ISCP – International Studio & Curatorial Program
Habby Osk residency at ISCP has been extended through June 2020.
Friends with Benefits
May 11 – TBD
Friends with Benefits is an online group exhibition wherein gallery artists were asked to invite a guest artist to participate. Each artist selected three works priced no more than $1,000 with 15% of total sales donated to the Ali Forney Center for homeless LGBTQ+ youth. Utilizing a broad range of developed creative approaches, the cross-pollination of social media, accessible price points, and adapting available online platforms, we hope to continue to help sustain artistic practices, creative industries, and organizations providing aid to those most vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also hope to see a more democratic art world emerge from this crisis.
The 36 participating artists presenting 108 works in total are Eleanna Anagnos, Marisa Baumgartner, Hannah Beerman, Fatemeh Burnes, Amanda Church, Jennifer Coates, Gregory Coates, Ryan Crotty, Ryan DaWalt, Robert Otto Epstein, Jay Gaskill, William Graef, Theresa Hackett, Jenny Hankwitz, Paula Heisen, Kyle Hittmeier, Bryn Jayes, Mary Jones, Jill Levine, Aline Mare, Daina Mattis, Ali Miller, Mary-Ann Monforton, Bobbie Oliver, Habby Osk, JD Raenbeau, Ernesto Renda, Taro Suzuki, Craig Taylor, Colin Thomson, Fred Valentine, Olivia Valentine, Hanna von Goeler, Lindsay Walt, Michelle Weinberg, and Robert Weiss. Please feel free to contact with any questions or inquire about additional works available.
Habby Osk is a sculptor who’s engages gravity into her work. Simple geometric masses in form of a sphere , cylinders and cubes are carefully balanced and displayed. Viewers are confronted with precarious compositions that can easily become disrupted. Each sculpture is a sensitive composition of balance and stability. Osk’s work is a contrast of permanence and frailty. Objects cast in concrete possessing stability and weight are placed in a manner that could be lead to destruction with the slightest change of weight distribution. Osk’s sculptures are always under tension . A tension that suggest the fine line or the frailty that lies between quiescence and chaos. Osk is originally from Iceland and currently a recipient of the prestigious ISCP Studio program for 2020.
Minako Iwamura’s work is a delicate balance of serenity and emergence. Constellation like etchings and lines emerge on a background that resemble the sky at daybreak or at night. Each pattern is meticulously placed , some paying homage to her Japanese heritage. Iwamura’s paintings exude a spiritual undercurrent , as if the lines and patterns are the consciousness and the quiescent background is the unconscious. There is a strong presence of duality in her art . A stoic execution of parameters versus the intuitive free forming or nature versus geometry. A duality which illustrates the state that hovers in a precarious spot of in-betweenness and the untethered.
Both artists are stylistically diverse, however both possess bi-cultural backgrounds and their works suggest a sensitive balance of two states. The unifying factor is the presence of a fine physical line – symbolically a force in which keeps the two states at an equilibrium.
If serenity were a thin sheet of glass, Osk and Iwamura’s work represent a faint fracture present, yet staying dormant and maintaining the peace.
Fractures in Serenity will open on the 18th of January from 6PM and will be on view each weekend from 2-6PM or by appointment.
Join us next Tuesday for an artist talk with residents Habby Osk and Zai Nomura.
Habby Osk will speak about her past and current projects, including her Anchor and Sling sculpture series, and the photography project Snap. Osk creates sculptures and photographic work which test the limits of balance and stability using gravity and force —referencing impermanence and the contingency of an action—to capture the moment of stillness before a looming collapse or durational transformation.
Zai Nomura will present recent projects such as Soul Reclaim Device and Still Life which lie between sculpture and photography. He will also introduce his new major participatory project about loss and grief, which will take place for the next year throughout the United States.