Keith Clougherty: Homestead Metabolism at Real Art Ways

2018 Real Art Awards recipient Keith Clougherty will present a new installation of works created with and inspired by his Great Aunt Mary.

Keith Clougherty practices social sculpture, creating objects, installations, and experiences using his ancestry and the history of land as a starting point. The vignettes in this installation include objects from his Aunt Mary’s house as well as artworks inspired by her life. Clougherty’s work questions our understanding of history by utilizing a blunt approach in exploring the continued effects of colonialism in North America. His work explores topics as broad and varied as elder care, Irish ancestry, economics, ecology, and production.

Read an article in the Hartford Courant about Keith’s and Mateo Nava’s Exhibitions.

About the Artist
Born in Miami Beach, Florida, Keith Clougherty attended The Design and Architecture Senior High in Miami. During this time he was selected as one of ten Visual Art finalists in the 2009 YoungArts program, a prestigious national competition sponsored by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts (NFAA). Keith earned his undergraduate degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. In addition to his art and care practices, Clougherty is a member of The FANG Collective, a group of politically active organizers and community advocates. Working with FANG has helped galvanize his social sculpture to directly address issues like white supremacy, capitalism, and global warming. Keith currently resides in Braintree, Massachusetts.

More about the Real Art Awards here.

The 2018 Real Art Awards is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation.

Colin McMullan is an interdisciplinary social practice artist interested in research and collaborative work involving wild foods, indigeneity, environmental justice, and decolonization. Experimental Research On The Nonexistence of Borders is a video installation work, in which an American field research scientist character performs experiments to prove the insubstantiality of political barriers from a natural law perspective.

The video was produced on location at the fence on the closed border between Armenia and Turkey. This video is a part of a series of works utilizing humor and pathos to question the legitimacy of political borders and promote transnational identity formation.

Colin performs as a somewhat obstinate, naive professor, conducting field research experiments to prove that borders have no meaningful impact on soil, air, water, flora, fauna, and human populations in the border region. The conceit of the work is that natural law defies the limitations of human legal constructs.

Political borders are intangible, ephemeral, imaginary, contrived, and highly permeable. Biological populations in border zones, including humans, are often at some liberty to defy these abstract limitations in service of greater, simpler truths.

The Experimental Research On The Nonexistence of Borders video will be accompanied by a short video on the concurrent social art project, Tree Spa for Urban Forest Healing, which will take place from Saturday, March 16 through Saturday, March 23.

About the Artist
Emcee C.M., Master of None is the pseudonym of Colin McMullan. He has a practice of active, cooperative, social, public art often utilizing vehicles, play, conversation, moving pictures, publications, and food, for which he has received institutional support from LMCC, IPG, CAG, ISCP, CUE, CBA, BHK, BBBP, Eyelevel BQE, ICA Yerevan, Smack Mellon, Skowhegan, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, Flux Factory, the Aldrich, Artspace, i-park, el Taller Boricua, and Real Art Ways.

He is currently based in Hartford, Connecticut, performing transnational “Experimental Research on the Nonexistence of Borders,” and operating the “Tree Spa for Urban Forest Healing.” Recent professional highlights include shows at Dorsky Gallery in New York, Real Art Ways in Hartford, the Museum of Modern Art in Yerevan.

Learn more at this link.

Opening Thursday, March 21, 6-8 PM, during Creative Cocktail Hour
Artist Talk: Sunday, March 24, 2:30-4 PM

2018 Real Art Awards recipient Liona Nyariri presents a new installation. Exploring the complexities of colonization, language, and mythology, Nyariri’s multidisciplinary work challenges how we understand systems. Utilizing scholarly research in the fields of linguistics and history, Nyariri constructs an alternative mythology utilizing both historic and contemporary narratives. Her installation creates a visceral feeling, making real the complicated emotions and experiences of her character, the Pidgin.

From Nyariri’s Artist Statement
“Liona Nyariri’s work revolves around the study of pidgin languages (similar to creoles or patois) that came from Southern Africa during European colonization. A pidgin language emerges when one or more languages come together to form a hybrid.

Nyariri is specifically focused on English as part of British colonialism and the colonization of Zimbabwe and South Africa. Nyariri uses her research to propel the creation of her own mythology around a character known as ‘Pidgin.’ This character is meant to represent the physical manifestation of pidgin languages and is the metaphor through which she explores how mythologies and language intersect and how they are used for political, social and economic gain or otherwise.

Nyariri’s process includes creating text work and objects that perpetuate the mythology of the character, Pidgin.”

About the Artist
Liona R. Nyariri (b. 1991) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in Fine Art from Parsons The New School of Design and completed her Whitney Independent Study Program fellowship in 2017.

Her work has been presented at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, AC Institute, Participant Inc., Long Island City Art Fair, Gallery MOMO, Cape Town Month of Photography, Young Blood Gallery, AVA Gallery and others. Nyariri is the recipient of the ABSA Art and Life award as well as a top finalist for the Sasol New Signatures Award.

