collective selection / selective collection

Exhibition Dates:
April 28 - June 16, 2023

Exhibiting Artists:
Alia Ali, Katherine Bradford, Kitty Brophy, Delia Brown, Rashayla Marie Brown, Crystal Z Campbell, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Talia Chetrit, Jaina Cipriano, Susanna Coffey, Mairikke Dau, Karon Davis, Taylor Davis, Ashley Doggett, Caroline Douville, Latifa Echakhch, Patricia Encarnación, Regina José Galindo, larí garcía, Gina Goico, Raven Halfmoon, Allison Janae Hamilton, Clarity Haynes, Laleh Khorramian, Adriana Lara, Laryssa Machada, Joiri Minaya, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, Yvette Molina, Azita Moradkhani, Rebecca Morgan, B. Ingrid Olson, Andrea Ottenwalder, Raquel Paiewonsky, Yelaine Rodriguez, Beverly Semmes, Alexandria Smith, Sheida Soleimani, Tabitha Soren, Christl Stringer, Martine Syms, Carrie Mae Weems, Brittney Leeanne Williams, and Francesca Woodman

Opening Reception:
Friday, April  28, 2023 from 5:00-9:00pm

Curator’s Talk with Camilø Álvårez:
Saturday, April 29, 2023 at 11:00am

Rivalry Projects is excited to present collective selection / selective collection, on view from April 28-June 16, 2023. This exhibition includes over 40 international artists and is curated by Camilø Álvårez of Samsøñ (Boston, MA). Join us for the Opening Reception on Friday, April 28, 2023 from 5:00-9:00 pm.

This exhibition considers collective action - how to make people move, be moved, and be moved by them. Defined as an action taken together by a group, whose goal is to enhance their condition and achieve a common objective, the exhibition utilizes this idea to consider how the aggregation of our choices impacts how we see, experience, and relate to the world -- for better or for worse.

Concurrently, this exhibition rebukes the impulse of compartmentalizing visual art, instead asking questions around cultural divestment, permacrisis, performative nihilism, bodily relations, manufactured relatability, and the aspiration for controlled narratives. collective selection / selective collection revels in the ambiguity of an anti-narrative, or moreover, a narrative which is not “…strictly autobiographical nor auto-fictive, but rather gleaned from a mixture of experiences and temperaments…”

About the Curator

Camilø Álvårez

Camilø Álvårez was born in 1976 in New York, NY, and resides in Boston, MA. Camilø is the Owner, Director, and Preparator at Samsøñ, formerly Samson Projects, founded in 2004. He has given solo exhibitions to William Pope.L (2010), Rebecca Morris (2006), Kader Attia (2008), and Beverly Semmes (2017) among many.

Samsøñ

Samsøñ creates and presents programs that explore the diversity of cultures and voices that continually shape contemporary art and ideas today, introducing emerging and under-recognized artists as well as re-contextualizing established artists. It is our mission to act as an interdisciplinary laboratory for the convergence of film, video, performance, music, design and visual art.

There is no solution to the question or argument; not zero and not infinite. A condition: there is no question or argument that can support an answer. For every element of ∅ the property holds (vacuous truth); There is no element of ∅ for which the property holds. Samsøñ is a member of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA).

Works

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Alia Ali (Arabic: عاليه علي // Sabean: ‎ 𐩲𐩱𐩡𐩺𐩲|𐩲𐩱𐩡) is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist. Working between language, photography, video, textile, and installation, Ali’s work addresses the politicization of the body, histories of colonization, imperialism, sexism, and racism through projects that take pattern and textile as their primary motif. Textile, in particular, has been a constant in Ali’s practice. Her strong belief that textile is significant to all of us, reminds us that we are born into it, we sleep in it, we eat on it, we define ourselves by it, we shield ourselves with it, and eventually, we die in it. While it unites us, it also divides us physically and symbolically. Her work broadens into immersive installations utilizing light, pattern, and textile to move past language and offer an expansive, experiential understanding of self, culture, and nation. Ali is the recipient of the Artsy Vanguard Prize 2021.

Born in 1942, Katherine Bradford is only now receiving due recognition. She unapologetically blazed her own path in the art world, painting daily, and building a community of likeminded artists in both Maine and New York. She is at a pivotal moment in her career, creating some of her most thought-provoking paintings and exploring her biography as an artist, woman, mother, and lesbian. Bradford, who splits her time between New York and Maine, is aware of Maine’s long lineage of nautical painting and builds upon the legacies of Marsden Hartley and John Marin, among others, yet her works transform the genre of marine painting into densely packed, metaphorical realms.

