In her work, Fay Ku grapples with her Chinese-American identity, fending off flippant sincere-yet-still-kin- da-racist questions about her cultural background as if “USA” could never be an acceptable answer to the question “Where are you from?” She does so with gratuitous patience and a sly wit by nodding to compositions and visual signifiers from art history and American culture, whether that’s making her own “Olympia” by Manet or using stage magic as a metaphor for wanting to disappear. Performers, acrobats, escape artists and magicians: subjects of her work that imply an incredible amount of behind-the-scenes focus and practice; the idea of being cut in half, escaping, disappearing right before your eyes. It also implies a lot of behind- the-scenes focus and practice to perform flawlessly for a public audience. Somewhere in there is a powerful connection to being a minority in America, where one must don jade armor to simultaneously protect one’s self and claim space proudly as independent from stereotypes and expectations.
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Pensive Eye
Contrasting the global, pandemic-enforced trend of living life through technology instead in person, Matthew Couper’s exploration of what social isolation might look like starts from an island in the middle of the ocean. For the artist, desert islands and desert proper are both metaphors for survival and reflect a bigger picture of what survival means […]
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Green Fairy Garden Gate
La Forgia started as a dream of owner Enzo Cinquegrana more than 20 years ago. A sculptor frustrated with the art gallery scene, Enzo dove head first into forging as a method to express his sculptural abilities. When he discovered forged metal could satisfy his need to create sculptural forms and his desire to have […]
