Introduction to artists

Kline fuses painting with sculpture to investigate human intimacy and totemic histories. Made from discarded and salvaged wood gathered in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and upstate NY, Kline’s works investigate the ritual of starting over by retrieving objects that have pre-existing histories and building a relationship with them. Raised in an immigrant and refugee family, Kline has an intimate knowledge of feeling discarded and forming fresh beginnings. Newly realized works nod to both recent and distant pasts, transforming Kline’s pieces into a collaboration with time itself. Rather than forcing the works into what the sculptor wants, the moments shared with each piece ignite a transformation. Once the wood has become familiar, Kline emphasizes texture with oil paint, wax, and pastels. Kline embraces rawness rather than hiding imperfection. Her sophisticated mark making appears both exploratory and refined, turning her scraps of wood into whimsical, figurative, and architectural stories. An overwhelming presence of family emerges and fades as you walk amidst the works, leaving space for individual interpretation. Ultimately, Kline’s work arrives at an intuitive place of stability, devotion, and balance. Both archival and newly born, the works build and transmit spiritual energy, and then pass it back and forth between object and viewer.

Kimia Ferdowsi Kline earned an M.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute and holds a B.F.A. in painting from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was awarded a full-tuition Danforth Scholarship. She has mounted solo exhibitions at Turn Gallery (New York), Marrow Gallery (San Francisco), The Elaine L. Jacobs Gallery at Wayne State University (Detroit) and 68 Projects (Berlin). Select group shows include Ceysson & Bénétière, The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, CANADA Gallery, PACE University, and The Drawing Center. In 2015 she was awarded a grant and residency through the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2018 she was honored to be nominated for a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Most recently, she is thrilled to be working on a monograph with Radius Books, set to release in 2022.Guest lectures and teaching include Yale University, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, SUNY Purchase, Lipscomb University, The Fashion Institute of Technology, Brooklyn College, Wayne State University, and Chautauqua Institute.

KIMIA KLINE

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Photographed by Carmen Chan

They Call it Reese is an observational artist inspired by formalism. Lines, shapes, colors, and textures are as central to her work as is the process of creating them. A complex layering of these abstract elements allows her work to speak to the representational. Her most recent series of paintings is inspired by nature. She methodically builds up sheer layers of “Dead monochromatic forms; each new layer informed by all previous layers. This process gives the painting a sculptural element as well as a sense of depth. Observations are simplified––distilling the essence of these natural forms reflects nature’s tendency to remove the Whiteextraneous. Man’s

Clothes”

Reese (b. 1991) holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a Bachelor of Science from Skidmore College. She has completed Artist-in-Residencies at Vermont Studio Center in 2017 and Elsewhere Studios in 2013. She was on a panel for the “The Entrepreneurial Artist Workshop” at the Tang Museum and received the Award of Excellence from the 58th Long Island Artist Exhibition at the Art League of Long Island. Reese has exhibited widely throughout the United States and has been featured in several publications including New American Paintings Northeast Issue 134, New American Painting Featured Artists, Inside Artists, Studio Visit Magazine, and A Women’s Thing.

MEL REESE

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“Netis a soft-sculpture architectural installation environment. In creating this piece, she was interested in exploring how the power of architecture and the spaces we inhabit impact us and teach us what is possible. She wanted to create a work that intervenes into the viewers space, offering them an empathetic, feminist, and ecologically-conscious alternative experience. Net’s immersive atmosphere is meant to feel like a sacred passageway, encouraging viewers who interact with it to open their imaginations to new possibilities. She created this work using primarily recycled and upcycled materials, which She hand knotted and wrapped with fabrics and yarns. She also used various reflective metallic materials to bounce light reflections around the installation space. Many of the fabrics she used in this piece are remnants from previous sculptural projects, which gives Net an archival quality and a sense of history. Most of the metallic fabrics come from a reuse center in Brooklyn which specializes in recycling textiles from the New York fashion and commercial design industries”.

Kathy Sirico (b. Philadelphia, 1990) is a Brooklyn-based artist working abstractly at the intersection of painting, sculpture, textiles, and installation. Sirico received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017 and her Bachelor of Science from Skidmore College in 2012. She has completed Artist Residencies at MassMoCA Assets for Artists in 2020, Vermont Studio Center in 2018, Lucid Art Foundation in 2017, and Recology, San Francisco in 2016. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally, notably in recent exhibits, SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York (2021), Summertime ‘21 at Galleri Christoffer Egelund in Copenhagen, Denmark (2020), and Interior/Exterior at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco (2019).

KATHY SIRICO

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FOOD“At the beginning of 2021, with the pandemic continuing and giving everyone a difficult time, I still wanted to have a bright feeling for the New Year. I started a diary-like artwork series that describes my everyday feelings, using images of the powerful Japanese icon -Mount Fuji. For each one I made, I used elements of what I saw, heard, ate, and felt that day. Those days were expressed with one unique hoop per day. These diary-like Fuji-san artworks continued intermittently throughout the year culminating with this showing at THE GALLERY”. Tomoko Sugimoto creates large- and small-scaled paintings with acrylic paint, thread and sewing machine to render whimsical figures suspended in abstract yet materially tactile space and express emotions, sensations and vision with abstract thread movements. Children playing, abstracted landscapes and everyday objects are recurring subject matter in Sugimoto’s living oeuvre. She defines her style with sharp contour and line juxtaposed with delicate pools of soft tints. Her current artwork embraces an exploration of the post-war Japanese identity and correlates to other postmodern studies of figure. Born in Tokyo, Japan, Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and has shown at numerous galleries and art fairs in Japan and overseas. She obtained a BFA in Graphic Design from Musashino Art University/Tokyo, and a BFA in Illustration at the School of Visual Arts/NYC.

TOMOKO SUGIMOTO

Ate / Appetizer