Opening Reception: Friday, August 5, 6-8PM
(Beverly Hills, CA – July 28, 2022) UTA Artist Space LA is pleased to announce The dark, too, blooms and sings, an exhibition featuring new work from the Yale School of Art Photography MFA Class of 2022. Curated by artist and Yale MFA alumna Genevieve Gaignard, the exhibition highlights photography, sculpture, and video from artists Emily Barresi, Dylan Beckman, Amartya De, Anabelle DeClement, Eileen Emond, Ian Kline, Chinaedu Nwadibia, Brian Orozco, Rosa Polin, and Jessica Tang.
Gregory Crewdson, Director of Graduate Studies in Photography, states, “The work represented here is widely varied, far reaching in sensibilities, stories, and points of view, using a vast collection of mediums. And yet, the show as a whole feels entirely cohesive, like a series of fountains fed by the same source. There is something beautiful, sad, and simultaneously inspiring and hopeful, in witnessing this particular group of young artists, at this time in history, grappling with a restrictive screen reality, and expressing something inherently internal about the world, its landscapes and inhabitants, and their own identities within that.”
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Emily Barresi is a photographer and filmmaker from Connecticut. With family roots in theater and motion-picture industries, she has always known the veil between monotony and melodrama wears thin. Working with non-professional actors and extras, she encourages subjects to toe the line between the simple yet surrealist aspects of everyday and to reconstruct uncanny versions of their memory through performance. Predominant themes in her work include luck, ambition, municipality, and autobiography. Emily received her BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2015 and MFA from Yale School of Art in 2022. Currently based in her home state, she continues to construct a cinematic reality through photographs, experimental video work, and community-led productions.
Dylan Beckman is an artist from Houston, TX. She makes objects based on unreliable memories and early experiences with moral instruction, as well as found imagery and archival research. She places these fabrications within photographic compositions that speak to desires for control and manipulation. Using sculpture, photography, and installation, she probes at the various ways that fun and play are mobilized to lure and distract, persuade and coerce. Her work is situated in the intertwined nature of instruction, allegory and the infinite interpretations of what it means to ‘believe’. She received her BA in History and Studio Art from Wesleyan University in 2017 and an MFA from Yale in 2022. She is currently lives and works in Charleston, South Carolina where she teaches photography at the College of Charleston.
Anabelle DeClement is a photographer from New Jersey who works with those close to her as well as with strangers and actors to create photographs which mesh the lines of reality and performativity, drama and mundanity, and hopefully point to a beauty and structure in chaos. Anabelle sees nature as a predominant voice in her work and wants the photos to leave those who see them with questions about our perspective and our relationship with where and how we are living.
Amartya De, born in Kolkata, is a watcher, thinking of the past, his family’s histories and the importance of storytelling and privacy today. Amartya wonders where images intersect with memory, his upbringing, playing on the streets, working in the construction industry, to his changing relationships with his friends, family, acquaintances and spaces as life thickens out. Looking at the form of his work through photography, its limitations and strengths, as a direct continuous engagement with the world, while thinking of its role or ability to aid in transformation. He actively uses movement, writes and finds company which could then be shared with a previous self or another. Working in analog and digital production techniques, he received an MFA from Yale university in 2022 and a One Year Certificate in Creative Practices in Photography from the International Center of Photography in 2019.
Eileen Emond is an artist from Brooklyn, NY. In her work, photographs reveal the theatricality of metamorphosis in the self and the material – believing the self, like an image, can be a construction of conscious choice. Contained within a photographic reality selfhood is established according to contradiction, between form and subject, where meaning emerges from absence, and constraint produces a kind of freedom. Emond received her M.F.A. in Photography from Yale University and her B.A. in Studio Art from the City College of New York.
Ian Kline was born in York, Pennsylvania, under the shadow of a twelve foot tall man lifting a barbell spinning in circles above the Veterans of Foreign Wars Memorial Highway. Through Kline’s lens, strangers, family, holograms, memories, and an anxious internal imagination float within the collapsing external world forming a paranoid American drama. Through crashing light and the emotional sparks of color, he hopes to give form to something more felt than known – what it is to be alive and feel in 2022, forever in the shadow of the past while simultaneously being guided into the future by unseen Sirens. Whenever Ian returns home, the twelve foot tall man is still spinning.
Chinaedu Nwadibia firmly believes in the functions of portraiture, storytelling and the supernatural. The orality of her Nigerian and African American heritage has nurtured a keen observational ear that guides her visual work. Using photography, sculpture and performance, she advocates for herself and others, illuminating the spaces just out of view and prompting a further investigation into how one perceives their surroundings. Her explorations help her art practice to exist beyond the conventions of the archive or historical narrative, instead using these frameworks to engage the imagination and encourage declarations of personal freedom. She earned her BA from Howard University in 2011 and her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2022. Chinaedu lives and works between Los Angeles and New York City and every day when she opens her eyes, she does her best to remember last night’s dream.
Brian Orozco is a poet and artist from Portland, Oregon who works in the still and moving image. He is interested in fathers, grand strategy, mathematics, melancholy, interpersonal relationships, pretenses, and provenances. He holds a BA in American Studies from Yale University where his academic work focused on Visual Culture and Photography, investigating the construction of national identity in order to deconstruct notions of home and belonging. He received his MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art. He was the recipient of the Mary Hotchkiss Williams Travel Fellowship in the Visual Arts from the Yale University Art Gallery in 2016. He received the Mortimer Hays-Brandeis Traveling Fellowship in the spring of 2019.
Rosa Polin is a photographer from Brooklyn, New York. She believes there is a constant tension between archetypal forces waiting to be revealed in discourse around technology, art, fashion and beauty. The energy around such topics is as profound as Gods at war; there’s nothing lowbrow or simple about a photographic portrait. She is interested in trends because they speak to the timeless. When we grapple with the image, the body, the face, we grapple with human nature. She believes in art as catharsis and is interested in the struggle between individuation and identification, form and intuition, ego and the unconscious. Rosa received her BA in photography from Bard College in 2016 and her MFA in photography at the Yale School of Art in 2022. Selected group exhibitions include When Ethics Meets Aesthetics, Leica Galerie, Milan, IT (2018); PhotoVogue/Visions, BASE Milano, Milan, IT (2017), and Labs New Artists, Red Hook Labs, Brooklyn, NY (2017).
Jessica Tang is an artist from the Muhheakantuck (river that flows both ways) valley, currently living and working in the region. The use and misuse of the tools, materials, and technologies of photography and industrial materials are an extension of a particular attention to and attunement to the elemental. tang’s practice is rooted in a conviction in what can be gleaned from presence and the potential for the empirical to be made poetic. tang received a M.F.A. from Yale University and B.A. from Columbia University.
ABOUT UTA ARTIST SPACE
UTA Artist Space is an exhibition venue designed by Ai Weiwei in the heart of Beverly Hills that is committed to showcasing art by globally recognized talent. Since its establishment in 2016, UTA Artist Space has presented notable exhibitions with interdisciplinary artists and creatives, including Derrick Adams, Myrtis Bedolla of Galerie Myrtis, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Essence Harden, Larry Clark, Petra Cortright, Conrad Egyir, Amanda Hunt, Mariane Ibrahim, Arcmanoro Niles, The Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery, The Haas Brothers, and Ai Weiwei, among others.