The BOX FACTORY GALLERY and NYC GROUP CRIT bring the latest series of art critiques to the 'Ridgewick' arts community.
All artists and art lovers invited!
NEXT MEETING: JAN 22, 2023, 2 - 4 PM
FEATURING: Emilio Jose Maldonado, Sandra Cavanagh, Mafe Izaguirre, Rafael Fuchs, Jackson Engman and Christy E. O’Connor
BOX FACTORY GALLERY
1519 Decatur Street
Queens, NY 11385
Emilio Jose Maldonado (b. 1983) employs discarded material goods and uses the point of view of the globally systematically disenfranchised to comment on the effusive disillusionment and florid disinterest of the destructive impact the cycles of consumption and disposal undertaken by first-world populations exact on less privileged communities.
Maldonado has been part of group and solo shows nationally and abroad, including The Mutability of Time (Schau Fenster, Berlin, Germany, 2022), Make/shift (VOX Populi, Philadelphia, PA, 2021) and The Santo Domingo Museum of Modern Art Biennial, (Santo Domingo, DR, 2013). He has received the CFEVA Artist Fellowship (2022-24) and Mural Arts Fellowship for Black Artists (2021) and is a member of both Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Philadelphia Sculptors. He has attended Elsewhere Residency (Greensboro, NC) and performs as a gallerist member and curator at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia, Adjunct Professor at Rowan University, as well as as Director of Artists Relations at Mural Arts Philadelphia.
IG: @scottico12
Director of Artist Relations @muralarts
Mafe Izaguirre (Caracas, 1978) is a New York-based transmedia artist working at the intersection of cybernetics and posthumanism. Her work on hybrid spirituality explores the problems of transcendence facing the challenges of imminent technological assimilation. Izaguirre is particularly interested in the residual dimensions of language. Her recent work, "The Hybrid Postpoetic Machine," delves into human-machine symbiosis to examine new representative instances of resonance, echoes, and noise in the poetic language. A collection of poems Izaguirre wrote explores human experience as machinery; while reading loud, the machine writes the forms, cadence, silence, and amplitude of the poet's voice. She has been working on a series of hybrid poetry books in collaboration with other poets that will be released in the Winter of 2022. Izaguirre was awarded the Queens Council for the Arts Grant in 2020 for her work "Sensitive Machines™"; She was selected as a More Arts Fellow in 2020 and a Jerome Foundation Alternate Fellow in 2021. She also has been an artist-in-residence at the DreamYard Project Community Art Center in the Bronx during 2018-2019. Izaguirre's Sensitive Machines™ have been presented internationally and exhibited in galleries in the United States. Izaguirre is an independent artist, a member of the Long Island City (NY) Artists Association, and the Director of Digital Content of the Global Posthuman Network, among other distinctions.
Sandra Cavanagh’s career began in 1997, after completing a Foundation in Fine Arts and a BA degree from the Kent Institute of Art and Design, University of Kent, UK. In the time since she has maintained a consistent practice and developed a large portfolio of work to include paintings, drawings and prints. She sustains a mostly narrative focus, often as a reaction to sociopolitical events with the intention of codifying ideas and feelings. Within this development, various subjects recur, such as the mythological feminine as a vehicle to explore patriarchal brutality and its weight on the collective, the consideration of mortality and the loss of innocence in transgenerational stories, visceral reactions both to memories and events of current general concern. She has often worked in series, creating pictorial storylines with some urgency to exhaust the subject and form to the point of understanding or unburdening herself of it. The result is an annotation of feelings underscoring a dramatic approach to form and message.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Cavanagh’s first two decades were pitched on the tensions between a loving family life and constant political upheavals, unrestrained military governments and the ominous danger of politically sanctioned brutality and censorship. She read Social Sciences at the University of Belgrano, Buenos Aires before emigrating to California and later to the UK where she completed studies in Fine Art. She returned to full residency in the United States in 2010 and has worked and resided in New York City ever since.
Rafael Fuchs is a Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, director, curator, and producer. He has earned his place as one of the most important photographers of his generation. A recipient of many awards, Rafael captured portraits and images of some of the most influential figures of the past 30 years, and these images embraced many magazine covers as well as became a part of distinctive private collections and Museums around the globe, such as The National Portrait Gallery in London. (Portraits of JK Rowling and Emily Watson.)
Rafael was Born in Tel Aviv and received his BFA with honors (the Rosa Merkin award) from The Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem in 1984. His international breakthrough in the art world revealed his personal documentary work, the self-portraits series he did in a war zone during real wartime, titled ”Hope For Peace.” The surrealistic/ satirical self-portraits he created while serving his obligatory duty as an IDF soldier in Lebanon in 1983, embracing practices of Butoh dance (as theatrical makeup), got the attention of Francois Hebel (who later became the director of Les Rencontres D’ Arles) who included the series in a show he curated in 1984 in Paris.
www.rafaelfuchscontemporary.com
IG: @fuchsprojects
Director of @thamesartcenter
Jackson Engman was raised in Washington, DC, then moved to New York to attend Pratt Institute, earning a BFA in Printmaking in 2020. He has lived in Brooklyn since, working as a fine art screen printer, studio administrator, and exhibition planner/curator. His work is inspired by dada and conceptual art and the writings of authors such as James Elkins and Lucy Lippard.
IG: @jackson_engman
Christy E. O’Connor is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in the New York metro area. She combines wearable sculpture, performance, and 2D mixed media works to create narrative bodies of work and installations.
O’Connor received a BA in Visual Art from Ramapo College of New Jersey, where she studied studio art, photography, and education. O’Connor has been professionally exhibiting her work since 2015. In 2020 she began experimenting with performance and wearable sculpture in response to COVID, and has continued this practice in new and exciting directions.
She has participated in professional development programs and studio residencies, including Creative Capital at Artworks (Trenton, NJ, 2017) AlterWork Studio (LIC, NY, 2020), ESKFF (Jersey City, NJ, 2022), and Elsewhere Studios (Paonia, CO, 2022).
Solo exhibitions and installations include The Maiden & The Crone, (2021), Eat, Buy, Love (2021), Victim Shame, Body Blame and Tea Time in Turbulence (2020), Dusklit (2016-2018), Treacherous Women (2018), Vacant Memories, Absent Dreams (2018).
YouTube: Christy O'Connor