Brendan George Ko, Smoke at Chilko VII, 2023

Exhibiting Artists:
Dylan Hausthor, Brendan George Ko, TJ Rinoski, rocki swiderski, Winnie Truong, and Hannah Secord Wade

Exhibition Dates:
June 21 - August 16, 2024

Opening Reception:
Friday, June 21, 2024, 5:00-8:00pm

Like a spiderweb knocked free from its anchor, or a fine fabric caught on a nail, our environment is unraveling. Each passing year brings a new threat, and a new state of disorder that forces us to rebuild our relationship with climate.  

Including works by Dylan Hausthor (ME), Brendan George Ko (Toronto, ON), TJ Rinoski (Richmond, VA), rocki swiderski (Tuscon, AZ), Winnie Truong (Toronto, ON), and Hannah Secord Wade (ME), this exhibition explores the shifting landscape that envelopes us. The works included will honor the nuances of our environment, but also consider alternative, transformative realities that provide a sense of escape. These re-imaginations will document both interior and exterior worlds and range in media from photography and painting to installation. The exhibition will encompass the entire space at Rivalry Projects and will be on view from June 21 - August 16, 2024.

WORKS

Installation Images

Artist Bios

Brendan George Ko (b. 1986) is a visual storyteller that works in photography, video, installation, text, and sound. His work is about conveying a sense of experience through storytelling and describes the image as supplementary to the story it represents.

Ko received his BFA in photography from Ontario College of Art & Design in 2010, and completed a Masters in Visual Arts at the University of Toronto in 2014. Here his practice shifted further into video and sound under the guidance of Kim Tomczak. Ko has shown his work locally and internationally including solo exhibitions with Patel Brown, Toronto, ON; Angell Gallery, Toronto; Contact Gallery, Toronto; LE Gallery, Toronto and group shows with Frogner Stasjon, Oslo; Red Hook Labs, Brooklyn; Birch Contemporary, Toronto; Camden Image Gallery, London. Ko has been the recipient of numerous awards including Contact Festival Portfolio Award (2017), Magenta Flash Forward Finalist (2018), Red Hook Lab’s New Artist Finalist (2018). He is also included within several collections including TD Bank and BMO Financial Group. In addition he has been commissioned to produce work for the New York Times, New Yorker, Vogue, Bloomberg Businessweek, Patagonia, Walrus. He lives and works in Toronto, ON and Maui. 

Dylan Hausthor (b. 1993) is interested in image-making as a process of hybridity—weavings of myth filled with tangents and nuances, treading the lines between investigative journalism, disinformation, performance, acts of obsession, and self-conscious manipulation. Photography’s ability to promote belief is a power not dissimilar to that of faith. By using modes of making that are traditionally linked to fact-finding, Hausthor hopes for the viewers and readers of the work to find themselves in a space between fiction and reality—to push past questions of validity that form the base tradition of colonialism in storytelling and folklore and into a much more human sense of reality: faulted, broken, and real.

They received their MFA from Yale School of Art and BFA from Maine College of Art. They work teaching ghost hunting, ritual, photography, and mushroom foraging. To help write this biography, Dylan contacted a forensic medium, who suggested that they “seemed like someone who was passionate in the things they believed in, hides secret messages in the things they have to say, and should avoid driving Volvos”. The live and work on an Island off the coast of Maine.

TJ Rinoski (b. 1994) explores the uncanny illusion touching on a humorous edge of his memory. He paints stories without clear narratives, as memories tend to be misleading and not always truthful. Rinoski's images are preconceived and gathered from tattered handwritten notes that only make sense to him. The words inscribed on his pages refer to his own experiences, photographs, and the occasional film scene. While Rinoski's works are derived from personal anecdotes, his paintings evoke shared experiences. Whether it is an elementary school field trip to the aquarium or watching sports on a sunday evening. The absence of details invites the viewer to momentarily live in the interpretation of his memories and build their own story within.

Solo exhibitions include presentations at Fortnight Institute, New York; 68 Home Gallery, Richmond, Virginia; and Gallery 5, Richmond, Virginia. Two-person exhibitions include presentations at Cob Gallery, London; Cherry Gallery, Richmond, Virginia; and Group exhibitions include Vardan Gallery, Los Angeles, California; Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, New York; Fortnight Institute New York; Auxier Kline Gallery, New York; Black Iris Gallery Richmond, Virginia; and Shopkeepers, Washington D.C, US, among others. He lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

rocki swiderski (b.1994 California) works across disciplines, manipulating color and form to capture the essence of the arid southwest. Breaking with the tradition of large-scale, pastoral depictions of the desert ‘sublime’, they instead focus on chance encounters, native species, or seemingly mundane depictions of brush and light, all of which are informed by their deeply spiritual commitment to noticing relationships between the land and its inhabitants.

swiderski received her BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2015. Her work has been featured in exhibitions across the United States and Europe, with presentations at Stellarhighway, Brooklyn, NY, lowell, Portland, OR, Arusha Gallery, London, Racecar Factory, Indianapolis, IN, Spy Projects, Los Angeles, CA, MOCA Tucson, Tucson, AZ, Everybody Gallery, Tucson, and the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR, among many others. siwderski has been a resident at Open AIR, Missoula, MT, MOCA Tucson, and Big Medium Residency, Austin, TX, among others. They run the American Institute of Thoughts and Feelings, an artist-run experimental project space in Tucson, Arizona. They live and work in Tucson, Arizona.

Winnie Troung (b. 1988, Toronto, Canada) works with drawing and animation to explore ideas of identity, feminism, and fantasy to find connections and transgressions in the natural wold. Challenging the ideals of beauty and naturalness, she develops intricate, figurative, and ambiguous collage-based work.

Truong holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design (2010). She has exhibited widely across Canada, the United States, and Europe, including exhibitions at Patel Brown, Toronto & Montreal, CA; VivianeArt, Calgary, AB; Brucebo Konstnärshemmet, Gotland, Sweden; and Mulherin, New York, among others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Rivalry Projects, Buffalo, NY; Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal, QC; McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, ON; Glenbow Museum, Calgary, AB, among others. She has received numerous grants and awards including the W.O. Forsyth Award, the 401 Richmond Career Launcher Prize, and the BMO 1st! Art award. Her work is represented internationally in private and public collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas, and the Bank of Denmark, Copenhagen among others.

Hannah Secord Wade (1981) creates fantastical landscape paintings, populated by fictional creatures, plants, and commonplace objects that are at once familiar yet alien. Working in series that are often dominated by a hue, she begins with a gathering of the painting’s subjects ,which are initially constrained or guarded. As the series progresses, the environments become more abstract and unstable - with land that moves, shifts, or disappears as the subjects in the work navigate new worlds.

She received her Master of Fine Art (MA) from Chelsea College of Arts, London, and her BA Fine Art from Hampshire College, Amherst. Wade has held solo exhibitions at Rivalry Projects, Buffalo, NY; Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME; Northern Daughters Gallery, Vergennes, VT; among many others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Farnsworth Art Museum; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, ME; Portland Museum of Art; University of New England, Biddeford, ME, and many others. Wade has been a resident at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, Open Wabi, and Arteles Creative Center in Finland. Her work resides in the permanent collections of the Portland Museum of Art and the Farnsworth Art Museum. Wade lives and works in Maine.