173: After eden

LatchKey Gallery and co-curator Molly Davy are pleased to present After Eden | the divine feminine, a group exhibition featuring works by Brianna Bass, Deeya Bhugra, Erin Collinge, Dana Davenport, Dominique Duroseau, Alanna Fields, Katinka Huang, Shara Mays, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, Daniela Gomez Paz, Chloe Luisa Piñero, Lina Puerta Sharmistha Ray, Jasmin Risk, Josie Love Roebuck, Defne Tutus, Lauren Murao Walkiewicz and Ibitsam Tasnim Zaman.

After Eden explores a wide range of artists and mediums that depict the divine feminine in various forms, including the Great Mother Goddess and Mother Earth. The artworks are sourced from different perspectives of race, religion and sexual identity to provide a diverse representation of the divine feminine in different cultures.

Through this exhibition, the significance of the divine feminine is brought to the fore in how it is associated with the concepts of fertility, creation, and nurturing and the significant role womxn played in ancient societies as priestesses and religious leaders.

After Eden highlights the contrast between society and most major religions of the world today. The works serve as evidence of a completely different way of life that celebrates the sacred female, reflecting on the implications of the shift from matriarchal to patriarchal societies.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Brianna Bass (1990) earned her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2022, and BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2013. She has presented in lectures with Missouri State University, Pratt Institute, and Yale University. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (NY), Latchkey Gallery (NY), Ladies Room (LA), Noh-Art in Naples, Italy, and Tree Art Museum in Beijing, China. She co-founded Mineral House Media, an artist-run platform designed to enrich emerging artists’ practices through exhibitions and an engaged online media archive. She currently resides in Hartford, CT and is represented byLatchkey Gallery.

Deeya Bhugra was born in New Delhi, based in New York. She graduated from School of Visual Arts (SVA) with an MFA in Fine Arts. Primarily a painter, she uses stippling as a technique for its meditative quality. It is during the process that she begins to lose herself in intricate labyrinths of thought; and subtle, ethereal revelations surface. As she delves deeper, the amorphous form disseminates grain by grain into its surrounding; and synchronically her rationale starts transcending into an infinite space.

Erin Collinge graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York with her B.F.A. in painting and an emphasis in printmaking. Her work focuses on femininity, predation, and emotion through color. Using the artist’s own experiences, her symbolic imagery comes together with watercolor, ink, gouache, and dry media such as colored pencils, pastel, and graphite.

Dana Davenport is a Korean and Black American interdisciplinary artist shifting between installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Within her practice, she addresses the complexities that surround interminority racism as a foundation for envisioning her own and the collective futurity of Black and Asian peoples. Davenport utilizes synthetic hair as a proxy for her body to discuss the strained relationship between Black and Asian peoples, specifically in America. As a product overwhelmingly sold by Koreans to Black Americans, she considers the implications of the material as it sits on the beauty supply shelf and how it is activated in the hands of Black folks through love and labor.

Dominique Duroseau earned her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2023 . She is a Newark-based artist born in Chicago, raised in Haiti.

Her interdisciplinary practice explores themes of racism, socio-cultural issues, and existential dehumanization. Her exhibitions, performances, and screenings include SATELLITE ART and PULSE Play in Miami; The Kitchen, The Brooklyn Museum and the New Museum (BWA for BLM), El Museo del Barrio, A.I.R. Gallery, BronxArtSpace, Rush Arts Gallery, and Smack Mellon in New York City; The Newark Museum, Index Arts, Project for Empty Space, and Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ. Her recent exhibitions and talks include: solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, panelist at Black Portraiture[s] at Harvard and lecturer at Vassar. She was a fellow at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, and received artist residencies from Gallery Aferro, Index Art Center, the Wassaic Project and Shine Portrait Studio. Duroseau holds a Bachelor of Architecture and a Master of Arts in Fine Arts.

