An exhibition curated by Philippe Hyojung Kim

In Painting: Sofya Belinskaya, Eric Chan*, Grace Athena Flott, Hank Reavis
In Open Medium: Alison Bremner, Le’Ecia Farmer*, Sarah Kavage, Lynne Siefert

*2024 Neddy Artist Award Grand Prize Recipient

Vulnerable/Venerable is a survey of works by eight of the Puget Sound’s most promising artists, selected from an incredibly talented pool of applicants with rich and diverse backgrounds and practices. At first glance, it seems a challenge to represent a multitude of topics, themes, and stories explored through the works of these eight artists in a single exhibition. At another glance, it becomes a mirror – a reflection from and to the world, visible yet hidden just under the surface of our shared realities. This exhibition is a kind of utopic vision, with each artist offering one interpretation after another, translating the most dystopic realities of our contemporary world into potent remedies.

Through our works and our practices as artists, we often reconcile our own vulnerability, successes and failures, and sense of individuality within the context of our shared humanity. The task at hand requires an honest reflection and a constant push and pull of a seemingly sadomasochistic interplay between catharsis and discipline. Through process after process, we reveal experiences hidden beneath layers of carefully organized forms, syntaxes, and structures that are relatable and cognizant, whether these connections are immediately recognizable or familiar to the us or not. With this grammar of vulnerability, both the viewers and the artists alike get to experience something much more than what is said and made visible.

In Lynne Siefert’s “film paintings,” dystopian yet familiar visuals of the climate crisis suggest an alternative to the narrative structure of the politics at play, allowing viewers to imagine a substitute world. Weaving upon traditional building and agricultural practices, Sarah Kavage’s work intervenes at the intersection of our local ecology, community, and history, healing the eroding relationship with the land and with each other. Framed within the layered views of real-unreal worlds in Hank Reavis’s collage work, we as viewers are brought into the ever-so recognizable yet unfamiliar interior of an encampment shelter, looking out into the post-industrial ruins of our possible future. Le’Ecia Farmer’s organic and amorphous sculptures provide us a moment of connection and meditative reflection on the fragility of our scarred history, while her futuristic imagination of material surfaces simultaneously venerates the hands of humanity’s Afro-ancestors.

Sofya Belinskaya constructs a poetic space of memory and dream in her recent paintings of Ukrainian immigrant families and the lives they left behind, providing solace in our current war-torn world. In Eric Chan’s allegorical paintings, generations of cultural and linguistic barriers and displacements experienced by many Asian Americans melt away at the tender scenes of queer embrace. Allison Bremner’s polychromatic collage paintings juxtapose and celebrate both the tradition and modernity of Tlingit folklores and lived experiences, accentuated through formline and patterns of recycled mid-century wallpapers. On and within the textured surfaces of Grace Athena Flott’s work, embodied politics of representing figures with burn injury and their stories reveal the transformative power of portraiture, re-envisioning trauma and scars as symbolic connective tissues of kinship and empowerment.

The artists in Vulnerable/Venerable engage with the identities and relations that have shaped them and their work with subtlety and temperance. Yet, these artists are not necessarily highlighting their own vulnerability. They are honoring others who may or may not be able to depict or describe, to speak for themselves, and in turn, bringing focus to greater stories, lived experiences, and dreams. The tensions and contradictions in our mirrored, raw, and messy realities are revealed, allowing viewers to take refuge and relief in the vision provided by these works. What is, and was considered vulnerable, becomes venerable, allowing potential to be reimagined.

To learn more about the Neddy Artist Awards, please click here.

Featured image: “Alla and Andrij” by Sofya Belinskaya