DUMBO Open Studios
Top left: Rebecca Levitan, let's get social, 2019. Top right: Ilana Harris-Babou, still from Finishing a Raw Basement, 2017. Bottom left: Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Picnic Parade, 2017. Bottom right: Natalia Nakazawa, Language of Birds, 2018.
Triangle is thrilled to announce our participation in DUMBO Open Studios! The event will be held virtually starting from Thursday, May 13 through Sunday, May 23. This virtual platform will give visitors the opportunity to participate and view the annual event from every corner of the world, from the comfort and safety of your home.
Triangle will feature special interviews and performances from our current artist-in-residence, Ilana Harris-Babou, Rebecca Levitan, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, and Natalia Nakazawa.
For a full list of programming/events and a map of artists’ studios, please visit this link. The public can virtually tour artists’ studios and spaces across the neighborhood throughout the weekend on Art in DUMBO’s Instagram and Facebook accounts.
Ilana Harris-Babou’s work is interdisciplinary; spanning sculpture and installation, and grounded in video. She speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor as a means to digest painful realities. Her work confronts the contradictions of the American Dream: the ever unreliable notion that hard work will lead to upward mobility and economic freedom. She has exhibited throughout the US and Europe.
Rebecca Levitan
“My highly concentrated paintings and works of text and image peek over the wall into lives both mundane and extraordinary in an attempt to transmute the flotsam of the world into a larger narrative. My work embraces a multiplicity of forms of image-making without judging their status. I am equally interested in Dutch Still Life, Indian miniature painting, and Chinese restaurant menus. I believe any honest accounting of our world includes all three, shows each equal care, and therefore isn’t limited to a singular style or mode of making. Thus, each work requires new techniques, approaches, and journeys down rabbit-holes. Together, my pieces form a body of work as disparate as the world that informs them, but linked by an interest in everyday moments and the vernacular image.”
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow is an interdisciplinary artist who often stages live and lens-based performances. She constructs narratives with wearable sculptures, drawings, and prints that aim to highlight the lost traditions and stories of her own heritage(s), cultural ideologies and the effects of migration, globalization, and climate change. Using urban and natural landscapes, some of which are culturally significant, she places the audience as the role of witness to her reclaim. Lyn-Kee-Chow lives in Queens, NY and is currently working on her ongoing series, “Junkanooacome," based on the 18th-century Jamaican folk masquerade called jonkonnu.
Natalia Nakazawa’s work is concerned with ideas of transnationality, diasporic contexts and cultural identities, storytelling, archives, and patterns of migration. She has long been fascinated by comprehensive cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but has questioned her own place and personal history within their confines. Nakazawa accumulates archival imagery by entering poetic search terms into the museum’s database, collapsing layered representations of the collection into textiles in order to reconsider the museum’s alienating structures and question national identities. In her wood panel paintings, she uses Jacquard woven ribbons that have been arranged as orthographic architectural forms to present multiple perspectives. Influenced by eastern storytelling devices and illustrated manuscripts, the works seek to present numerous viewpoints of a singular story.