Upcoming Curated and Co-curated Exhibits with Wen-hao Tien
Inner Gaze
Contemporary Sculptures
Curated by Wen-hao Tien
May 13-June 11, 2023
At Eastover Contemporary Art Space
430 East Street, Lenox, MA 01240
Opens Wednesday-Sunday, 10:30AM-5PM
Opening
Sat. 5/13 at 2:30–5PM
Artist Talk on Zoom (RSVP to receive a link: whtien@icloud.com)
Thursday, 5/18 at 8:30PM (ET)/8:30AM (Shanghai Time)
Curated by Cambridge (Mass)-based artist and curator Wen-hao Tien, Inner Gaze, features works of 12 experimental sculptors from the New England area. These works are open and intriguing -- leading us to spaces we have yet to discover. We may gaze into another world, a world within a world, a spiritual space, a space in our daily lives, or simply a fleeting sight.
Exhibiting Artists: Cori Champagne, Ben Gregg, Tracy Hayes, Michael King, Deborah Read, Samnang Riebe, Carolyn Sirois, Dennis Svoronos, Tara Tamaribuchi , Wen-hao Tien, Jeffu Warmouth, and Zhang Zhaohui
Press Contact:
Wen-hao Tien
whtien@icloud.com
617•519•8990
The Artists (in order of a random draw)
Marginalia: Crawl
Jeffu Warmouth
Multiple iterations of the artist crawl along a set of narrow strips. From Marginalia, a series of performance-based video compositions projected onto walls that explore the body's relationship to marginal aspects of our environments. HD Video Loop, 14 minutes.
Jeffu Warmouth is a Massachusetts-based conceptual artist whose work asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His sculpture, installation & media artwork has exhibited and screened internationally, including the Boston Sculptors Gallery; Boston Cyberarts Gallery; Emerson College; Fitchburg Art Museum; deCordova Museum; Boston Center for the Arts; Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Kaunas Photo Festival, Lithuania; Experimenta Media Arts, Australia; and the 404 Festival of Art & Technology, Argentina & Colombia. He was born in California in 1970, and lives & works in Groton, MA.
He received a BA from the University of Michigan, and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. He is Professor & Chair
of Communications Media at Fitchburg
State University.
Camouflage
Net Project
Tara Tamaribuchi
Tara Tamaribuchi is an artist based in Seattle, WA. She began her art career as a painter and then shifted her practice to work across mediums after working in temporary public art. She has been sharing Japanese American incarceration history through iterations of the Camouflage Net Project since 2017 (Seattle Center, Seattle University, Galpão in São Paulo, and Northwest African American Museum). Other recent projects include Awakening the Buddha (intervention at Seattle Asian Art Museum), the first showing of Groove Bardos at Mass MoCA, and curating a web exhibition, Reimagining the Future Through the Past (Washington State Arts Commission). For the past two years, she has been a leader in the effort to save more than 100 Seattle art studios from redevelopment at the Inscape Arts Building, the former INS immigration and detention center in the Seattle Chinatown International District.
As an artist, she has been building support from city, county, state, and federal leaders, and leading creative placemaking efforts by collaborating with cultural institutions including On The Boards, Wa Na Wari, and the Wing Luke Museum. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Lesley Art+Design, a BFA in Painting from Pacific Northwest College of Art, and a BA in Journalism from George Washington University.
Baitong
Pe Knohng
Samnang Riebe
Being of a place, being of a family, belonging to–– or conversely being ‘of-or-on the other side', there is richly packed meaning within those ideas that I have found worth investigating. With consideration to my own multi-racial identity and multi-cultural upbringing, my most recent works speak to the complicated nature of the frustrations, tensions, barriers, and conflicts between us and those we love. The title Baitong Pe Knohng translates from Khmer to English as –– Green from Inside.
Samnang Riebe is a Cambodian American Visual Artist who’s upbringing was split between the city of Phnom Penh, Cambodia and the Greater Boston area of Massachusetts, USA. While primarily trained as a Painter, his formal artistic concerns also encompass sculpture and object-making, as evident in his most recent Painting Skeletons. These three-dimensional paintings serve as abstracted representations of his Khmer and Buddhist upbringing at play with and enmeshing ideas of place, landscape, color, and heritage. He received a BFA from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art & Design. He resides in Boston, MA and is currently positioned as a Lecturer at Boston University’s School of Visual Arts and as a Senior Adjunct Faculty at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, teaching Painting and Drawing.
