Bark Like A Dog: 8/01—10/02, 2022
ONLINE EXHIBITION
Including artwork by members Albert Abdul-Barr Wang, Grayson Cassels, Samantha Connors, Rebecca Forstater, Josh Green, Valeria Divinorum, Michelle Herman, Heather Piper, Heather Renée Russ, Eva Redamonti, and Naderson Saint-Pierre.
Curated by PP member Grayson Cassels, Bark like a Dog is a group show that merges painting, sculpture, digital design, and mixed media from eleven artists, who each capture the essence of tradition and innovative new material. The show title references the phenomenon of animals mimicking sounds compared to how an artist might mimic a medium or style. Cassels sees this phenomenon mirrored in the ways each artist pulls inspiration from external sources: mimicking the medium, technique, or concept in a format that is uniquely their own. In this show the artist might create digital work like a painter, or paint like a sculptor. In some cases the artists use new mediums to interpret traditional processes or draw from those processes to reflect the contemporary experience and speculate about the future.
Full press release
To best enjoy the archive as curatorially intended, please view on a desktop or landscape-orientation device.
Meet the artists
Albert [Abdul-Barr] Wang is a Salt Lake City-based conceptual photographer, tapestry, painter, sculptor, and installation artist. His projects focus on historical and economic archives, glitches in artificial intelligence and speculative themes as related to Catholic and Muslim identities, surveillance, post-language relating to science fiction, capitalist machinery, and the architectonics and commodification of sociopolitical violence via technology and social media.
Wang was born in Brooklyn, New York City. Currently he is a BFA Honors student in Photography & Digital Imaging at the University of Utah. He has exhibited at Postmasters Gallery, Site:Brooklyn Gallery, Filter Space, Equity Gallery, Texas Photographic Society, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Also Wang has been an artist-in-residence at the School for Visual Arts and a recipient of the Working Artist Org grant. The artist is also a co-founder and co-curator at Office Space, a Salt Lake City and Burbank (Los Angeles) contemporary gallery network which is part of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA).
Grayson Cassels, curator of “Bark like a Dog” is a current undergraduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University where she has experimented with painting, sculpture, and mixed media works. Inspired by her upbringing in the South, her generation’s inundation with technology, and the human form, Cassels’ work melds these themes in colorful abstract and representational works.
Grayson Cassels’ work investigates the female form in three specific spaces: in wellness culture, digital spheres, and in Southern communities. In this body of work, she grapples with femininity, shame, sexual health, and bodily ownership through personal experience and research. Cassels uses paint and mixed media to create capsules that depict optimism and pain, tradition, and innovation, and transcend through time periods. These capsules exhibit the female form in the current state of the world and in a fictional digital reality.
About Samantha Connors:
Within making, I am seeking to initiate conversation and action around wealth inequity, the inherent violence of gentrification, and community rooted trauma. My work frequently addresses the fragmented histories left behind by displaced people in Kensington and South Philadelphia, utilizing scavenged objects from demolition sites within sculptural works or by creating recreations of the lasting traces demolished buildings leave on the surrounding landscape. Recently I have been constructing hand-built representations of the tools used within construction projects to investigate the lasting mental health effects that occur in the people witnessing their neighborhood rapidly gentrify. My practice embraces the use of craft-based techniques and materials, bringing a homemaking and labor rooted skillset against a scarcity capitalist run world.
Rebecca Forstater (she/they) is a South Carolina based interdisciplinary artist whose work considers the production of current histories in digital landscapes. Featuring motifs of reality television banality, online community myth-making, and artificial transfiguration, Forstater’s work is presented through an aesthetic of lo-fi deepfake performances combining analog silicone masks and re-hashed digital video reminiscent of half-remembered internet memes from the past decade. Her distinct ironic appropriation of celebrity culture manifests in the visceral feeling of being torn between repulsion and familiarity. Through the outward-facing aesthetic of tacky luxury and cliched reality television narrative, Forstater questions whether we can trust our own desires in a screen-based world.
