EMBRACING 2022

January 4th to February 26th, 2022

As we head into the new year, THE GALLERY is delighted to present EMBRACING 2022. Featuring emerging female artists: Kimia Kline, Mel Reese, Kathy Sirico, and Tomoko Sugimoto. Their specialties include using threads to create conceptual artwork and multicolor painting on objects.

The 2020s began in very uncertain situations in many aspects, and all of us might have been experienced a lot of ups and downs in the first 2 years. Even in this day and age, there are so many issues that we have to deal with personally and socially. From race to gender to politics to religion to environment to poverty; we’re living in a society where it’s easier to close yourself off to people that are different from you.

Kimia Kline

Kline fuses painting with sculpture to investigate human intimacy and totemic histories. Made from discarded and salvaged wood gathered in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and upstate NY, Kline’s works investigate the ritual of starting over by retrieving objects that have pre-existing histories and building a relationship with them. Raised in an immigrant and refugee family, Kline has an intimate knowledge of feeling discarded and forming fresh beginnings. Newly realized works nod to both recent and distant pasts, transforming Kline’s pieces into a collaboration with time itself.

Rather than forcing the works into what the sculptor wants, the moments shared with each piece ignite a transformation. Once the wood has become familiar, Kline emphasizes texture with oil paint, wax, and pastels. Kline embraces rawness rather than hiding imperfection. Her sophisticated mark making appears both exploratory and refined, turning her scraps of wood into whimsical, figurative, and architectural stories. An overwhelming presence of family emerges and fades as you walk amidst the works, leaving space for individual interpretation. Ultimately, Kline’s work arrives at an intuitive place of stability, devotion, and balance. Both archival and newly born, the works build and transmit spiritual energy, and then pass it back and forth between object and viewer.

Mel Reese

Reese is an observational artist inspired by formalism. Lines, shapes, colors, and textures are as central to her work as is the process of creating them. A complex layering of these abstract elements allows her work to speak to the representational.

Her most recent series of paintings is inspired by nature. She methodically builds up sheer layers of monochromatic forms; each new layer informed by all previous layers. This process gives the painting a sculptural element as well as a sense of depth. Observations are simplified––distilling the essence of these natural forms reflects nature’s tendency to remove the extraneous.

Kathy Sirico

“Net is a soft-sculpture architectural installation environment. In creating this piece, I was interested in exploring how the power of architecture and the spaces we inhabit impact us and teach us what is possible. I wanted to create a work that intervenes into the viewers space, offering them an empathetic, feminist, and ecologically-conscious alternative experience. Net’s immersive atmosphere is meant to feel like a sacred passageway, encouraging viewers who interact with it to open their imaginations to new possibilities.

I created this work using primarily recycled and upcycled materials, which I hand knotted and wrapped with fabrics and yarns. I also used various reflective metallic materials to bounce light reflections around the installation space. Many of the fabrics I used in this piece are remnants from previous sculptural projects, which gives Net an archival quality and a sense of history. Most of the metallic fabrics come from a reuse center in Brooklyn which specializes in recycling textiles from the New York fashion and commercial design industries”.

Tomoko Sugimoto

“At the beginning of 2021, with the pandemic continuing and giving everyone a difficult time, I still wanted to have a bright feeling for the New Year. I started a diary-like artwork series that describes my everyday feelings, using images of the powerful Japanese icon - Mount Fuji. For each one I made, I used elements of what I saw, heard, ate, and felt that day. Those days were expressed with one unique hoop per day. These diary-like Fuji-san artworks continued intermittently throughout the year culminating with this showing at THE GALLERY”.

Special Thanks to 

Kan Asakura / Zahra Sherzad

The Gallery Crew

Manabu Asanuma / Victor Diaz / Shuji Furukawa / Karma Gurung / Fabian Morales / Federico Perez Mosso / Hiroki Odo / Brian Saito / Mari Yoh

Exhibition curated by Akiko Ichikawa