ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jared Buckhiester (b. 1977, Dahlonega, GA) is a New York-based artist who makes everything but painting. Using figurative representation as a vehicle, he combines autobiographical material with social and political narratives. His practice has been described as “a long-term project of representing beleaguered American masculinity through a gay male lens”. Buckhiester works across media, employing various approaches to rendering. The result is a grouping of discrete works, all of which function as Buckhiester’s cast of characters. A ceramic vessel in the shape of a crouched drill sergeant is like a worried oversized water jug sits next to a of Dorothy’s windblown house, come to rest atop an unfortunate cowpoke. Base images and materials are shaped like building blocks, forming a crumbling foundation atop of which larger narratives can be made. Buckhiester completed his MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College, New York, and his BFA at Pratt Institute. Recent solo exhibitions include The Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, NY (2021); Klaus Gallery, New York (2019); Iceberg Projects, Chicago (2019); Agnes, b Howard Street Gallery, New York (2018); BGSQD, New York (2017); Soloway, Brooklyn, NY (2016); and Thomas Rehbein, Koln (2015), among others.

CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021). Other titles include While Standing in Line for Death and Ecodeviance. The Book of Frank is now available in nine different languages. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Visit their website https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88.

Deborah Czeresko is a New York City-based artist and designer, best known for her work with glass. Her work references food, art history, gender, her experiences as a queer artist, and her current practice includes hot glass sculpting, performance, and collaboration. The winner of the first season of Netflix’s Blown Away, Czeresko’s skills have been sought after by artists and designers such as Eric Fischl, Robert Gober, Deborah Berke, Anna Seldorf, and FORM Architecture. Her work can also be found at the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York and the Toledo Museum in Ohio.

Karen Yvonne Hall is a queer afrodominican New York native painter, opera singer, composer, videographer and scent artist. They focus on world building to envision and manifest a better future. She combines multiple mediums in attempt to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, which in German translates to “total artwork.” This genre is most influenced by Richard Wagner which Karen was exposed to in their youth when they received their formal music training. Wagner believed Gesamtkunstwerk to be the art of the future where all art forms are unified via the theatre. Karen uses this concept to fully immerse viewers into her world. A world where healing our inner selves and the earth is at the center and the priority.

bb kenda is an imaginative creator of objects, spaces, videos, and performances. Their aim is to include playfulness, self-exploration, sincerity, humor, and love in all that they do.

Rose Nestler (b. 1983 in Spokane, WA, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College. Nestler has exhibited in the United States and internationally, including exhibitions at König Galerie, Projet Pangeé, Public Gallery, Fisher Parrish, Hesse Flatow, Thierry Goldberg and BRIC. Her work was curated in a two-person show at Spring/Break in 2019 and she was a Lighthouse Works Fellow in 2018. She will be an artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans in 2022. Upcoming exhibitions include solo shows at Public Gallery (London, UK) in 2021 and at Mrs. Gallery (NY, USA) in 2022. Her work has been featured and reviewed in Juxtapoz, Vulture, Maake, and Metal Magazine.

Sarada Rauch is an artist, poet and musician born in Los Angeles and based in Brooklyn. Their work reenacts popular media and intimate memory, collapsing them into each other to explore the construction of histories and Otherness. Sarada exhibits and performs internationally in spaces such as The Drawing Center, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Hudson; RH+ Gallery, Istanbul; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Central St. Martins, London; La Conservera Center of Contemporary Art, Cueti; RISD Museum, Providence, among others. Artist residencies they participated in include Open Sessions at the Drawing Center, New York; The LMCC Swing Space, New York; _Hannacc, Barcelona; Greatmore Studios/Triangle Network, Cape Town; and they received the BBK Saxony Fellowship in Leipzig. Sarada was one of the directors of Heliopolis Gallery in Brooklyn. They are an Assistant Professor of New Media and Technology at LaGuardia Community College.

Marion Scemama grew up in Uruguay and Paris where, in the early 1970s, she began working as a photo journalist. In 1981 she travelled as a photographer for a French magazine to New York. Two years later she met David Wojnarowicz and the two embarked on a friendship and collaboration on posters, videos and photography. In 1986, she returned to Paris but then went back to New York in 1988 to help Wojnarowicz with his work after told her he was HIV-positive. In 1991, a year before his death, Wojnarowicz asked her to travel with him through south-western USA, knowing that it would be his final trip. Since 1992, she has lived and worked in Paris.