Creating erotic and psychologically charged paintings on paper, Kitty Brophy depicts power in female sexuality. Masked figures, close crops of genitalia, and self-pleasure are recurring themes in the work, while she utilizes a limited color palate of stark whites, midnight black, and deep blood red. The power and play of her figures is evident in the wickedly sensuous lines with which Brophy has drawn their counters, following the curves of thighs, cheeks, ribs and elbows with the same grace and decisiveness she brings to ever inch of her composition.

Delia Brown's work is primarily engaged in exploring desire as an individuated experience that connects the personal to the collective unconscious, often mediated through advertising and commercial culture. Referencing early bourgeois painting genres, she paints herself and friends enacting their own fantasies of being part of the leisure class, with props from snacks and beverages to million-dollar artworks functioning as important accessories in the assumption of privilege.

Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB) is an “undisciplinary” artist who fosters radical acts beyond mere representation. Creating visually poetic and emotionally engaging artworks with a deeply critical eye towards medium and audience, RMB works in installation, photography, performance, writing, video and filmmaking alongside a visionary critique of power structures.

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descent. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Campbell’s recent works use underloved archival material to consider historical gaps in the narrative of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification.

Talia Chetrit was born in 1982 in Washington DC. She now lives and works in New York. For more than three decades, Talia Chetrit has been developing a photography and video practice marked by her investigations into sexuality and identity, thus challenging perceptions of pornography, voyeurism, and objectification. Videos and inkjet prints of her photographs oscillate between the personal and the private and the planned and the candid by capturing both consenting and unaware people, often in conjunction with her own body.

Jaina Cipriano is a Boston based artist communicating with the world through photography, film and installation. Her works explore the emotional toll of religious and romantic entrapment. Jaina creates her photographs in built sets, forgoing digital manipulation because she believes creating something truly immersive starts with the smallest details. A self taught carpenter, Jaina loves a challenge and her larger than life sets draw inspiration from the picture books and cartoons of her childhood.

Susanna Coffey’s portraits are investigations of the human head. The work is driven by questions about what a portrait image can mean. What is a beautiful appearance? Why do conventionally gendered images involve caricature? Can inchoate feeling-states be adequately portrayed? Meticulously observed, most works show her in many guises and locations: under dramatic lighting, highly costumed, inside a studio, within landscapes, foliage, places of fiery devastation, and amidst phantasmagoric patterns. Some portraits seem almost entirely abstract with only the barest suggestion of a human face.

Mairkke Dau creates fascinating new worlds in her oil paintings where everything, and everyone, is connected quite literally by the outlines and borders shared. Languid curled figures share painted edges with hallucinatory clouds, landscapes and plants of unknown origin. Mountains meld into charm necklaces, vintage lamps, abstract shapes and kitty cats. Even when subtle details and flourishes are added, the silhouettes of her images remain primary. Dau’s free associations drift from recognizable to completely otherworldly and are executed with swift confidence. Each canvas seems to have an overarching mood and feel, softly referencing everything from holidays to art history.

Karon Davis has a wide-ranging multimedia practice that encompasses installation, sculpture, film, photography and performance. Her work draws on elements of theatricality and mythology as it explores issues of humanity, survival, and ways of being. Davis creates sculptures and multimedia installations that touch on issues of history, race, and violence in the United States, using materials as varied as plaster strips, chicken wire, glass, and readymade objects. Davis is also the co-founder of The Underground Museum, a cultural hub and urban oasis located in Arlington Heights that serves low-to-moderate income communities in Los Angeles and cultivates the hope that increasing access to art will inspire, educate, and transform lives.

Taylor Davis’s exacting forms encompass sculpture, drawing, collage, and painting. Sheexplores the relationship between object and viewer, often through precise manipulations of form. Taking up questions of orientation, space, identity, and perception, Davis’s work insists on the unique sense of presence and attention that each viewer brings to an encounter with a work of art.

Ashley Doggett’s practice explores themes of religion, race, gender and dissociation by citation of historical narratives. Her focus is America’s tragic legacy of white supremacy, slavery and the trauma that is often revised or erased by dominant historical narratives. In her paintings, drawings and woodcuts that are primarily figurative works, she recontextualizes racial stereotypes in an act of aesthetic protest. Her reclaiming of these icons encourages reconsideration and engagement with these historic, yet systemic and recurring issues.

