PS122 Gallery is pleased to present “Afro Blue” by Meredith Nickie and “The Lillian Project” by Maki Ueno, opening on March 13 and remaining on view through April 4, 2010. In addition we are featuring an installation by Reade Bryan in the Hallway Project Space.
Meredith Nickie explores issues of post-colonialism, gender, and race as framed by the historiographies of imperial rule and the enduring legacies of culture and capital. She works primarily in sculpture, installation and photography. She describes her work as
“…enlist(ing) the fanciful ornamentation of chinoiserie to reveal how this form of representation embodies and suppresses, in all its European cultural self-fashioning, the ‘black imaginary’ realized through colonial oppression and postcolonial recovery. These works serve as a challenge to contemporary global configurations of production, distribution, and consumption made manifest in tropes of conquest by focusing on the historical ambiguities and racial complexities of desire and exoticization. Through my work, I trace the ambiguity or mutuality of notions of interior and exterior, private and public, enclosure and expansiveness, dependency and autonomy, sensual engagement and self-possessed detachment. Out of the matrix of these complex and transferable modernities, I focus on issues of power, cultural difference and identity as they are spatially expressed.
Meredith Nickie’s work has recently been shown at Art in General, New York; Sculpture Center; Long Island City; IDEA Space at Colorado College, Colorado Springs; A Space Gallery, Toronto; with upcoming exhibitions at Rush Arts Gallery, New York; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; ArtSpace, New Haven; and the 2010 Sculpture Biennial at Evergreen Museum, Baltimore. In 2007, she received her MFA from Cornell University and in the same year, was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Nickie was a DAAD fellow in Berlin from 2007-2008, and a Whitney Museum Independent Study Program fellow from 2008-2009. In 2009, she received a residency grant at the Santa Fe Art Institute, and was also awarded an Emerging Artist Grant from the Ontario Arts Council. Currently, a Jackie McLean Fellow at the University of Hartford, she is a Visiting Artist at the Hartford Art School.
Maki Ueno will be exhibiting five large-scale photographs as well as a video from her “Liilian Project.” This series began in 2007 when the artist met “an elegant old British lady, sitting on a bench with her dog.” The artist has spent the past three years documenting this spirited woman in her small apartment and her private club, listening to her “worldly” stories. Despite their many differences, they bonded over their shared backgrounds as immigrants in New York City. As Lillian’s health has deteriorated over the years, so has her independence and her loneliness is profound. Yet, Maki Ueno has found Lillian’s strength of character and dignity inspirational and tries in these photographs to “share the essence of this woman’s life with (her) audience.”
Maki Ueno was born in Kagoshima, Japan. She studied comparative literature in Japan before moving to the United States to study cinema, focusing on cinema theory and filmmaking at University of Hartford. Ms, Ueno moved to New York City to study photography at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in 2007. She received the Director’s Fellowship from ICP and was a Student Fine Art Finalist at the New York Photo Festival in 2008. Recently, she received a grant from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund and she has exhibited work at Camera Club of New York and the Fashion Center Juried Art Exhibition.
The Hallway Project is by Brooklyn resident, Reade Bryan. His work is a continuation of sculptural installations that question the role of materials and resources, while examining natural growth and production.
For further information please contact:
Susan Schreiber, Gallery Director, 212.228.4249; ps122gallery@gmail.com
This exhibition has been made possible through the generous support of the New York State Council on the Arts, Painting Space 122, Inc. and the Friends of PS122 Gallery.
The Lillian Project is made possible in part with public funds from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cuyltural Affairs and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Transportation:
Subway: #6 to Astor Place, walk two blocks east and one bloack north
Bus: M15 to Marks Place, walk one block north
