Open Studios

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 6:30 - 9:00PM EDT

Please join us on Zoom for our virtual Open Studios, a series of conversations with our Fall artists in residence. Attendees are encouraged to attend the full event or drop in at any time during the evening. Registration is free but is required: click here to register. For more information or to request accommodation, contact barbara@triangleartsnyc.org.

6:30 - 7:00pm - Riitta Ikonen in conversation with Clara Darrason
7:00 - 7:30PM - Layo Bright in conversation with Adeze Wilford
7:30 - 8:00pm - Isaac Pool in conversation with Wendy Vogel
8:00 - 8:30pm - André Magaña in conversation with Tamara Santibañez
8:30 - 9:00pm - Group conversation moderated by Triangle Director Nova Benway

Layo Bright (b. Lagos, Nigeria) addresses themes of culture, identity and family in her works. She received her MFA in Fine Art (Hons.) from the Parsons School of Design (2018). Awards include the UrbanGlass Winter Scholarship Award (2020), and the International Sculpture Center’s 2018 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award (2018). She was a Professor at The New School (Department of Integrated Design), and has exhibited work in the U.S. and Nigeria including You Don’t See Me (2020), Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, MD; Maid in Nigeria (2019), Untitled AWCA, Lagos; Carry Over: New Voices from the Global African Diaspora (2018), Smack Mellon, NY; among others. Adeze Wilford is an Assistant Curator at the Shed where she has organized Howardena Pindell: Rope/Fire/Water. Additional curatorial projects include Vernacular Interior at Hales Gallery in 2019 as well as Excerpt (2017) at the Studio Museum in Harlem, along with the film series Black Intimacy (2017) at MoMA. She has contributed research and essays to catalogues and magazines including Black Refractions, Fictions and Young, Gifted and Black.

Riitta Ikonen's work threads together memory, myth, imagination and an anthropomorphic view of the natural world. Originally from the deep eastern Finnish forests, she mediates interaction between people and their environment that materializes as performance, video, wearable sculptures and photographic portraiture. Reveries stand out as a survival strategy while investigating the various ways humanity occupies and interprets this planet and certain elements, usually small and insignificant, peak Ikonen’s interest. Pre-covid, Ikonen used to travel most of the year lecturing, exhibiting and performing around the world with various collaborators. Ikonen is based at Rockaway Beach, NY. She is a winter swimmer and currently enthusiastic about Eyes as Big as Plates Vol II, mycology, horseshoe crabs, moss, cyanobacteria and TNR. Clara Darrason is a curator, founder and co-director of The Chimney NYC in Brooklyn, as well as gallery manager at Almine Rech gallery, NY.

André Magaña’s work adopts the aesthetic languages and object making practices of his ancestors, making sculpture that describes the oft-contradictory realities of Mexican-American experience and his own identity. Magaña bears direct reference to Mexican art history, pop culture, and “Hispanic” consumables by building a world where historical time is collapsed, and elements of pre and post-colonial reality are left to sort themselves out. Magaña’s practice extracts narrative from this collapse, where transmuted caricatures and fragments of Mexican and Pan-Latinx culture are rendered as large scale bioplastic objects and effigies, becoming icons of an imagined anti-colonial modernity. Tamara Santibañez is a multimedia artist living and working in Brooklyn. Enlisting inanimate objects as stand-ins for human figures and relationships, Santibañez emphasizes the undulating exchange between power and vulnerability, otherness and assimilation, generational expectations and individual capability.

Isaac Pool is an artist who works across sculpture, performance, poetry, and lens-based media. Their practice takes its cues from the suburban shopping mall, coded vernacular objects, and the glitzy affirmations promised by the pop diva remix. Pool's work engages feminism with a perverse sentimentality and antagonistic relationship to gender presentation. Formally, they invest in illegibility, aphorisms, and the clipped syntax of a notes app. The work manifests dark humor, joy, glamour, and excess laced with an undercurrent of shame. Pool amplifies the power of fantasy and creates spaces where superficial pleasures can become makeshift sites for social survival. They have performed and exhibited internationally with solo shows in New York, Detroit, and Brussels. Their first full length book of poems in print, Light Stain, is available from What Pipeline, Detroit. Alien She, an ebook dedicated to Mark Aguhar, is available from Klaus eBooks. Wendy Vogel is a writer, critic and independent curator. She writes regularly about art and culture for Artforum, art-agenda and MOUSSE, and teaches in the photography department at Parsons School of Design.