Born in West Virginia, New York based artist Vincent Tiley received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2017 he participated in the Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR) and was a 2013 participant at Artist Cooperative Residency and Exhibition (ACRE) program. His work has been featured and reviewed in Art in America, the Chicago Tribune, Performa, and the New York Times. The artist has been widely exhibited internationally including the Museum of Art and Design, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, AxeNeo7, CFHILL, and the International Museum of Surgical Science.His works have been collected by the Whitney Library, the Leather Archives and Museum, Yale University Library, and the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Born in Long Island, NY Christopher Udemezue has shown at a variety of galleries and museums, including the New Museum, Queens Museum of Art, PS1 MoMa, Bruce High Quality Foundation, and Envoy Enterprises. Udemezue recently has utilized his Jamaican heritage and the complexities of desire for connection, tragedy through personal mythology and public lynching as a primary source. As the founder of the platform RAGGA NYC & CONNEK JA, he completed a residency with the New Museum "All The Threatened and Delicious Things Joining One Another" in June 2017. Also being the lead organizing member of the art collective House of Ladosha, Christopher has shown recently in the New Museum’s “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” 40 year anniversary show and he was apart of the chosen artists in The Shed's Open Call grant program/ show that was on show in the new Hudson Yards Shed gallery, NYC in June 2019. In 2021 Chris was elected to be Co-Chair of board at Recess Gallery, Brooklyn NY.

Angela Washko is an artist devoted to creating new forums for discussions about feminism in a variety of forms and contexts. Washko's practice spans interventions in mainstream media, performance art, installation, writing, video art, video games, and documentary film. A recipient of the Creative Capital Award, the National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Indiecade Impact Award and the Franklin Furnace Performance Fund, Washko's practice has been highlighted in The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The Guardian, ArtForum, Art in America and more. Her projects have been presented internationally at venues including Museum of the Moving Image, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial, and the Milan Design Triennale. Angela Washko is an Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and AIDS activist. He was a prominent figure in New York's Lower East Side art movement during the 1980s, and his art still proves to be influential nowadays. HIV positive, Wojnarowicz often used photography, painting, collage, sculpture, and film to tackle the political issues related to the AIDS epidemic.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Angela Conant is an artist, curator, and educator in Brooklyn, NY. Her work in sculpture, painting, and video abstracts bodily form and addresses the transformative effect that representation (in art, written language and journalism) has on cultural perception. She studies art made as a means of survival.

Marble sculptures act as matrices: she takes rubbings of her carvings, which yield bodies work on paper. Her own sculptures and paintings function as props and characters in her video work, which parodies science fiction, gender roles and news media. Her practice encompasses curating as well as collaboration on artist-run projects.

Conant’s work has been exhibited at Electronic Arts Intermix (New York City), EFA Project Space (New York City), Planthouse (New York City), SPRING/BREAK art show (New York City); Glasshouse Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Interstate Projects (Brooklyn, NY); the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art (Wilmington, DE), Neter (Mexico City, MX), The Sunview Luncheonette (Brooklyn, NY), ICA Baltimore (Baltimore, MD), La Mama Gallery (New York City), SARDINE (Brooklyn, NY), Galerie René Blouin (Montreal, QC), Agency (Brooklyn, NY) and Assembly Room (New York City).

She has spoken at Boston University's School of Fine Art and at New York Foundation for the Arts, and was awarded a Critical Writing residency at Recess (New York City) in 2013, an Artist Residency at the Millay Colony (Austerlitz, NY) in 2014, and is a 2019 Home School Hudson participant. In 2007, she co-founded The Gowanus Studio Space, an artist-run collaborative in Brooklyn where she served as Artistic Director until 2014. She earned a BFA in Painting from Boston University in 2004 and an MFA in Art Practice from School of Visual Arts in 2013. She was a 2020 Shandaken Paint School Fellow, and is pursuing an Advanced Certificate in Curatorial Studies from Hunter College.