Devin Howell

My current body of work investigates personal stories, referencing life in South Florida. I view these paintings as nonlinear narratives prompted by biographical reference points. Memory is a form of imagination directed at the past and constructed in the present. It provides a set of specific parameters for imagery but also affords opportunities to experiment with subject/object emphasis and organization within the rectangle. The slippery nature of memory lends itself to playing with ideas of spatial ambiguity, volume, flatness, elongation, and compression. I like taking something

Alex Stern

As an artist, I think about collision: flesh meeting the built world, the convergence of trauma and humor, and the connection between philosophy and its material expression. I am attracted to the quirks and frailties of human nature, individual and societal excess, and the dynamics of inner life. Through paint, other people’s photographs, and found language, I explore the intersection of these unlikely combinations, making new images that are at once upsetting and funny, confusing and revealing, painterly and harsh. My work appears coded, yet it is coherent

Jake Troyli

This work deals with (mis)representation, performance, otherness, and the construction of identity. By using my own form as a sort of elastic avatar, and appropriating motifs from both classical and comic realms, my paintings exist in a space that defies and subverts immediate assumption. Instead, I recast uncomfortable truths with an appetizing palette, utilizing selfconscious self-imagery and familiar language to navigate tense conversations with my viewer, and with myself.

Henry Gabriel Anker

My paintings are abstract allegorical landscapes of interwoven visual and narrative symbols. These symbols do not function as citational didactics but as enigmatic narrative projections. With each painting pointing back to the ones that preceded it, I am in conversation with the past. I mine utopian theory for inquiries into alchemy, movement, gender, and color:

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Kareem-Anthony Ferreira

I trace patterns of personal, familial, and social identity within the genre of Black portraiture. As a first-generation Canadian with strong Trinidadian roots, I grew up in two different cultural milieus. My practice grows from this concern: a negotiation of my enduring cultural divergence between displacement and indigeneity; divided, yet rooted in multiple places at once.

Amber Esseiva

Title: 
Associate Curator
Last Name: 
Esseiva
Head Shot: 
Bio: 

 

Affiliation: 
Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University

Ruth Erickson

Title: 
Mannion Family Curator
Last Name: 
Erickson
Head Shot: 
Bio: 

Ruth Erickson is Mannion Family Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, where she has curated exhibitions of work by Kevin Beasley, Mark Dion, Rokni and Ramin Haerizadeh, Ethan Murrow, and Wangechi Mutu, among others. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including France and the Visual Arts since 1945: Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art (2018), Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist (2017), Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957 (2015), Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (2015), and Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology (2014).

Affiliation: 
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Heather Rubinstein

My work signals its history from the material properties of fabrics—what happens when the fabrics are subjected to various procedures: cutting, folding, sewing, staining, dyeing, and brushwork. For my purposes, domestic fabrics such as bedsheets or drapes (always sourced from thrift stores) work better than traditional canvas. I like their porousness and flexibility as well as their status as recycled, repurposed products. My paintings are informed by postwar European abstraction (Alberto Burri, Supports/Surfaces, Sigmar Polke) and the Pattern & Decoration movement, but I try to avoid

SV Randall

My work examines the relationship between consumer, commodity, and transformation. Within a culture of feverish consumption and retinal impatience I often make “fast” objects by the slowest means possible. The resulting sculptures, photographs, and installations represent overlooked objects rendered in symbolic materials.

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