Showing: July 2 – August 30
Reception: July 13, 5 – 7pm
Abrams Claghorn Gallery is pleased to announce the selected individuals of our Emerging Artist Program for summer 2019: MaiLee Vang AKA Leeee, Moxie Evan, and Allie Phillips.
Part of the mission of Abrams Claghorn Gallery is to work with up-and-coming artists by giving them a platform to showcase their work while they develop their art careers. The Emerging Artist Program evolved from that mission as a professional development tool to provide mentorship and insight on gallery show processes with selected participants ahead of a summer exhibition. Once selected, these artists began working with industry professionals to develop their artist statements, curatorial skills, and create new work ahead of their exhibition date.
We posted an open call on our website, social media outlets, and forwarded it to local colleges, art schools, and our network of artists. All the applicants submitted proposals with images of past work as well as an artist statement. Once selected, our mentors – sculptor and professor Pamela Blotner, painter Elizabeth Addison, gallery manager and visual artist Natalie Mae Borges, gallery assistant and photographer L. Herrada-Rios, and owner Robert Abrams – met with each artist on a bi-monthly basis to provide guidance and constructive critique to refine their visions for their individual projects.
“Nco Ntsoob Peb (Remember Us)” is a three-part homage and critique of the Hmong past,
present, and future by recent San Francisco State graduate, MaiLee Vang (Leeee). Through stories of her own personal heritage highlighted with dynamic detailing and narrative composition, Leeee uses her printmaking craftsmanship to illustrate a harrowing history of her forgotten people, punctuating the resilience of the Hmong united in the aftermath of trauma.
For “Slap Bracelet,” Allie Phillips takes a thoughtfully playful approach to recontextualization. Using clip art images of women from 1992 as a jumping off point for this series of silk paintings, Phillips creates a statement through repetition of feminine imagery juxtaposed with a loose and gestural execution. The results are a rough yet broad meditation on taste, the goal not necessarily to produce pristine imagery but to have audiences interject with their own contexts.
Focusing on the web of connections to people, Earth, and community, Moxie Evan’s “Nature of the Soul,” is an extension of the artist’s reflection of the relationship between the world’s inhabitants to the environment. Evan emphasizes the importance of social awareness to create balance and harness positivity in both the natural world and our immediate communities through mixed media collages and ceramic sculptures. Often with an undertone of larger global issues such as global warming, Evan’s works for “Nature of the Soul” emphasize the inarguable value in taking care of the natural world and the people around us.
Abrams Claghorn Gallery invites you to join us for the concurrent opening receptions of MaiLee “Leeee” Vang, Moxie Evan, and Allie Phillips on Saturday July 13th from 5pm to 7pm and celebrate the first iteration of our Emerging Artist Program.