Love Language
Wen-hao Tien
In Love Language, Tien gathered tree limbs bearing markings made by insects. The artist teased out the complex patterns, treating them as a found language and filling in portions with gold—celebrating their indigenous grammar and simultaneously creating her system of hieroglyphs. You are encouraged to look for signs in the tree limbs and produce rubbings of them to hang in the “Viewer’s Frame.”
Born and raised in Taiwan, Wen-hao has been residing alone the banks of the Charles River, Massachusetts, since 1996. As an interdisciplinary artist, her career includes teaching, speaking, and community services. Wen-hao’s practice is rooted in her curiosity about self-expression and civic engagement in multicultural societies. Her academic preparations span the fields of biomedical sciences, public health, humanities, and visual art. Besides her studio practices, she is respected for her role in building interdisciplinary Asia Studies communities at Harvard University and Boston University. Her recent solo exhibitions Weed Out, Home on Our Backs, It Speaks for Itself, and I Love Your Grammatical Errors (forthcoming in April 2023) experiment on the interplay between art exhibitions, visual history, and public humanities. Wen-hao teaches at the Art and Design Department of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and at the Boston University Department of World Languages and Literatures. As the 2020 Artist-in-Residence at Boston’s Pao Art Center, she produced a body of work during a pivotal time in Asian American civic movements on Boston Chinatown local history. Her work is exhibited frequently in the Northeast, presented at the Boston Sculptors Gallery where she is a member, and supported by the generosity of grants. Wen-hao’s project, Weed Out, is featured in a new book, Crossing Boundaries & Confounding Identity: Chinese Women in Literature, Art, and Film, SUNY Press 2023.
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health (MPH), Lesley University College of Art and Design (MFA)
Meditation
on a Cello
Ben Gregg
We can’t be surprised unless we have expectations. The more familiar something is, the more uncanny it becomes when we discover it is not as we expect. The iconic forms of the violin and the cello have been largely unchanged for centuries, but what happens if we make a beautiful, logical, but entirely wrong addition to those familiar curves?
Every new thing is, in fact, a novel combination of existing things. But that doesn’t mean that all novel combinations are equally useful. Here we see an experiment in combination that is almost certainly a dead-end. What do you get when you take the classic silver volume of a coffee percolator and use it as the resonating chamber for a cello? Novelty? Yes. Utility? Goodness no.
Ben Gregg has been a teacher and administrator at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts since 1999. As a teacher, Ben pushes his students to question their learned definitions of normality, and to be playful and exploratory in their pursuit of an authentic voice and vision of the world. He pursues a similar goal in his shop, creating work that defies expectations by transforming very normal things into new and surprising forms. In a world flooded with mediated truth and contrived beauty, Ben wants to wake us up, make us look again, and pursue more authentic and individual ways of being.
Ben holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from Brown University and a Masters in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
slow seep
Carolyn Sirois
slow seep speaks to how our experiences, ideas, reflections seep into (and out of) our consciousness over time. What we absorb moving through life continuously morphs. We process. Books bring comfort and distraction and shape– they tell our stories. Books have beginnings and endings. I alter books and book pages as a metaphor for changing perspectives. And I love the feel of books, their pages, smell, and weight – analog to resist our digital lives. Water cleanses. Water refreshes. Water alters materials, land. Water seeps and we are resilient.
An artist in the Boston area, Carolyn Sirois’s art practice and teaching practice(instructor of writing) inform each other. She’s a Lecturer of English at Northeastern University, where she teaches Advanced Writing in the Disciplines for Arts, Media & Design, Interdisciplinary Advanced Writing in the Disciplines, First-Year Writing and First-Year Writing for Multi-Lingual Writers. Carolyn has also been adjunct faculty at the SMFA/School of Museum of Fine Arts (now SMFA at Tufts), Berklee College of Music, and the Boston Architectural College. Over the years she has exhibited her art in Cambridge, Boston, the North Shore, the Vineyard, New Hampshire and Maine. Carolyn’s artwork is in private collections in New England, Florida, Washington D. C., Ottawa, Bangkok and Rome.