Nyariri has completed a residency with Artist Alliance Inc., New York and is currently completing a fellowship in Germany at the Hochschule Für Bidende Künste Braunschweig, funded by the state of Lower Saxony (BS Projects scholarship 2018/19).

The 2018 Real Art Awards is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation.

Real Art Ways presents new large scale paintings by Gil Scullion.

Artist Talk – Saturday, April 27 | 2:30 PM

Using hand-cut stencils on cardboard, Empty Spaces utilizes imagery culled from uninhabited hallways, kitchens, and other domestic scenes. The resulting paintings contain an eerie sense of familiarity, upended by the lack of bodies these spaces are meant for. Scullion’s use of the photomechanical texture of halftones as well as repetition furthers the less-than-human feeling of these pieces.

From his Artist Statement
“The paintings comprising the two-dimensional elements of Empty Spaces are produced through the use of stencils, which challenges conventional notions of the original and the handmade. As such they take on a singularly theatrical quality; they exist solely for the sake of the overall effect, only for the sake of the show. The artworks dispense with any notion of autonomy or even a sustainable object quality. These works are hollow stand-ins for what is expected from art. They will ultimately be discarded. They are an absence masquerading as a presence.”

About the Artist
Gil Scullion is an artist living and working in Middletown, Connecticut. Upon finishing his undergraduate studies, Scullion moved from Austin, Texas to New York City. There, his work developed in a conceptual manner before he pursued graduate studies at the State University of New York Albany.

His work has been featured at Real Art Ways, the De Cordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, P.S.1 in Long Island City, New York, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut and the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

He has taught for the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Wesleyan University and Manchester Community College. His work has received support in the form of grants from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, the Hartford Downtown Council and the Middletown Commission on the Arts.

Featured image: Sitting Room (detail)

Combining found objects and materials with yarn, Angelica Hilliman Cotto creates sculptures that subvert the familiar to create intriguing compositions. Open spaces, spokes and rubber straps create intricate shadows on the wall, acting as an additional layer in her work by creating a greater sense of depth.

Artist Statement
“The Forever Bound project addresses addiction, unjust laws, mental health, our darker attachments, bad habits, betrayal, toxic relationships, and all of the things that keep us chained when we hunger for true freedom. It is the notion of being stagnant, caged, limited, restricted, confined. How do we become liberated? And what does that look like? Riding bicycles allows for a taste of true liberation, physically pushing to move past something. Forever Bound uses deconstructed bicycles to do the exact opposite, where they now behave as cages rendering (the viewer) immobile and oppressed.” – Angelica Hilliman Cotto

About the Artist
Angelica Hilliman Cotto was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She grew up in the Blue Hills neighborhood surrounded by a family of activists, artists, politicians, and community organizers. At the age of 13, she enrolled in a progressive boarding school in Williamstown, Massachusetts where she learned to stretch canvases and experimented with oil paint. Her artistic style was influenced by the travel back and forth between the vibrant urban setting of Hartford and the rural environment of the Berkshires. Her painting became very free and gestural, with the act of painting becoming more of a dance.

After high school, she pursued a painting degree at Syracuse University and later transferred to the sculpture department at Hartford Art School. There she found joy in the freedom to use anything and everything for materials. She produced multiple sound pieces, as well as work that incorporated ritual and nostalgic items.

Cotto has installed work at Spark Contemporary Art Space, Artspace Hartford, Pumphouse Gallery and The Mill. Her paintings were recently displayed at several businesses in the Parkville area of Hartford, including Firebox Restaurant, Story and Soil coffee shop, and Little River Restoratives.

Cotto is also a member of Girl on Girl, a collective of female-identifying artists with chapters in Syracuse, New York and Los Angeles that provides a supportive community for collaboration and growth across all mediums. Angelica lives in Hartford’s North End, works as a teacher through the YWCA and ride bikes as her main form of transportation.

About Real Wall
Real Wall is a series of wall-mounted exhibitions taking place in between formal gallery spaces. Artists are invited to engage with the space in experimental ways meaningful to their practices in short-run exhibitions.

On view in our Video Room is American At Work by Ohio-based artist Kelley O’Brien.

In her multidisciplinary practice, O’Brien explores how social systems are created and maintained through architecture, both physical and constructed. In American At Work, we watch Angel, a naturalized American citizen from Mexico City and General Services Administration employee at the Anthony J. Celebrezze Federal Building in Cleveland as he performs one of the duties of his position. While he removes and replaces the outgoing portraits of Barack Obama and Joe Biden with that of Donald Trump and Mike Pence, the viewer is reminded of the continued effort of the current administration to wall off his homeland.

