Heidi Zenisek

Heidi Zenisek

Heidi Zenisek

Heidi Zenisek

Heidi Zenisek

Gestate

April 5 – April 28, 2019

Currently, my work parallels society’s abuse of ecology with man’s mistreatment of women; an ecofeminist epic in the age of the Anthropocene. Facets of my childhood on an Iowa farm inform how I embody scale, movement, insemination, and renewal—agricultural detritus being my material of choice. I use sculptural assemblage and installation as platforms to abstract, interpolate, and find a rediscovered relevance within the refuse.

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Zenisek is a sculptor from Iowa City, IA where she received her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Iowa and spent her younger years on a farm surrounded by dirt, cows, corn and rust. Since then, she has lived and exhibited throughout Iceland, participated in numerous residencies, worked at sculpture parks and galleries, and was most recently awarded the Dean’s Fellowship to begin graduate school at the University of Maryland.

www.heidizenisek.com

Bryanna Millis

Bryanna Millis

Bryanna Millis

Bryanna Millis

Bryanna Millis

Bryanna Millis

Imagination of Salvation: Actions on the Land

April 5 – April 28, 2019

“One of the challenges of our time is that people feel disconnected from – perhaps even insensitive to – the world’s great problems…there is a huge gap between what we know and what we feel. How can we translate knowledge into action, and really change our behavior?…Only by embodying knowledge can we gain a sense of responsibility and commitment.”

– Olafur Eliasson

In Imagination of Salvation, Bryanna works with local partners from Al Azraq (the blue one), a former desert oasis in Eastern Jordan that has been decimated by 30 years of groundwater over-pumping and resource mismanagement. Through this work she seeks to create a visual lexicon to understand how mind, body, and heart-centered knowledge can lead us to overcome powerlessness and cynicism and take action for change.

This work is about dreams, and changing what we believe to be possible. Imagination of Salvation: Actions on the Land, begins that conversation, representing a time of getting to know the land, and thinking about its past, present, and possible future. The works include documentation of site-specific actions, mixed-media collage, poetry, and local memories in Arabic.

Maps here represent a visual form of data, or intellectual knowing, which are altered to see how they can become vehicles for deeper engagement and understanding of place. Actions on the land reflect embodied knowledge, or feeling, through interactions with heat, water, earth, stone, salt, and net. Other pieces address a third form of knowing, through the heart, and seek to understand how heart-centered knowledge can make us feel connected to the earth, to one another, to something larger than ourselves.

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Bryanna Millis is a conceptual environmental mixed-media artist focusing on the linkages between heart and mind, feeling and intellect. Her work is situated within broader themes of place and time in the Middle East, and she uses cut paper, paint, thread, objects, and found materials to root esoteric concepts in concrete experiences of specific histories, present moments, and imagined futures. Bryanna has a Master’s degree in Development Economics from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Communications and Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019 she will attend the Athena Standards Residency in Athens, Greece. Bryanna lives and works in Washington, DC and Amman, Jordan.

www.bryannamillis.com

Ash Cheshire

Marion Colomer

J. Casey Doyle

Your Rouge Photography

vân anh le

Dusty Rose

Sidney Mullis

John Thomas Paradiso

Maritza Ranero

Ashleigh Rose Robb

Hillary Rochon

Alex Dolores Salerno

K. Sarrantonio

Erin Smego

Sarah Stefana Smith

Diana Walsh

Sandra Chen Weinstein

Qigemu

Transcendence

March 1 – March 31, 2019

Juror’s Statement
The artists featured in “Transcendence” provide a starting point for individual and collective action through their radical uses of presence and absence. Blurring the boundaries of genres, mediums, and visualities, the works presented all challenge the traditional binaries and patriarchal notions of gender associated with Western systems of thought, surveillance, and power. Even though visibility does not always equate to empowerment, these works certainly provide visceral and theoretical insight into our ongoing understanding of gender.

On viewing “Transcendence,” I hope you not only take time to examine what shifts or transformations you have undergone in your own thinking and behavior around gender, but also reevaluate how you actively support the LGBTQIA+ community on a daily basis. The cathartic, utopian visions of gender imagined by the artists are not accessible unless we collectively work towards justice.

Special thanks to IA&A at Hillyer for being an active ally in the ongoing discourse around gender, race, class, power, and agency.