Alanna Fields is a mixed-media artist and archivist whose work unpacks Black queer history through a multidisciplinary engagement with photographic archives. Fields’ work has been exhibited at The High Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, MoCADA, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Baxter St. CCNY, Expo Chicago, Felix Art Fair in LA, and UNTITLED Art Fair in Miami. Fields is a Gordon Parks Foundation Scholar and has participated in residencies at Silver Arts Projects, Light Work, Baxter St. CCNY, and Gallery Aferro. She received her MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute and is a Lecturer of Photography at Howard University. Fields has given artist talks at the Aperture Foundation, Light Work, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Parsons New School, Syracuse University, and Stanford University. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Aperture Magazine, FOAM Magazine, and The Atlantic amongst others. Fields lives and works between Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Katinka Huang moved to England from China at a young age - not with her family - but on her own. Katinka attended an all girls boarding school whose Western ideology about gender and propriety conflicted with the eastern ideology of femininity that she was brought up with in China. Katinka's upbringing at a British boarding school dominated by girls ignited her interest in examining the female psyche. In response to the artist's state of confusion and alienation, she created alter egos as the means of dissociation, which have now become the mould in which she creates. Katinka re-imagines these alter egos into stories of absurdity, she transforms a tempestuous personal diary into tales full of fantastical characters, depicting people and places as monstrous or saccharine creatures, as antagonists and protagonists. The cast of self-referential characters functions as recurring motifs which unabashedly reveals a mutilated female psyche. Katinka grew up in London, UK where she attended Central Saint Martin and studied graphic design. She later moved to Paris and earned her BFA at Paris College of Art, majoring in Fine Arts, she has recently attained her MFA at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Shara Mays is an Oakland-based visual artist whose work addresses systemic racism through an autobiographical approach. Using abstract expression and intuitive impression, Mays’ paintings and installations invoke landscapes and emotions connected to her family history in North Carolina. Her latest work speaks more broadly to selfhood, memory, and identity. She holds a Master's of Fine Arts in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Mehari Sequar Gallery in Washington, DC and Chandran Gallery in San Francisco, California. Notable group shows include Considering Female Abstractions at the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, Texas, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California. Her work is included in the International African American Museum, the Green Family Art Foundation, and select private collections.

Coralina Rodriguez Meyer was born in a car in an Everglades Florida swamp, raised queer between a rural Southern immigrant community and the Caribbean, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is a Tinkuy mixed race, indigenous Andinx (Muisca Colombian /Inca Peruvian), Brooklyn based Quipucamayoc artist. Spanning 20 years and 30 countries, she works across disciplines including architecture, community organizing, moving images, documentary sculpture and urban design. They studied painting at MICA, anthropology at Hopkins, prior to receiving her architecture BFA at Parsons and MFA in Combined Media at Hunter College CUNY. She has worked as an architect and urban designer in NYC for 2 decades while a guest critic at Parsons, Pratt and FIU.

Daniela Gomez Paz earned her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2023. Her work intersects between weaving, drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture. Born in Cali, Colombia, she immigrated to Queens, New York. She pursued path in the arts and background in pedagogy led her to facilitate a wide range of programs with children, youth, seniors and families in schools, museums, and community centers. She acquired a Double Degree: BFA [Printmaking/Painting] & BA [Art History] from SUNY Purchase School of Art and Design and a MAT [Masters in Art Teaching] from Queens College.

Chloe Luisa Piñero is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Philadelphia, PA, who works in mixed media painting, collage, and sculpture. Reflecting on her own experiences and familial histories from both her native home of Philadelphia, and her ancestral home of Puerto Rico, Chloe aims to preserve stories and memories tied to place, while exploring themes of gender, queerness, and desire as they relate to her own identity. Piñero earned a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2018. Chloe has taught in art education and public programming at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and continues to teach in the Philadelphia area.

Drawing from her experience as a Colombian-American, Lina Puerta’s art examines the relationship between nature and the human-made, and engages in themes of food justice, xenophobia, hyper-consumerism, and ancestral knowledge. She creates mixed media sculptures, installations, collages, handmade-paper paintings and wall hangings by combining a wide range of materials, from artificial plants and paper pulp to found, personal and recycled objects.

Puerta was born in NJ, raised in Colombia and lives and works in NYC. She holds an MS in Art Education from CUNY and has exhibited internationally. She has been honored with numerous awards including the 2019/2020 Artist-in-Residence at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in Harlem, 2017-NYFA Fellowship in Crafts/Sculpture, Fall 2017 Artist-in-Residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, the 2016 Dieu Donné Workspace Residency, Artprize-8 Sustainability Award, 2015 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, 2015 Kohler Arts Industry Residency (WI), 2013-14 Smack Mellon Art Studio Program among others. Exhibition venues include the Barns Art Center, The Sugarhill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, the Ford Foundation Gallery, The Museum of Biblical Art, El Museo del Barrio, Socrates Sculpture Park, Wave Hill and the Hunter East Harlem Gallery in New York City; 21C Museum Hotels in Louisville, KY and Bentonville, AR; Pi Artworks in London and Ponce+Robles in Spain. Puerta’s work has been written about in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, and Artnet News among others.