“This [my artwork] addresses an issue that has been affecting the diaspora for a long time. How our appearance can sometimes give us the impression that we have to lend ourselves to a binary game. As a visible minority, the way we integrate into society can lead to our loss or our victory. Ghosts are traps into which we can fall: stereotypes, precariousness, communitarianism and many others. I wanted to address this subject but in a more playful and personal way.” - Caroline Douville

Latifa Echakhch is a contemporary Morrocan visual artist known for her socio-political and culturally-driven works. Her sculptures, paintings, and installations decontextualize culturally symbolic objects, challenging viewers’ preconceived associations with those items. “I am particularly interested in the exact moment coming after an action or an event, when we have before our eyes some traces which we—as viewers—have to rebuild as a narrative chronology, in order to be able to understand the context, as a kind of detective practice,” she reflected on her work. 

Patricia Encarnación (she/her) is an Afro-Dominican interdisciplinary artist and scholar. Her work depicts the effects of colonialism on different socio-cultural strata within Afro-diasporic communities with a special focus on the Caribbean and Latin America. Encarnación explores the idea of being from the Caribbean by reconstructing quotidian objects, landscapes, and aesthetics that she was exposed to while growing up in her homeland.

Working in the context of a newly democratized society, Regina José Galindo has developed a socially and politically motivated practice in which she strives to acknowledge the thirty-six years of civil war Guatemala endured, but also looks forward to a more peaceful and productive future. Galindo’s oeuvre highlights old problems that persist in the “new” Guatemala. Her works are combative and often shocking, bringing into the public realm topics that few Guatemalans dare confront.

To hear the work in the exhibition:

Las Escucharon Gritar Y no Abrieron la Puerta, 2017
audio
Run Time: 9:57

larí garcía (b. 1994 in Miami FL) is an artist and writer that combines historical research, personal narratives, and magical realism through a comparative and ethnographic approach. By staging detailed assemblages, they reveal inherent limits of material meaning and value while subverting ways we are conditioned to see objects.

Gina Goico (she/they/ella/elle) is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and self-proclaimed necia. Through their work, Goico navigates their identity and the spaces where they exist in the Dominican Republic and the United States. Through their career they have come to create a diverse body of work that ranges from embroidery to installations, ink drawings and performance.

A citizen of the Caddo Nation, Raven Halfmoon sculpts imposing figurative clay pieces that reflect her Native heritage while subverting outsiders’ stereotypes or expectations of her culture. Halfmoon is interested in pushing the boundaries of clay, and she continues to create pieces on a grand scale to explore identity politics and Indigenous sovereignty.

Allison Janae Hamilton (b.1984) is a visual artist working in sculpture, installation, photography, and video.  She was born in Kentucky, raised in Florida, and her maternal family's farm and homestead lies in the rural flatlands of western Tennessee.  Hamilton's relationship with these locations forms the cornerstone of her artwork, particularly her interest in landscape. Using plant matter, layered imagery, complex sounds, and animal remains, Hamilton creates immersive spaces that consider the ways that the American landscape contributes to our ideas of "Americana" and social relationships to space in the face of a changing climate, particularly within the rural American south.   

Clarity Haynes is a queer feminist American artist and writer. She currently lives and works in New York, NY. Haynes is best known for her unconventional painted portraits of torsos, focusing on queer, trans, cis female and nonbinary bodies. Her themes often include aging, illness, and mortality. Her work pushes the social conventions of beauty, femininity, as well as gender and sexuality.

Laleh Khorramian’s practice incorporates the cosmological thinking of ancient cultures and their complex mythologies and spiritual vocabularies with her own imagined worlds, synthesizing them into “histories” that are both futuristic and ancient. In the past decade, her work has spanned stop-motion animation films, sound, light, monoprints, drawings, painted landscapes, portraits, and collage.

Adriana Lara is fascinated by how a single thing (an object, a photograph, a song, a text) can be transformed into a work of art. This process does not relate to formal alteration or the application of expert skill, but rather to a simple act of articulation. Rather than relying on the physical creation of something new, this becomes that (namely, art) because the artist declares it to be so. This special kind of alchemy imbues all of Lara’s objects with a restless ambiguity. Much like her art, Lara is something of a shape-shifter herself, moving between the roles of artist, curator, musician, or writer whenever it suits her needs.

Laryssa Machada is a visual artist, photographer and filmmaker. Born in Porto Alegre – RS, Brazil  (1993), currently living in Salvador – BA, she builds images as rituals of decolonization and new narratives of present/future. She studied journalism, social science and arts – and learned a little more from the beautiful cadence of the samba. Her works discuss the construction of an image about LGBT’s, native people, Afro-Brazilian culture – walking through “Brazilian deinvasion” as a practice of visual education.

