Closing Reception with Performance: Spatial Essays in Room 106 at Real Art Ways

Exhibition Documentation (PDF)

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by 2022 Real Art Award recipient Ying Ye.

Through her work, Ye links food, labor, and the body to themes of cultural identity, intergenerational trauma, and systemic oppression experienced by many Asian Americans. Throughout Burn the Midnight Oil, Ye examines the use of soybeans in the making of tofu (especially in the form of fragile tofu skin), referencing the process as a metaphor for her family’s experience as Chinese immigrants and workers in the food industry. Combining elements of performance, sculpture, video, and text, Ye looks toward community building and shared resources as a way to heal from the stresses of life under capitalism.

About the Artist

Ying Ye is an interdisciplinary Chinese artist who incorporates her family’s tradition of cooking into her work. Ye’s work addresses the “burden that younger generations of Asians and Asian Americans [experience] in American culture.” Ye has exhibited at venues including Farmington Valley Arts Center, Five Points Gallery, and the Ely Center of Contemporary Art in New Haven. Ye earned a BFA in Painting and Sculpture from Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford in 2019.

About the Real Art Awards

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2022 Real Art Awards was juried by multidisciplinary artist Carlos Motta, curator and creative strategist Yona Backer, and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2022 Real Art Awards is supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Edward C. & Ann T. Roberts Foundation.    

Real Art Ways presents It’s Going to Rain, a solo exhibition by Real Art Award winner Tielin Ding

Before a storm comes,  swirling vortices of air bring leaves floating and in motion.  Brooms, fans, umbrellas; gathering, murmuring; It’s a party with flickering lights. Yes, it‘s going to rain. 

It’s Going to Rain is a multimedia exhibition that reflects on the relationships between objects, environments, and their shared states of uncertainty. John Cage asked, “When a truck passes by a music school or a factory, which is more musical?” Tielin Ding approaches his exhibition, It’s Going to Rain, with a similar spirit; pondering the buildup of energy before a storm and the tension that precedes a natural eruption.  When does the storm truly begin? The umbrella, a common motif in this exhibition, symbolizes protection and faith. The color yellow recurs throughout his practice. He considers the yellow lines on roads, suggesting a sense of both continuation and separation. By focusing on the friction and pulse between things and their environments, It’s Going to Rain presents a look at the moments between safety and uncertainty, logic and whimsy.  

About the Artist

Tielin is a wanderer, observer, and mixed-media process-based artist interested in repetition of forms and movements; operation of chances and metaphors. In his installation works, he likes displacing objects, shifting their scales, and relocating their context, aiming to build his own constellation with a leap of thought and a slow surprise.  He holds the belief that “At the center of a mirage, is its transformation”. “Chance favors a prepared mind.” A lot of times, inspiration comes from his observation while wandering, while playing, while living. Sometimes, it can be mystic and improvisational. He has been very interested in drifting in the field of language and space, risking getting lost from point A to point B. Born in 1996 in Chongqing, China. Tielin Ding is a wanderer, observer, and mixed-media artist currently based in New York and Shanghai. He graduated with an MFA in photography and related media at Parsons School of Design, The New School in NYC, with a bachelor’s background in architecture and engineering at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture. He exhibited his works at Site Santa Fe in New Mexico, Brand Library in California, Garrison Art Center/BAU Gallery/The FLAG Art Foundation in New York, Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana, Noorderlicht International Photo Festival in the Netherlands, and Reclaim Award in Germany. Past residency he attended includes Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, Abbott Watts Photography Residency at Monson Arts, Nars Foundation Satellite Residency on Governors Island, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation residency, Millay Arts, VCCA, and Volland Foundation.   

To read Jared Quinton‘s essay on “Its Going to Rain” please click HERE

Jared Quinton is a curator, writer, and currently the Emily Hall Tremaine Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT, where he oversees the pioneering MATRIX exhibition series and the museum’s postwar and contemporary collection and galleries. He has organized exhibitions and programs at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Kitchen (New York), Terremoto La Postal (Mexico City), Ely Center of Contemporary Art (New Haven), Gallery 44 (Toronto), Abrons Art Center (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Chicago Artists Coalition, Institute of Fine Arts (New York), Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago, and the Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA). He has written for Artforum, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, and e-flux, and has contributed to exhibition catalogues for the Hammer Museum, Blanton Museum, MCA Chicago, and Prospect New Orleans. He has held the Marcia Reid Marsted and Jeffrey G. Marsted Curatorial Fellowship at the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellowship at the MCA Chicago, and the Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellowship at the Whitney Independent Study Program, been a guest critic at Hartford Art School / University of Hartford, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Chicago, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and juried prizes for Provincetown Art Association and Museum and Holy Cross University. He holds art history degrees from Williams College and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Real Art Ways presents thick, hazy, cleer, blew, a solo exhibition by Shona Macdonald. 

You’re invited to join us for an artist talk with Shona Macdonald and Peter Albano on Friday, October 24, at 6pm. Free admission – no registration necessary to attend. 

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thick, hazy, cleer, blew explores the effects of weather as ephemeral, mundane records of our daily lives. In addition to weather and forecasts, these three bodies of work explore the atmosphere and atmospheric perspective.

‘The Vapors so Whiten’ series pulls imagery out of layers of dusty pigment applied to toned paper. Small in scale, these works depict either cars driving in and out of visibility on roads with no beginning or end.  With no points of reference, it is often uncertain in which direction the vehicles are heading. In the ‘Car, Eyes’ series, floating cars bob amidst unidentified bodies of water; adrift, they are rendered useless. The third series, ‘Blow In’ suggests images of laundry, flags, and leaves, all being buffeted by the effects of wind. 

