Delphine Adama Fawundu

Tanya Merrill

The Bathers, 2018 Oil on canvas 40 x 30” The Reckoning, 2018 Flashe, oil, oil stick, and graphite on linen 43 x 40”

Asif Mian

00 born in jersey city, nj to pakistani immigrants. 04 a gun to my head & held hostage in parents’ pharmacy in queens. 06 first fistfight with a kid flying a kite. 09 father is indicted for sexual assault. it was a hoax & charges dropped. 11 fistfight at teaneck mosque. 12 fresh raiders hat stolen off my head. 14 fistfight with neighbor. 16 wrestling captain. 16 confront estranged father so he would leave the house. 16 steal a car & bash 31 mailboxes on homecoming night. 17 fistfight. 17 shatter my wrist polevaulting. 19 father mxrdered in terrel, texas. 20 BA genetics & BA studio art from drew university. 22 surrounded by 2 crackheads in LES: they think i have drugs. 23 streetfight on 31st & park with a drug dealer whose drop-phone landed at our feet. 25 begin meditating

Nothingness & Spectre

I am repulsed by violence in our daily life, but much like a crowd pausing to watch a fistfight, I am attracted to the visceral power these human elements hold over us. By working at the intersection of sculpture, performance and filmmaking, I have been exploring the imprint that masculinity, competition, spirituality and violence have on our culture. The work has a physicality that stokes the fires of ritual and chaos, intimidation and perception, spontaneous and premeditated.

In my thesis presentation, material and immaterial works occupy the same space, echoing the composite of our daily lives. The material works ground and transform substance, surface and meaning into familiar forms. Implicit violence and trauma are absorbed and channeled into the fabric of these objects, evoking the concept of epigenetic inheritance: the idea that traumatic experiences affect DNA in ways that are passed on.

The immaterial works loom; their forms are shrouded in common plastic sheeting. Thermal cameras are able to peer inside the forms with special forensic ability. Inside, the virtual beings command attention with their suggestion of potential threat, value, and/or spectral nothingness. Solid or virtual, the works converge and intersect material, form and theme within the confines of the space. asifmian.com

Asif Mian

Trauma Suit for RAF, 2018 SAE industrial wool felt, adhesive, acrylic polymer 40 x 30” x variable Threat Value, 2018 Hand knotted wool Afghan rug, machine woven polypropolene rug 9 x 7’

Public Meeting Place, 2017 Video Projection of More Human performance (18:07 TRT) Wood, gypsum, plaster, enamel 29 x 9 x 12’

Samantha Nye

b. Hollywood, Florida, sometime in the 1980s

Samantha Nye is a painter and video artist currently living in Manhattan. For the first decade of her life she was a relatively unsuccessful child model. At five years old she remembers her mother driving her to South Beach casting offices as she energetically rehearsed the line, “Hello, my name is Samantha Nye, and I’m 7 years old... Here is my right profile...” She often performed seven. She learned early about performance and identity, which has directed her studio practice towards the investigation of seduction through reenactment. Through her paintings and videos she highlights aging bodies, celebrates queer kinship, and facilitates an intergenerational dialogue about sexuality between queer women and their mothers/grandmothers.

Samantha was a 2014-2015 Fellow of Queer/Art/Mentorship and is currently a Columbia University Visual Arts MFA Candidate, graduating in May of 2018.

Reenactment has long been a theme in my practice which centers around a performative relationship between my mother and myself. My current body of work includes a series of paintings that reimagine “aspirational lifestyle imagery” from the 1960s alongside a series of music videos that remake Scopitone films from the same era. These pop-cultural references are chosen as dominate symbols of the sexual and cultural consciousness of my mother’s adolescence. I have also regularly cast a group of women, ages 55-92, related to me either through blood or life-long friend circles of my mother and grandmother. With this, my reenactments aim to retroactively influence the models of sexuality that influenced the generations of women before me, from whom I inherited notions of gender and methods of seduction.

What started as queer role play amongst extended family has grown to include queer elders, bound by the concept of chosen family. Both my paintings and videos are meant as love letters to queer spaces past and present, the thriving and the abandoned. In my attempt to image queer kinship I acknowledge the beautiful parts, the prickly parts, the radical parts and the parts that have long needed fixing. With celebration and criticality I pull references from lesbian legacies and failures. These works envision a fantasy history of both age and trans-inclusive lesbian spaces and mash-up incongruent queer references such as Slim Aarons photographs of the 1960s, lesbian separatist spaces of the 1970s, Bat Mitzvah parties from 1990s, and the Miami club scene of the early 2000’s .