Carolyn is a graduate of the School of Museum of Fine Arts (Diploma and Fifth Year) and received her MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University College of Art & Design.
Cargo Ship Pangea 2.0
Cori Champagne
Cori received her BFA at Massachusetts College of Art + Design, as a dual-major in Sculpture and Glass, and her MFA from Maine College of Art (MECA). While at MECA, Cori began working with Sandra Oberdorfer; the two would go on to form the collaboration which became the Bunny Sandwich Collective (BSG), which existed from 2010-2015. Following the culmination of BSG, Cori became a member of ArtShape Mammoth, exhibiting with the group from 2015-2019. Since 2020, she has been represented by Boston Sculptors Gallery.
Her work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions all over the US, including Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, Monte Vista Projects in LA, and at Michigan Tech University, among many others. In addition to exhibitions of her sculptural works, Cori has been the recipient of numerous competitions to create site-specific temporary installations, such as the Oregon Jewish Museum, Garner Arts Festival, and the Feverish World conference at the University of Vermont.
In addition to her studio practice, Cori is adjunct faculty at Boston Architectural College, in the School of Architecture, and is a program administrator at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Saw
Deborah Read
The objects that I create emerge from my dialogue with darkness and the unknown. Working with what you don’t know, or can’t conceive of, is in opposition to what might be called an enlightenment project. The Zen teacher, Joan Southerland, uses the term “endarkenment” for this type of work. The method is improvisational and messy, often generating many ‘mistakes’ or ‘failures’ and begins with a phrase or question that calls out to me. I hold the phrase in my mind and trust that certain objects will reach out in response. I am often attracted to old and discarded materials; saws, old wooden forms, tools, rusty metal bits, discarded textiles. These lost objects reach out from the past and act as ancestors, anchors, primary structures, from which the work will weave itself. On this primary structure I inscribe words, repetitive marks, obsessive layering of gestures, sewn patches, woven mater, collage patterns and colors until the object transforms itself. I think of this process as activating the object, creating a type of talisman or object of power. The mundane, the overlooked, and repetitive labor, especially of women, is important in much of my work and why you often find stitches or strips of thread, paint, or marks. I feel the idea of repeated, everyday ‘touch’ to be important, but not the touch of a stroke of genius, but one of utter ordinariness. Furthermore, repetitive, laborious, mundane tasks like sewing, hammering, mark-making or any type of manual labor is ripe for losing one’s mind in a sense of timelessness or deep time. Deep time is only felt in the dark, unknowable, and inconceivable spaces of the world; the place before you were born, or where you go when you die. Although you can’t know these spaces in an intellectual sense, artwork can serve as a gateway to the mysterious and sacred. It is my intention that when one enters into the space of my work there is a certain activation of this feeling of deep time, of a voyage asked to be taken, and a question that might be dangerous and liberating all at the same time.
Proof of Life
Dennis Svoronos
Proof of Life was conceived as a response to my own affliction with brain cancer, and as an affirmation and exaltation of my continued existence in spite of this diagnosis. In using myself - or the viewer - as the launching point, source of examination or inspiration for the artworks, I am consciously and continuously acknowledging and appreciating our unique and fleeting existence together.
Whether through selfies, live tweets or biometric data, in the 21st century world we live in, there is no end to the tools we have to represent, document and scrutinize our culture and our identity. In a similar way to how the ancient Greeks and Romans used marble and bronze to express their distinct socio-cultural moment, I use iPhones and LEDs to the exact same ends; trying to understand our place and ourselves at this unique time.
Dennis Svoronos’ work exists between art and engineering; it is inspired by the modern world in motion. He uses his sculpture to reflect this environment charged with electricity, spectacle and information. He uses our common language of the 21st century: electronics, robotics and interactive kinetics, to build connections between the viewers and the work. In a society fractured by technology, Dennis Svoronos uses it to bring us together. Currently, he is making work in response to his recent diagnosis of brain cancer, seeking to use his art as a platform to question sickness, wellness and recovery.