Joiri Minaya (1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian multidisciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity. “My work is a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas. It’s about reconciling the experience of having grown up in the Dominican Republic with living and navigating the U.S. / global North; using gaps, disconnections and misinterpretations as fertile ground for creativity. I’ve learned there is a Gaze thrust upon me which others me. I turn it upon itself, mainly by seeming to fulfill its expectations, but instead sabotaging them, thus regaining power and agency. Inter-disciplinarily, I explore the performativity of tropical identity as product: the performance of labor, decoration, beauty, leisure, service.”

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski is a queer Puerto Rican American artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Raised between multiple cities and rural communities across America in a constantly shifting landscape, her practice explores themes of hybridity, mythology, and sexuality. Whether through drawing, video, performance, or installation, Amaryllis experiments with how to name the conflation of celebration and mourning when being racialized, liminal, and alive. Employing flamboyance as an exercise in utopic fantasies for the future, her work is a dream sequence triggered by our current time.

Yvette Molina is a Mexican-American artist focused on the relationship between justice and caring. Her work incorporates processional banners, ritual, storytelling, costumes, action figures, collage, and painting. Current projects include New Pantheon, a series of reimagined gods born to confront the world’s challenges, and Big Bang Votive, a communal storytelling project where participants are invited to share a personal story of love or delight. Yvette memorializes each story with a painted symbol on a starry backdrop to create an expanding constellation of our collective joy and love. 

Azita Moradkhani was born in Tehran where she was exposed to Persian art and culture, as well as Iranian politics, and that double exposure increased her sensitivity to the dynamics of vulnerability and violence that she now explores in her art-making. Moradkhani’s colored pencil drawings of intimate lingerie, negligees, and corsets explore interconnected narratives of pain and pleasure through abstract patterns and images based on photojournalism, art photography, and historical symbolism. She uses eroticism to seduce the viewer, who finds, upon closer inspection, through the layers of colored pencil, past the details of lace and filigree, disruptive iconography narrating inherited histories of nation and belief.

Born in central Pennsylvania, Rebecca Morgan works in painting, drawing, and ceramics that subvert stereotypes of Appalachia. Imbued with folk tradition and a sly sense of humor, her work peels apart the simultaneous reverence and disgust for rural people. Stylistically, Morgan embraces the hyper-detailed naturalism of Dutch masters, as well as absurd, repulsive caricature suggestive of underground cartoonists like R. Crumb. Although they often contain modern clues, her characters and scenes evoke a romanticized, nostalgic America, nonexistent but wistfully recalled, much like Norman Rockwell’s illustrations. Morgan’s works question what such images were selling in their conception, and she gives her archetypal maids, hillbillies, and dandies the space to explore contemporary issues of women reclaiming their subjectivity, a pop-cultural false sense of romance, and ideas about masculinity, power, escapism, and hedonistic backwoods pleasure.

B. Ingrid Olson implements elements of photography, sculpture, and performance in an ongoing exploration of the boundaries between body and space. The results of this process are multidimensional objects and images that re-imagine the capacities of the body and the structuring of space.

In her photographic works, fragmented views of Olson’s body oscillate between a pictured subject and a subjective perspective, creating tensions between interior, direct experience and exterior, mirrored existence, and giving the artist full control over what the viewer is allowed to see — or not. Olson draws the viewer in, but only to a point. The layered visual interruptions and camouflaged elements thwart attempts to find coherence in a single visual plane or continuous meaning, disorienting the viewer’s perception of both.

Andrea Ottenwalder (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1995). Visual artist based Santo Domingo. After graduating from art school, she became a participant in the 26th edition of the Eduardo León Jimenes Art Contest. She has participated in artistic residences and has been part of exhibitions in South Korea and Puerto Rico, the most recent being "La Práctica" by Beta-Local. She explores themes such as impermanence, nostalgia and identity based on the autobiographical. This body of work consists of seven bath towels each one representing a symbolic milestone in the life of a fictitious woman.
These are: La Niña, La Adolescente, La Joven, La Madre, La Adulta, La Anciana and La Mujer, which is both the first and the last one. The towels represent the body of a woman and of red dye represents the passing of time. The images found on each towel are a combination of my family photos, personal archives, screenshots, and photographs of past projects.

Raquel Paiewonsky (Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic) works across a range of media, including installation, sculpture, video, painting and photography, exploring issues concerning gender politics, femininity, relationships, maternity, and ecology, among others.

Yelaine Rodriguez is a scholar, educator, independent curator, cultural organizer, and writer who merges her creative language and academic research within her practice. As a visual artist, Rodriguez conceptualizes wearable art, sculptures, and site-specific installations drawing connections between her research on Black cultures in the Caribbean and the United States. 

