New YorkTranslated Cities

Manuel Acevedo, Isidro Blasco, Austin Eddy, Shara Hughes, Armita Raafat, Hilda Shen, and Dannielle Tegeder

Guest curator Natalia Nakazawa brings together seven artists who examine the potential of the city beyond the systemic. These artists interpret the city through the lenses of invisible structures, imagined spaces, and reconstruction, offering insights into urban navigation and understanding. The architect or city planner conceives structural ideas pertaining to the organization of systems, contending with the flow of data and materials as they pass overhead and below in the form of cellular signals, pipelines, aerial property lines, and miles of structural steel. But the element of the individual is distinctly absent. How do we locate the human body in the urban scale? Individual bodies link various architectural schemes and vistas through perception and passage. We look to artists to translate this lived experience into new forms through fantasy, perceptivity and reconfigurations of the real.

Dannielle Tegeder builds on the afterimage of the city through painting and hanging constructions. She creates complex relationship with urban systems resulting in synesthetic maps that are at once highly personal and structural.  Hilda Shen works from an intimate scale: the relationship of her body to the built environment. In her large collages and small ceramics, Shen’s work invites a bodily response from viewers imagining themselves within the conceived scale.

Manuel Acevedo draws over Polaroid photos of the empty site of the World Trade Center. These intimate and grand images inhabited a space between architecture, sculpture, and fantasy. Painter Shara Hughes playfully collapses exterior and interior into compositions that remind us of the density of lived spaces. Objects, rooms, and landscapes melt into one another, facilitated by spastic colors and distorted remnants of domestic living.  Austin Eddy creates sculpture and abstract painting that entangle the human and awkward within urban materiality and structure.

Isidro Blasco uses digital photography to combine elements of architecture, landscape, and human movement. Utilizing wood slats and digital images, Blasco then creates sculptural installations that expand his vision into physical space.Armita Raafat translates stories (both historical and autobiographical) and uses modules of Muqarnas as her building blocks to create three-dimensional compositions grounded in modern abstraction. Raafat casts elements over and over, layering them into fractured patterns that emerge from the wall.

Translated Cities is on view January 22 through February 21th, 2015. A printed catalog, featuring the work of each artist along with essays composed by Natalia Nakazawa and Chloe Bass, accompanies the exhibition. Catalog design by Deric Carner.

Guest Curator Natalia Nakazawa is the Assistant Director of EFA Studios, an arts educator at the Museum of Arts & Design and has an active art practice working in painting and installation.