January 10th, 6-8

Dates: January 10th to February 9th, 2019

Field Projects and AN/OTHER NY are pleased to present No Place Like, featuring the works of Mitsuko Brooks, Naomi Cohn, Yewen Dong, Valery Jung Estabrook, Mariano Del Rosario, Maria Fragoso, Em Kettner, Amanda Konishi, John Lee, Padma Rajendran, Dana Robinson, Jia Sung, Taro Takizawa, and Connie Zheng.

The nature of home can be complicated and fluid, fluctuating between internal feelings of belonging and one’s placement in the external world. The works included in No Place Like build a complex understanding around this familiar word through the process of making. A home can be physical, located in a specific time or place, pointed to on a map, a structure where material objects rooted in the domestic proliferate and become the backdrop to one’s life. It can be an emotional space, familiar, or of collective memory, where the trace of one’s community and family remains, accessed through the recollection of a gesture, a habit, or everyday routines. Or home can simply be where one exists, changing moment to moment as time moves forward.

Cohn and Kettner conjure domestic talismanic objects through the form of the vessel and the discipline of craft, while Fragoso and Rajendran point to the spaces that house them and their owners. Through repetition of movement, Estabrook and Lee linger on a private moment in time. Robinson and Sung explore cultural stories shared by many, referencing popular media from the past and present. Dong focuses on the memory of material that bears witness to traces of the hand, while Konishi’s abstractions use the repetition of shapes and mark-making to suggest landscape. Brooks and Zheng mine items consumed in our daily lives to glean meaning from the detritus of the banal, while Del Rosario and Takizawa pare down complex objects and information in search of a kind of universality.

AN/OTHER NY is a group of artists, writers, and curators advocating for Asians and Asian-Americans in the arts. Founded in 2015, they are an evolving community for workshopping artistic practices, and a safe space for collective thinking and action around issues of race and representation, transnational identities, and political engagement in the arts.