rebeccaforstater.com
@r4stater
Josh Green is a painter and art educator living in New York City. Green was born in 1990 in Pensacola, Florida. Green was inspired to paint by his mother, an aspiring painter herself. As a teenager he apprenticed under the wildlife painter Dharbinder Bamrah before he passed (2006-7). Green then mentored under the Gulf Coast artist Gregory B. Saunders at the University of West Florida for his BFA (2008-14). Green then moved to Florence, Italy to study the techniques of the old masters at the Florence Academy of Art (2014-17). He later went to receive his master at the Alfred-Dusseldorf Painting MFA (2019-21). Green then moved to NYC were he is now painting, educating, and assisting Y.Z. Kami.
Green was deeply affected by the craftsmanship of the Italian Renaissace masterpieces in Florence, Italy, especially the frescoes of Giotto at Santa Croce Cathedral. For him being skilled with one's hands and being intimate with the materials is vital to his art practice. At the Florence Academy of Art, Green inherited an unbroken tradition of realist painting passed down from master to student.
joshgreenart.com
@josh_green_artist
Michelle L. Herman is a multidisciplinary artist who creates sculpture, video, and installations to initiate conversations about agency within invisible systems of power. Drawing from theoretical and philosophical research, feminist and disability politics, comedy, and conceptualism, Herman explores themes such as the performativity of everyday life in technologically mediated society, value production, and how agency navigates larger systems of power. Herman has exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions.
Heather Piper is an interdisciplinary artist located in Brooklyn, NY with work ranging from paintings to multimedia puppetry performance. She creates thoughtful new mythologies with moments of levelty inspired by folklore, science fiction and the occult. The artist’s journey began at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied writing and animation, and became involved with Rough House Puppet Theater Company. There she created original works and fabricated props and puppets in a collaborative environment. In 2013 Heather moved to NYC to intern for the Henson Creature shop, and went on to work as a freelance fabricator for Puppet Kitchen, Macy’s window displays, commercials for Viacom, McDonalds, HBO, independent films, music videos, and more. She has also hosted both in person and virtual puppet making workshops and has guest lectured at SVA, and Tulane University.
Heather Renée Russ works across photography and installation. She blends organic marine materials with queer femme signifiers to engage with themes of displacement while celebrating the vibrant communities queer artists have historically created in cities by the sea. In 2019, she used her residency at Vermont Studio Center to make work for Intersectional Cyber Feminism at Satellite Art Show in Miami. In 2020, she was in residence at MASS MoCA where she made work for Futureless, an exhibition at SomoS in Berlin. In 2021, she completed a residency at ChaShaMa North and showed in their Re-imagining Rural exhibit at One Brooklyn Bridge Park this summer. She has an upcoming solo show at Unison Arts in New Paltz, New York and was invited to return this year for an alumni residency at MASS MoCA.
Eva Redamonti is an artist and illustrator based Brooklyn, NY. She works primarily in pen and ink, digital mediums, and graphite. Her work resonates around themes of Futurism, science, mental health, and surrealism. She has been recognized by institutions such as World Illustration Awards, Communication arts, The New York Times, Adobe, and more.
“Drawing for me is a positive place in my mind which is deeply personal and connected to my well-being. After Studying Music Composition at Berklee College of Music, I moved to New York and I now work here teaching, drawing, and making music.”
Naderson Saint-Pierre: “I am a self taught artist located in Brooklyn. My work has been featured in Orlando museum of art, Orlando Science Center and SOBO Art Gallery in Florida. My work has been on a published book called displayed in a Jean Michel Basquiat’s exhibition”
Naderson Saint-Pierre paints colorful, compelling, black portraiture. While he describes himself as a self-taught artist, his work is a testament to his incredible raw skill and precise technique. Often autobiographical and rich in narrative, his portraits highlight and celebrate an image of black identity, with odes to pioneers in the art world while carving out a style that is uniquely Saint-Pierre’s own.