Sharmistha Ray (they/them) is a visual artist, art critic, curator, and professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Art. They make paintings and drawings that examine the complex inheritance of multiple cultures through the lens of gender and abstraction. In 2020, they co-founded the feminist artist collective Hilma’s Ghost as a participatory and collaborative model for research, exhibitions, and pedagogy. Ray’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally.

Jasmin Risk is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work uses discarded textiles to examine healing and repair. They champion fragmentation, allowing for imperfections, and stake out territory in less definable, in-between spaces to embody their queer, non-binary, autistic identities. Their art practice incorporates textiles, performance, writing, video, book-making, and materials-based research. Within textiles, they use knitting, needle felting, wet felting, and paper-making, alongside destructive mark making techniques implementing cheese graters, blades, and ripping by hand. By embedding fragments in textiles, paper, books and installation, Risk reconsiders what constitutes “wholeness.”

Josie Love Roebuck is an interdisciplinary artist from Chattanooga, TN. Roebuck received her M.F.A from the University of Cincinnati (2021). She received her B.F.A with an emphasis in drawing and painting, from the University of Georgia (2019). Roebuck is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Drawing/Foundations/Printmaking at the Northern Kentucky University. Roebuck’s process addresses the contemporary complexity of identifying as biracial through symbolizing pain and triumph, exclusion, and acceptance. The act of Roebuck sewing together portraits has allowed her canvas to become her paper and her needle to become her pen, in order for Roebuck to draw upon the past and present to convey a story of her experiences and her family’s experiences.

Defne Tutus is an artist, writer and curator based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. in Art History from Tufts University. She also studied fashion design at FIT, fiber art and metal working at SVA and participated for many semesters in NYC Crit Club. She has shown her work at SVA, Copeland Gallery in London, ABC No Rio, Tussle Magazine Projects and Site:Brooklyn. She has participated in fundraisers for Open Source Gallery, Textile Artists for Movement Voter Project, and Thirst: a fundraiser and art auction in association with No More Deaths. She is a member of Incredible Incubator, an artists collective born in 2020 with an interest in work which interacts with the surrounding environment in unexpected ways.

Lauren Murao Walkiewicz (b.1991) is a painter and installation artist who explores futuristic mythologies of a world after the climate apocalypse. Using intricately cut wood or pvc panel and acrylic paint, Walkiewicz’s non-linear narratives explore the new denizens of earth, and their sensual and violent world. Walkiewicz earned a BFA from the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design and currently resides in New York City. She has shown with SPRING/BREAK art show, 550 Gallery, The Locker Room in New York and Practice Gallery in Philadelphia. She was featured in I Like Your Work’s Spring Catalog “Through Mossy Ways” and Create Magazine issue #32. Walkiewicz has been an artist in residence at RUC residency in Valcamonica, Italy, and is currently an artist in residence at the NARS Foundation International Residency in New York.

Ibitsam Tasmin Zaman is a Black Lesbian American, conceptual, multidisciplinary, intersectional feminist and self-taught artist. Her art practice consists of creative writing, spoken word poetry performance, narrative painting of BIPOC people, community art projects, and soft sculptures/installations. Her work draws inspiration from Persian Islamic geometric art, Indian classical art, surrealism, and magical realism. Originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ibtisam moved at age six to England, followed by the UAE. Her mother made the decision shortly after 9/11 to escape the violence that Muslims and BIPOC are still facing today. From thirteen onwards, she lived between the UAE and India over the proceeding nine years. Ibtisam’s work has been exhibited nationally with New York Health and Hospitals Arts and Medicine Program in collaboration with Residency Unlimited, funded by the Laurie M TischIllumination Fund.

ABOUT THE CURATOR:

Molly Davy is a writer, researcher, and educator interested in the intersection of performance and the archive. Her work focuses on the relationship between natural and built environments, and the potentialities between Environmental Science and the Humanities. Davy is Associate Director, Operations and Part-Time Faculty at Parsons School of Design | The New School. She is Visiting Associate Professor in the department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute where she teaches in collaboration with Architecture faculty.

Davy holds an MA in Media Studies and Visual Culture from New York University and a BA in Art History and Gender Studies from St. Catherine University. Recent curatorial work includes the group show “if you surrender” co-curated with Daniel Johnson at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York (January-February 2023).