–Antonius-Tín Bui

Selected Artists:
Vân Anh (NY)
Ash Cheshire (MD)
Marion Colomer (DC)
J. Casey Doyle (ID)
Sidney Mullis (PA)
John Thomas Paradiso (MD)
Qigemu (Jasmine Lin + April Lin) (CT)
Maritza Ranero (MA)
Ashleigh Rose Robb (CA)
Hillary Rochon (DC)
Dusty Rose (MD)
Alex Dolores Salerno (NY)
K. Sarrantonio (NY)
Erin Smego (IL)
Sarah Stefana Smith (DC)
Diana Walsh (MA)
Sandra Chen Weinstein (CA)
Your Rouge Photography (VA)

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About the Juror:  Antonius-Tín Bui (b. 1992) is a queer, gender-nonbinary, Vietnamese-American artist who recently graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Since graduating from MICA, Bui has been awarded fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Kala Art Institute, Tulsa Artists Fellowship, Halcyon Arts Lab, and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. They are currently interested in complicating Vietnamese history and queerness through performance, textiles, and photography.

Special thanks to A. Morgan McKendry, who developed the curatorial concept for Transcendence as part of an internship with IA&A at Hillyer this past Fall 2018.

Spencer Dormitzer

Spencer Dormitzer

Spencer Dormitzer

Ponder… er ING, I AM THE ASTEROID

March 1 – March 31, 2019

In September of 2017, I embarked on a year-long series of drawings titled: PONDER… er ING or, I
AM THE ASTEROID.

Each piece contains several layers of frenetic, haphazard marks, methodically drawn over extended
drawing sessions. The first layer (or conversation) starts with a lighter hue or shade, with progressive
layers of marks moving darker down the spectrum. From a distance, the orbs seem to float upon the
surface of the paper, some centrally, while others are slightly askew. As the viewer gets closer to the
work, the sphere becomes frenzied and confused as meticulous marks create a sculptural or fibrous
aesthetic.

Conceptually, I think of this body of work as a meditation of difficult conversations about significant,
yet simple ideas. The difficult conversations are depicted in the layering of the ink marks, while the
idea is represented by the sphere. When I started this series, I was struggling to articulate myself
to others. Finding the correct words for basic conversation was becoming increasingly difficult due
to stress and social anxiety. These works and the process of making them have been a welcome obsession, as each drawing session unlocks a myriad of emotional responses—Zen, boredom, self-
doubt, courage, comfort, and impatience, much like the emotional responses to significant ideas.

As I move into the last stages of making this particular body of work, (each piece takes weeks,
sometimes months to complete) I have discovered a powerful understanding of mindfulness and its
connection to my art making process, something I may have repressed in earlier work. The co-titles
play on this process and concept—I ponder, therefore I am a PONDERER of PONDERINGS, while I
AM THE ASTEROID dwells on the loneliness and stargazed thought process of making these
pieces. 

—

Spencer Dormitzer attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986 and has been a working
artist for over 30 years. Dormitzer previously worked as a Studio Manager for New York Abstractionist David Reed and as an Executive Producer for the New York Cosmos. He has had work in over 75 group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the greater Washington, DC area; Chicago, IL; Antwerp, Belgium; Santa Fe, NM; Philadelphia, PA; and New York City, NY. Dormitzer is the former Director of Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery in Washington, DC, and is currently the Director of Brentwood Arts exchange in Brentwood MD. He has managed, curated, and juried over thirty exhibitions throughout the DC metro region.

www.sadormitzerart.com

Michal Gavish

Michal Gavish

Michal Gavish

Michal Gavish

Michal Gavish

Michal Gavish

Crystal Architecture

March 1 – March 31, 2019

To a chemist, urban structures are familiar: they look naturally constructed, growing like
crystals under the microscope. Michal Gavish, originally a scientist studying these
formations, now creates large, handmade prints of cityscapes in the manner of the crystals
she used to research. In her new exhibition, Crystal Architecture, she exhibits prints
deconstructing her new hometown of Washington, DC.

Gavish rearranges her photography-based images of city buildings into geometries that extend
vertically. She recasts familiar city streets into invented layouts, instilling undercurrents of
turmoil in the magnificent, quiet buildings. She builds them into scaffoldings of infinitely long
rows of windows and columns. These careful compositions of multiple lines and rectangles
display magnificent patterns of crystalline-like geometries.

Printed on translucent fabric layers, the vacant structures become fleeting dioramas of
contemporary archaeological sites. These images emerge like thin embroidery patterns that
sometimes appear flat and at other moments are three-dimensional.

—

Michal Gavish is a multimedia artist currently living and working in Washington, DC. She received her MFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. Previously, she had earned a PhD in Physical Chemistry, which continues to influence her art and science practice. Her works have been exhibited internationally in solo shows at the Budapest Museum, LIU and Garrison art centers in New York, Spinnerei in Leipzig, Germany, and Sandra Lee in San Francisco, to name a few. Her work has been in many group shows including at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Stanford University, ZeroOne Silicon Valley Biennale, Venus Knitting in Brooklyn, Sonoma Art Museum in California, Bogota Art Fair, Columbia and more. Gavish writes reviews for SciArt Magazine and lectures extensively on art and science. She has curated group shows in the New York area and was awarded several artist residencies in New York City and Europe.

www.michalgavish.com