Romance, Pittsburgh x Iowa, Brooklyn
Emilia Wang, Naomi Hawksley & Ingrid Yi-Chen Lu
This presentation brings together works by artists Naomi Hawksley, Ingrid Yi-Chen Lu, and Emilia Wang around motifs of containerization and suspension, creating a dialogue between interiority, memory and materiality that gives form to unseen systems of belief that shape how we relate to our surroundings on a social, metaphysical, and emotional level.
Throughout her work, Emilia Wang explores the flux of diasporic movement and the rootedness of the transcendental realm, setting into relief the minute ways we attempt to define ourselves and perceive human experience in the context of a much wider universe beyond our understanding. In this installation, her washy ink compositions on delicate scroll- like paper and fabric are suspended at various heights with fishing wire from the rafters to create an ethereal labyrinth hovering above the floor. While eschewing self-seriousness in her child-like hand, these semi-abstract paintings are conceived as “irrational” calendars that “map” out the artist’s life and possible futures using both esoteric and familiar symbols.
Ingrid Yi-Chen Lu’s paintings are as engaged with the history of minimalism as they are with the visual culture of maximalism. Playfully employing corrugated cardboard and craft materials––the stuff of stationary stores, birthday parties, and associations with femininity––she operates in a simultaneous reverence and revision of abstract painting and ideas around formalism. As she engages in a reflection on how the aesthetics of youth and diasporic cultural and personal iconography are carried through our ongoing development of personhood, she draws from her wide collection of materials, sourced while visiting home in Taipei and in the dollar stores of New York City. In doing so she generates an interior logic of patterning and its interruption, refusing rigidity through a distinct set of visual challenges and solutions.
Naomi Hawksley’s graphite drawings of seemingly anonymous young women often paired with self-aware, cheeky text–– such as “How will I be myself today?”––similarly look at selfhood in relationship to an external world that lacks certainty and attempts to circumscribe the nature of being. Encased in protective, small acrylic boxes, these images read as delicate meditations on interiority, ideas of “safe space,” and structures of morality and ethics. In the absence of a shared reality, her work also looks to the future, asking how can we move forward with no map at all?
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