Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/22/2020
5:00 pm until 8:00 pm
Location
Buffalo Arts Studio
Categories
Panel Discussion: Contemporary Culture, Contemporary Art
February 28, 2020, 5:00-8:00 pm
Part of M&T Fourth Friday @ TriMain Center
Panelists: Jay Carrier, George Hughes, Jodi Lynn Maracle, and Sepideh Pourhang
This panel discussion will focus on the ways artists are influenced by the intersection of their cultural histories and contemporary experiences. Panelists include Jay Carrier, George Hughes, Jodi Lynn Maracle, and Sepideh Pourhang. This panel is taking place within Buffalo Arts Studio on Friday, February 28, 2020 from 5-8pm in tandem with Jay Carrier’s solo exhibition, “We Took Things with Us: A Collection of Recent Work”, on view at Buffalo Arts Studio from January 24-March 6, 2020.
Each of the panelists combine formal elements from their cultural heritage with mixed-media processes, producing artwork that is truly transnational. These artists ask the viewer to think across boundaries, challenging colonialism and its legacies. This discussion will also address the way(s) that artwork made by transnational artists is too often relegated to anthropologic sections of cultural institutions, suggesting that the art and artmakers exist only as relics of a “pre-American” past.
Jay Carrier (Niagara Falls, NY) Often employing landscape as metaphor, Jay Carrier’s paintings and drawings reflect his duality of experience. He was born on Six Nations to Onondaga and Tuscarora parents, and he currently lives and works in the city of Niagara Falls. According to Carrier, “The dichotomy of these opposing societies constantly clash, intermingle and become one throughout the making of my art.” Carrier also maintains a deep connection to the region’s exceptional physical landscape, drawing inspiration from the Niagara River and Niagara Gorge. Carrier holds a B.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Carrier studied painting at The College of Santa Fe, New Mexico as well as participating in the MFA program from the University of Illinois.
George Afedzi Hughes’ (Ghana, Buffalo, NY) uses the history of colonialism as a basis to highlight parallels between colonialism’s brutal history and contemporary global conflicts. In today’s information age, global occurrences of violence reach us instantaneously: transmitting fear and unease. His work interprets the spectacle of news, history and social engagement into visual form, by appropriating imagery from global popular culture such as sports and ritual. Born in Ghana in 1962, George Afedzi Hughes studied painting at The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, College of Art, where he earned a BA in Art and an MA in Art Education. His paintings, performances, and installations have been shown in Canada, China, Denmark, Dubai, England, France, Germany, Ghana, Holland, Northern Ireland, Nigeria, Portugal, South Africa, Sweden, Uruguay, Wales and the United States.
Jodi Lynn Maracle Born and raised in what is currently considered Buffalo, NY, Jodi Lynn Maracle is a Kanien’kehá:ka mother, artist, teacher and language learner. Maracle utilizes Haudenosaunee material language and techniques, such as hand tanning deer hides and corn husk twining, in conversation with sound scapes, projections, video, and performance to interrogate questions of place, power, erasure, story making, and responsibility to the land. She has shown her work throughout Dish With One Spoon Territory in site specific installation performances such as the Mush Hole Project at the Mohawk Institute Residential School (home of the Woodland Cultural Centre) in Brantford, ON, as well as the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, ON, Artpark in Lewiston, NY, and Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center in Buffalo, NY.
Sepideh Pourhang’s multi-disciplinary approach brings her identity to the aesthetic surface of her work. Despite her presence, her identity is erased by the paints, prints, and traditional motifs that she adds to the surfaces of her photographs. This erasure redresses the suffocating definition of the “model minority.” Pourhang is influenced by Persian Miniature patterns and the complex and paradoxical experience of life as a woman. Her works contain ornamental decorations called “Tazhib” (illumination) and “Tashir” (a style of ornamentation), used in borders and panels of Persian illuminated manuscripts. The detailed gold leaf in her works, typically used for religious texts, exalts their content. Originally from Iran, Pourhang received her MFA from University at Buffalo. Her works demonstrate how tradition envisions the centrality of women; she strives to bring the previously marginalized and intimidated woman into the spotlight.