Beverly Semmes is a sculptor whose practice also incorporates painting, photography, and performance. These complementary elements adhere in surprising ways, probing the paradoxes and complexities of the female body and its representation.

Alexandria Smith is a mixed media visual artist based in London and New York. “My work interweaves memory, autobiography and history to explore girlhood experiences that culminate in the complexities of Black identity and its relationship to the body. Flatly painted images, often symmetrical and at times collaged, show two mirrored figures, heads or other more amorphous semi-abstract shapes that embody a state of duality and call into question the stability of identity, while simultaneously evoking stability through that same use of repetition. My characters embody multiple states of being as manifestations of hybridity and duality, that simultaneously challenge heteronormative gender roles, allude to a divided self, and underscore the complex realities of humanity.”

Sheida Soleimani is an Iranian-American artist and the daughter of political refugees who were persecuted by the Iranian government in the early 1980s. Soleimani makes work that melds sculpture, collage and photography and highlights her own critical perspective on historical and contemporary socio-political occurrences in Iran.

Soleimani’s work interrogates the dissemination of information in digital contexts, adapting found images from press and social media leaks to exist within alternative scenarios. Her photographs document constructed sets within her studio, in which repeating images carve out trompe l’oeil perspectives in a visual metaphor for the competing political narratives relayed by her source materials.

Tabitha Soren explores the expansive power of photography by pushing its material limits and embracing its unreliable nature. She probes the surface of the photograph to unlock the rich history of the medium and experiments with sculptural and painterly interventions to further complicate the inherent uncertainty of the source. This layered approach underscores not only the bounds of the viewer’s perception but also makes visible the psychological states of Soren’s subject matter, creating a tension between what is seen and what lies underneath.

Christl Stringer is a Black surrealist figurative painter, writer, and filmmaker. Through her art and writing she explores the interiority of the Black womanhood and childhood experiences. Her films and scripts have been accepted into NFFTY, Thuh Film Festival, New Haven International Film Festival, and Another Hole In The Head Film Festival.

“My paintings and films use figurative surrealism to investigate the themes surrounding the interiority of Black womanhood and childhood. While using motifs such as clocks, television sets, horses, toys, and other domestic and nostalgic items—I invite the viewer to understand the constant spite, anger, and reluctant humor I find in my experience of being a Black woman. The figures in my work are often contorted by reclaiming cubism to express a womanist lens.”

Martine Syms is an artist based in Los Angeles who works in publishing, video, installation, and performance. Her work focuses on identity and the portrayal of the self in relation to themes such as feminism and Black culture. Syms coined the term "conceptual entrepreneur" in 2007 to characterize her practice.

Syms has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humour and social commentary. Using a combination of video, installation and performance, often interwoven with explorations into technique and narrative, Syms examines representations of blackness and its relationship to vernacular, feminist thought, and radical traditions. Syms’s research-based practice frequently references and incorporates theoretical models concerning performed or imposed identities, the power of the gesture, and embedded assumptions concerning gender and racial inequalities.

Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power. Determined as ever to enter the picture—both literally and metaphorically—Weems has sustained an on-going dialogue within contemporary discourse for over thirty years. During this time, Carrie Mae Weems has developed a complex body of art employing photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video.

Brittney Leeanne Williams transforms Southern California vistas into what she calls “emotional landscapes: representations of psychological states, memories, and emotional ties.” Williams’ female forms become conduits for her exploration of feminine and Black identities.

Williams explores the potential of the female body to both encapsulate and express a variety of psychological states. Rendering skin tone in a surprising spectrum of reds in an effort to subvert expectations, Williams depicts the figures as both faceless and contorted into a near circular embrace of their own bodies, or that of another. Ensconced in these intricate moments partially inaccessible to the viewer, the bodies expand out of surreal fractured backdrops, sourced from the artist’s own personal history. Acting as an amalgamation of both the artist’s identity, as well as that of her female family members, these bodies serve as communal symbols of hope and love, pain and loss.

Francesca Woodman made her first mature photograph at the age of thirteen and created a body of work that has been critically acclaimed in the years since her death. Born into a family of artists in Boulder, Colorado, she also spent much of her childhood in Italy. Much of Woodman's work was produced as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where she studied from 1975-1978.

Woodman’s oeuvre represents a remarkably rich and singular exploration of the human body in space and of the genre of self-portraiture in particular. Her interest in female subjectivity, seriality, Conceptualist practice, and photography’s relationship to both literature and performance are also hallmarks of the heady moment in American photography during which she came of age.