Superbird | 12/13/2022 - 3/05/2023
ONLINE EXHIBITION
with artwork by members Gary Cruz, Ruth Jeyaveeran, David McDonough, carrie R, Mack Sikora, and Rochelle Voyles
Superbird is a group show curated by co-founder Lauren Hirshfield. Connected through a shared mark-making methodology and unifying palette, the works selected for this presentation imbue the spirit of the winter solstice. Sharp, commanding, yet altogether embracing the beauty of the world, Superbird weaves a visual tale of longing, resilience, and triumph.
ARCHIVE - To best enjoy the archive as curatorially intended, please view on a desktop.
The artists
Gary Cruz makes abstract painterly images using a variety of digital methods and processes. Most recently, he takes photographs of graffiti on his walk to the studio, digitally distorting and animating the photographs, and turning them into abstract kaleidoscope videos. It is from these videos that these new still images emerge. Each video reveals hundreds of images. These discovered images contain circle, star, or other primal geometric shapes – some resembling x-rays, or rorshachs of a new interior space. Spiritual, psychological, with an emanating quality of light, they are vaguely familiar yet new.
Cruz is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant. His first solo show was at White Columns, New York City in 2003. His last solo show “I’ll Take you There” was at the Olympia Project, Bushwick, in 2020. He currently lives and works in NYC.
Ruth Jeyaveeran’s work is based in traditional material practices. Drawing from my experience as part of the South Asian diaspora, she examines connections between our bodies, our communities, and the natural world to confront feelings of otherness, alienation, and dissociation. Her process celebrates repetitive motions of making using ancient craft traditions. Wool is primal, spiritual, and bound to nature. Textiles, a source of warmth and shelter, are a tactile antidote to our disenchantment with the modern world. Using the language of ritual and symbols, Jeyaveeran collaborates with the material and the process allowing deeper truths to emerge.
Born in Lusaka Zambia, and raised in the Midwest, Jeyaveeran lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent exhibitions include Felt Experience at the Brattleboro Museum, Communion, a solo installation at Main Window Dumbo and Amplify, a public art installation at the Queens Botanical Garden. She’s been awarded residencies at the Jentel Foundation, Willapa Bay, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, La Napoule Art Foundation, and PADA Studios. Currently, she's an Assistant Professor of Textile Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
David McDonough makes abstract paintings on canvas and other surfaces using a variety of media including oil, acrylic, glass, and ceramic tile. The abstractions are often suggestive of natural forms, though they elude any singular reading. His aim is to balance control and spontaneity in processes that cultivate play, improvisation, invention, and transformation. Using high key color palettes, and bringing in materials that are available in his immediate surroundings, he makes work that derives from specific personal experiences and draws the beauty and joy out of these complicated lived moments. McDonough has shown in solo and group shows in and around the NYC area including a recent solo show at One River School (2019). He graduated in May (2022) from SUNY Purchase with an MFA in Visual Arts, where he was given the Outstanding MFA Award. While there he also taught drawing and organized the Visiting Artist Lecture Series.
carrie R works in sculpture, drawing, and digital media. Her recent works include sculptures made in hydrostone, treated with quick applications of pigment, markers, and oil bars, as well as drawings in colored pencil, marker, and digital mediums that mimic this fast-paced energy through meticulous, built-up layers of thin and pixelated lines and scribbles. Influenced by psychological fiction and domestic environments—both indoor and outdoor, and referencing heightened emotional reactions to personal histories from freak accidents to solitary moments, these objects sit as relics of an imagined but emotionally real environment, containing thematic elements of fear, solitude, self-preservation, and beauty.
carrie received her BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and is the recipient of a Common Field Travel Scholarship and a James O. Dumont Travel Grant Award. Most recently she has exhibited with 5-50 Gallery, Below Grand, and PARADICE PALASE. She currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
Mack Sikora’s current practice focuses on collecting the evidence of every relationship - texts, letters, mixtapes - and enshrining these objects in wall-hung and handheld reliquaries. Each reliquary holds a relic of love, entombed under layers of wood, hidden behind doors and walls, safely tucked away and protected.
Sikora works in painting, drawing, and Instagram lurking. She received a BA in Studio Art and Art History from DePauw University and an MFA in Painting from Boston University. Her work has most recently been exhibited in Sneak Show (Greene House, Brooklyn, 2022), Trite and True (Dream Clinic, Columbus, OH, 2022), In the Wake of Slumber (Paradice Palase, Brooklyn, 2021), and MAIL (Olympia, Manhattan, 2021)
Rochelle Voyles is a Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary artist originally from Toledo, Ohio. Her work transforms textile patterns into abstracted landscapes and figures using collage and paint. She uses the language of cloth to re-envision reality, embracing pattern for its own sake. In her collage work, she uses analog techniques to decontextualize emotionally charged images of our world, its history, and its picturesque landscapes in order to reframe dichotomy, trauma, and hypocrisy. She is inspired by the proliferation of images in our current online culture, the found printed image, photography, and the timeless practice of making images on a grid.
Voyles received her BFA in Fine Arts/Printmaking from Pratt Institute. She was a 2022 resident at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony and a 2021 resident at the ChaNorth ChaShaMa Artist Residency. She has shown at galleries in New York such as Trestle Gallery, Peninsula Art Space, The Local Project, and Collarworks.