RISE 2020: Hillyer Newly Selected Artists

RISE 2020: Hillyer Newly Selected Artists

RISE 2020: Hillyer Newly Selected Artists

February 7 – March 1, 2020

Hillyer is proud to present our newly selected artists for the 2020/2021 exhibition calendar. RISE 2020 includes work from Hillyer’s rising artists who were selected from our most recent annual open call for proposals, and who will be exhibiting solo presentations starting this April 2020 through April 2021.

Featured Artists:
Kristin Adair
Lynn Alleva Lilley
Redeat Assefa
MK Bailey
Mary Baum
Katherine Burling
Yasmine Dabbous
Magdolene Dykstra
Caley English
Kate Fitzpatrick
Aziza Claudia Gibson-Hunter
Jeremy Jirsa
Walter Kravitz
Gabrielle Lajoie-Bergeron
Nava Levenson
Noah McWilliams
Lee Nowell-Wilson
Hillary L. Steel
Michael Thron
Jessica van Brakle
Elizabeth Vorlicek

 

Additional selected artists and exhibitions, not represented in RISE 2020, include:

  • Rogelio Baez Vega (Puerto Rico)
  • Heather Goodchild (Canada)
  • Roma Blanco (Argentina)
  • Alessandro Gianni (Italy), in partnership with the Italian Cultural Society
  • Stefan Tiefengraber (Austria), in partnership with the Austrian Cultural Forum
  • Goldschmied & Chiari (Italy), in partnership with the Italian Cultural Institute
  • Shaping the Past, in partnership with the Goethe Institute
  • Korean Video NOW, in partnership with the Korean Cultural Center and the Smithsonian’s Korean Film Festival
  • Outbound, juried by Julie Wolfe

Suzy Kopf

Bow and Arrow

February 7 – March 1, 2020

Between 1947 and the early 1970s, real-estate developers the Levitt Brothers built more than 140,000 houses in towns they created—in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Puerto Rico—all of which they named Levittown. Suzy Kopf was inspired by two trips she made to Puerto Rico’s Levittown, a suburb of San Juan, both pre- and post-Hurricane Maria. Known amongst midcentury enthusiasts, Levittown, Puerto Rico’s well-preserved homes are both a testament to the United States’ ongoing colonialism of the Caribbean and a cross-cultural version of the decaying American Dream of homeownership for the masses. Through her watercolors, oil paintings, and sculpture, Kopf asks her viewers to scrutinize these structures for their problematic origins.

Originally from Silicon Valley, CA, Suzy Kopf was a resident of NYC for eight years and currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD. She completed her MFA in studio art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016, and holds a BFA from Parsons and a BA in art history from Eugene Lang College. She is the recipient of numerous residency fellowships, including Kala, The Studios at Mass MoCA, Playa, VCCA, Byrdcliffe, Hambidge, Elsewhere, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. She has received a Design History Society Travel Grant, as well as several research grants to support her practice. Kopf is a cofounder of the Gowanus Swim Society, a Brooklyn, NY-based art collective. In addition to her own studio practice, Kopf is the Director of Sales and Marketing for BmoreArt, a regional arts publication and website. She also teaches watercolor painting and museum studies at Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

www.suzykopf.com

Neil Forrest

The Washingtonian Service

January 3 – February 2, 2020

Neil Forrest’s works examine historical events, architectural monuments, and national identities, and use the lens of ceramic history to play out corporeal and material elements of storytelling. His installations aspire to a logos of craft, site, and knowledge.

Forrest’s The Washingtonian Service is a colosseum, a collision, and a suite of celestial objects that meet in DC. The colosseum appears as the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library and is emblematic of a golden age in a salient city. The real MLK Library, soon to be re-incarnated and re-inhabited, was a city’s search for modern identity in architectural form. Admired by an elite but perhaps unloved by many, Mies van der Rohe’s library is itself a storyline in Washington.

Forrest’s rendition of this icon as a porcelain model embodies both a fascination with miniatures and a flirtation with great centerpieces such as Napoleon’s commissioned “Egyptian Service.” If Napoleon used a porcelain miniature to glorify his expeditionary force in Egypt, The Washingtonian Service instead hosts the rare chance of a collision between a celestial object with a contested landmark, forecasting a cosmic problem as much as an existential one.

Neil Forrest is an artist and professor at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and taught at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway. He has exhibited at the Denver Art Museum, the Museum Hilversum in The Netherlands, and the Cheongju Biennale in Korea, and has received Established Artist’s grants from the Canada Council and the Norwegian Artistic Research Council.

The artist would like to thank SangDuk Yu, Marie MacInnis, Charles Freeman, Ellie Ruck, and George Cho.

This exhibition was supported by Arts Nova Scotia.

Noel Kassewitz

Rococo Remastered

January 3 – February 2, 2020

How does an artist prepare for climate change?

Noel Kassewitz’s practice examines how a painter copes with a rapidly changing cultural and environmental landscape. Using experimental techniques that blur the line between painting and sculpture, passive and active object, cultural artifact and survival tool, she works to examine this moment in time through the lens of art history, rising social pressures, and commodified disaster preparedness. In her latest body of work, Rococo Remastered, Kassewitz delves into the historical clues left to us by the pastel-colored art movement that preceded France’s revolution and reinterprets the works through the lens of Miami pool-party culture for today’s audiences.

Noel Kassewitz was born and raised in Miami, Florida. Her works have exhibited nationally in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Miami, as well as internationally in Milan and Bologna, Italy. She currently resides in Washington, DC.

www.noelkassewitz.com

Tessa Click

Search Party for Two

January 3 – February 2, 2020

Based in symbolic language, this body of work seeks understanding of the real world through the use of absurd characters, props, and settings as forms of proxy. Mundane scenes, intertwined with otherworldly imagery, set the stage for playing out unseen connections between internal and external conflicts. These mixed-media paintings and structures invite the viewer to consider concepts of potentiality and agency in uncertain times. While some of the imagery may at times feel familiar and childlike, the artist’s use of unrecognizable objects and disorienting vantage points highlights a lack of groundedness. The nonlinear narratives embrace artifice, duplicity, a sense of play, and analog materiality. Influences from children’s storytelling toys, historical narrative painting, and theatrical set design can be found throughout the formal and conceptual aspects of the work.

Originally from Carmel, IN, Tessa Click received a master of fine arts in visual arts from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, and a bachelor of science in visual art education from Ball State University in Muncie, IN. She has been a resident of Washington, DC, since 2012.

www.tessaclick.com

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