Dennis Svoronos is a Boston-based sculptor whose work has been shown nationally and internationally. He holds a diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Tufts University as well as a Masters in Fine Art from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Svoronos has been represented locally by the Boston
Sculptors Gallery since 2012 and his work has been exhibited at numerous institutions and galleries such as the MFA, Boston; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; G.A.S.P Brookline, MA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, FL. Svoronos has also been the recipient of numerous awards and public work commissions. Currently, he is visiting faculty in Graduate Studies and Sculpture at Massachusetts College of Art and Design as well as Northeastern University’s College of Art, Media and Design.
Dis-Carded
Michael King
Dis-Carded boils down to language because it continuously changes and evolves. Not always in a good way. Our written language is quickly disappearing. It’s being discarded, it’s being thrown away for other more efficient methods of communication. However, we lose the intimacy and thought that goes into writing language with our hands. This is why we have such a hard time communicating with each other. This is why we have so many health issues and violence in our country because we have discarded our ability to communicate on an intimate level.
Michael P. King was born and raised in Rochester, New York. He entered the US Army on September 3, 1993 and completed Basic Training and Military Police Advanced Individual Training at Fort McClellan, Alabama. Michael retired from the US Army at the rank of Sergeant Major in 2015 after more than 21 years of service.
Michael uses art as an outlet and enjoys tackling complex issues in his work. Often rooted in his military experiences, he attempts to spark conversations about issues that are either ignored or avoided. Michael works with different mediums to make visually intriguing pieces to draw in his audience.
Michael has earned a Master of Arts in Leadership Studies from the University of Texas at El Paso and a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the Director of Veteran Relations for the United Veteran Benefits Agency and resides in Lenox Dale, Massachusetts with his wife and children.
The Scrolls
Tracy Hayes
The scrolls initially developed out of a desire to have unlimited access to material and indulge in a working preference within intimate settings, and morphed into an interest in the fickle nature of language and story. The nature of obscuring while proceeding into the next section led to imagining that this exploration of freedom might be a version of a book, though not literally. The marks resemble a type of language or mantra, or an attempt to speak about the unspeakable.
Structures appear briefly only to dissipate and dissolve. The metaphorical space of above, below and behind the surface is considered to access what is sensed to be present, but not readily visible. These works seek to make sense of a world just outside of reach, beckoning yet elusive.
Tracy Hayes is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Morrisville, VT. A native of Montreal who has lived in US since attending University of NH (BA), Hayes has a BFA from NH Institute of Art and an MFA from Lesley University College of Art + Design. Recent participation in shows include: Terra in Tribeca, NY, Abstract Art: Contemporary Approaches in Watertown, MA and Troubling the Space in Boston, MA. She and artist peer Deborah Read co-founded an initiative which has since expanded to Art+Everywhere, a project that provides a direct funnel to exhibition spaces for alumni of the Lesley MFA in Visual Arts Program.
Through
the Window
Zhang Zhaohui
I was born into a military/intellectural family in Heibei province China in 1965 and grow up in a troop compound in Beijing. Learnt traditional calligraphy and ink brush painting in the fine art program in Children’s Palace in Haidian District in 1970s, I started my dream of becoming an artist. Failed to be admitted by the affiliated mid-school to Central Academy of Art in 1981, I involved to the museum study program in Nankai University in order to become an art expert. Had been working at National Museum of Art （中国美术馆）as assistant curator of modern art for 7 years before 1996 I came to New York to study curating MA program at Bard College, supported by Asian Cultural Council fellowship.
Since returning to China Beijing in 1998, I have been deeply involved new art movement as an independent curator and freelance writer for nearly 10 years, trying to foster a better art milieu in China. I gradually come to realize that artist career is my top life selection when I am 40 years old. Therefore, I gave up the art observer role in 1999 and shifted myself to an art practitioner exploring the potentials of transferring the ancient media into a modern/contemporary expression/language.
Based on my experience and knowledge to art history/theory and involvement of the art scene of 200 years, I put my rear part of my life into the adventure of art dream. Luckily, my art exploration has been gradually recognized by art establishments at home and abroad. Many solo shows and group exhibitions have been staged worldwide and 10 museums have collected my works including the Art Institute of Chicago（芝加哥美术馆）and Fukuoga Asian Art Museum（福冈亚洲艺术博物馆）.
In order to seek a freer social environment and bigger exposure of my art I immigrated to USA and settled down in Lenox MA. in 2022, starting a new journey of art career.