From her artist statement, “I produce interruptions that act to reveal the affective dimensions of architectural and social systems. My practice takes the form of site-specific works, to provide alternative contexts by which to understand lived environments. Through the creation of aesthetic interventions such as: radio broadcasts, historical landmarkers, personal interviews, and literal maps I aim to locate myself, individuals, and communities within the intangible context of their social relations.”

For more information on Kelley O’Brien and her work, visit her website.

Featured image: American At Work still

Artist Talk: Saturday, March 9 | 2:30 PM 

2018 Real Art Award recipient Niki Kriese presents new works in her solo exhibition Chewing the Scenery. In her paintings, Kriese utilizes vernacular locations like gardens or skateparks to craft complex figure ground studies. The resulting images contain a strong sense of nuance while delving into issues surrounding duality, specificity, and sense of place. Her compositions contain a playful weirdness while simultaneously referencing abandonment.

Says Visual Arts Coordinator Neil Daigle Orians, “Niki’s work allows, and in fact encourages, the viewer to imagine a space that is familiar, but not too familiar. During a studio visit, I fell in love with her process of collaging images that ultimately become the disjointed, technicolor spaces of color and texture.”

On view January 17 – March 31, 2019
Opening reception: Thursday, January 17, 6-8 PM during Creative Cocktail Hour
Artist talk: Saturday, March 9, 3 PM

About the Artist
After barely graduating with her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2007, Niki Kriese moved to New York in search of fame, fortune, and falafel. She doesn’t remember anything before that. She makes art and lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and freaking adorable kids.

About the Real Art Awards
The 2018 Real Art Awards competition was open at no charge to artists living in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Niki was one of six artists chosen from a field of 286 applicants. The three jurors were multimedia artist Saya Woolfalk; New Britain Museum of American Art Director Min Jung Kim; and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins.

The 2018 Real Art Awards is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation.

Featured image: Between Us (detail), 2018, 20” x 24”, acrylic on canvas

Downstream is an exhibition of sculptural paper works by artist Barbara Hocker. Her work explores nature, creating experiential installations and pieces that engage the viewer in a serene manner.

From her artist statement:
Viewers have often told me that my work is very peaceful, quiet, and serene. I think this comes from my love of being alone in the woods or at the shore and trying to bring that feeling to my art making. My ongoing practices of Tai Chi/meditation and study of East Asian metaphysics and aesthetics also inform my art practice. Yin and yang, being and nonbeing, stillness and movement, light and dark, sea and sky, surface and depth, artist and viewer, self and nature – I am interested in exploring how one can see beyond polarities to sense the invisible and mysterious unity underlying them.

Says Visual Arts Coordinator Neil Daigle Orians, “Part of what makes Barbara’s work so fascinating is the forms and structures she utilizes to convey her imagery. By utilizing books as an artform, she’s tapping into the history of language and the culture of story. Her flatworks exploit the flexibility of the medium, taking digitally printed images and crafting painterly compositions that mimic the fibrous nature of her kozo papers.”

About the Artist
Barbara Hocker is a Connecticut native with extensive experience creating and exhibiting work including solo shows and projects in Hartford, New Haven, Newport, and Boston. She has work in several corporate and private collections, including the permanent collection of The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan and several related hospitals in New York and New Jersey. Awards received include an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Greater Hartford Arts Council, a Creation of New Work Initiative Grant from the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation, and an Artist Resource Trust Fellowship from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. She holds a degree in Fibers from Syracuse University’s College of Visual & Performing Arts and attended Cranbrook Academy of Arts. Barbara lives in Bolton, Connecticut and maintains a studio in the Arbor Arts Center in Hartford. Her art process has been informed by her practice of Yoga, Tai Chi and Qi Gong for more than 25 years.

Learn more at her website.

Featured image: Woven Water XXII (detail) – 2018, 23″ x 90″, pigment print, monotype, rice paper, encaustic medium

Utilizing the camera as a mark making tool, Keri Halloran creates images that exploit the painterly possibilities of photography. In this body of work, I bet burning alive would be beautiful., Halloran captures ambiguous images that exist in a liminal space between reality and fiction, literally blurring the lines between what is and is not recognizable. Combining this with a sensitivity to materials and installation methods, the result allows the viewer to engage in her photographs as objects, images, and an expansive collage on the wall.

From her artist statement:
“As each perspective gets layered onto one’s self, it has an affect on one’s perceived reality. The viewer receives from the disparate images emotions that are communicating with each other in a positive and negative way. The vagueness and ambiguity within the visuals lends itself to the vagueness that the self can embrace as well.”

About the Artist
Keri Halloran is an artist from Hartford, Connecticut who focuses on visual sensations within images. She received a Bachelors of Fine Arts in photography at Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford. Keri is actively showing throughout Connecticut while working full time in commercial photography.

http://www.kerihalloran.com
Instagram: @keri.halloran

Real Wall is a series of wall mounted exhibitions taking place in between formal gallery spaces. Artists are invited to engage with the space in experimental ways meaningful to their practice in short-run exhibitions.