Macdonald engages with qualities of atmosphere through slow and muted approaches. The laborious, hand-made nature of her work leads to a more embodied experience of what the weather means and how it affects us physically and imaginatively while the indecipherable atmosphere she conjures from multiple layers of pencil marks coupled with hazy imagery leads, ultimately, to a kind of disorienting opacity.

Curator’s Comment:

Shona Macdonald’s lush and intimate drawings reflect on our complicated relationship with weather. In a sleight of hand, the work depicts the molecules around its subject matter as well as the subject matter itself. Her laborious attention to the space between the viewer and the viewed is a demonstration of envelopment. What happens when the water surrounds us? We float; or we don’t.

Weather effects our sense of time.  Weather patterns cycle, as with our orbit, on a scale that is greater than our ability to fully understand it.  Some would say that human action holds an insignificant weight against the scale of these orbital systems. The world will spin and wash itself occasionally.

The subject matter in these works are engulfed by atmosphere; whether in its liquid form, a dense mist, or thick air.  The result is a lopsided example of conflict.  The cars (nor the cloth) have any real power within these compositions.  They hang at the whim of a grander order- one made of microscopic elements; molecules, particles, pigments.  I find an odd peace in the hopeless future of these characters, as they crowdsurf across color towards an unknown fate.

This work makes me feel small in the greatest of ways.  It reminds me of humanity’s pixel-sized significance within the history of what Carl Sagan called “[our] pale blue dot.”  The majority of my existence has been spent feeling in control, under control, or out of control. But, when I view these works I don’t consider control at all.  I feel like a particle; amidst a wave of something I’m not meant to understand.  I like that feeling.

Acquiescence is the reluctant acceptance of something without protest.  Politically, I find this concept revolting but, spiritually I find it necessary. At some point, we’ve all been caught in a storm.  Whether we dodge the rain, seek shelter, or face the skies, there comes a point where our shoulders drop, and we acquiesce as the sky comes falling down.

-Peter Albano

About the Artist

Shona Macdonald was born in Scotland and currently lives in Western Massachusetts. Selected solo exhibitions include McDonough Museum of Art, (2023), Zillman Art Museum, (2020-21), Brattleboro Art Center and Museum (2018), Roswell Art Museum, (2011), Tarble Arts Center (2015), Gridspace, (2014) Engine Room, Wellington, New Zealand, (2010), Proof Gallery, Boston, MA (2009), Reeves Contemporary, NY, NY (2008), Den Contemporary, LA, CA, (2007) and Galerie Refugium, Berlin, Germany, (2002.)  Two person exhibitions include the Ballina Art Center, Ireland (2022), Dayton Art Center (2018,) and Linden Sculpture Garden (2012.)  She has shown in over 100 group exhibitions across the United States, UK, Australia, and Canada.  Reviews of her work include Art in America, Art News, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times, Sacramento Bee, and Boston Globe.  She has been an invited Visiting Artist at over fifty institutions, including The University of Wyoming (2023), Georgia State University (2007), the University of Alberta, and the University of Calgary, Canada, (both 2002). Shona Macdonald is a 2009 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award.  Selected artist residencies include UCross, Ragdale, VCCA, Roswell, Kimmel Harding Nelson, and internationally, at Can Serrat, Spain,  Ballinglen and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, both Ireland.    

Exhibition Documentation (PDF)

Real Art Ways presents Megafauna (these desperate earthly forms), a solo exhibition by Real Art Awardee Ezra Moth. 

My work teeters on the edge of speculation and functionality, between science fiction and practicality, and it always deals with the intersection of ecology and queer liberation. It is not medium specific and has been presented in the form of sculptures, speculative agriculture interventions, and performance artworks. Largely, I hope to present thoughtful and radical alternatives to the climate catastrophe, centering nonbinary and nonhuman perspectives in these future visualizations.   My materials are often living organisms: plants, algae, fungi, and bacteria. Part mad scientist and part drag persona, my art practice ricochets from sublime hopefulness to postapocalyptic despair, between humor and profundity. I often begin with a specific problem: unsustainable industrial agriculture practices, pharmaceutical companies’ monopolization of access to hormones, or water pollution – and from there, my storytelling, sculptures, and installations offer hypothetical and fantastical solutions. I work in a community biology lab, hybridizing fennel plants for use in hormone replacement therapy. Alongside its strong estrogenic properties, fennel is also a host plant for native swallowtail caterpillars. These tall herbaceous bodies and their metamorphosizing residents had me imagining a future where gender is not regulated by policy or monopolized by pharmaceutical companies. Could I grow a garden of hormones in my backyard, and with those gardens, could my trans friends harvest and synthesize their own gender? Megafauna (these desperate earthly forms) presents the process of that research: concentrated phytoestrogen extracted from the mutant plants created in my laboratory. Refrigerated and surrounded by traces of the scientific process, these vials of liquid are connected via a metaphorical umbilicus to a vast bioplastic form that inhabits the gallery space. This thing is neither vessel nor human nor animal. It is a specter that faces toward the present violence against trans bodies. A monstrous amalgamation of this fear: a symbiotic sludge of gelatine and seaweed and fennel and flesh.

About the Artist

Ezra Moth is an interdisciplinary artist whose work engages with ecology, queer identity, and the Anthropocene. Immersed in fantasy and dystopian futures, their installations contrive narratives through the lens of eco-feminism. Having studied sustainable agriculture and sculpture at UCONN, and performance art at Goldsmiths, University of London, their work spans both scientific curiosities and dreamlike utopias. Their installations and performances have been presented internationally in exhibitions and residencies such the Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival in Greece, Ortegay Y Gasset projects in Gowanus, RIXC center for new media culture in Latvia, Joya Arte + Ecologia in Spain, and the Queens Botanical Garden. They are currently based between Tolland, CT and Brooklyn, NY. 

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