“All that is Gathered,” a three-person exhibition curated by Allison Conley, lecturer of visual arts in printmaking and drawing, opens Jan. 8 in the Crowell and West galleries, Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts.
The three – Golnar Adili, Kristina Bivona and Karen Lederer – are artists whose printmaking practice fundamentally informs their work, permeating sculpture, painting, installation and craft.
A reception will be held at the galleries Jan. 17, 4:30-6:30 p.m.
“This exhibition looks at the wake created from life moving forward, picking up and putting down, and the evidence of joy, pain and resilience,” said Conley.
Prints, she noted, are the product of contact and separation, a process intrinsically linked to touch, departure and memory; evidence of one surface imparting itself upon another.
“These themes echo through the work as the artists reflect the intimate, complex and layered experiences they have gathered,” she said.
Adili, a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist of Iranian descent, is the daughter of political activists. Much of her work is influenced by growing up in Tehran after the Iranian revolution of 1979 and resultant issues of displacement, longing, loss and a search for identity.
Interested in “blurring the lines between design, craft and fine art,” she uses image transfer techniques to meld personal archives with the present. She envelops her trauma in such familiar comforts as hands, books, pillows and breasts, all of which call out to the human need for touch.
Adili holds a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Michigan. She has been awarded numerous fellowships and residencies, and her work has been shown in galleries, museums and other art venues in New York, California, France, Germany and Iran.
Bivona, of Philadelphia, is a printmaker, book artist and scholar who has been practicing art and radical politics for more than two decades. She works in Brooklyn, where she co-established a printshop for prison diversion with Recess Art’s Assembly program, a nonprofit exhibition and studio space.
Her personal printmaking practice takes the form of artist pop-up books about sex work and incarceration, aimed at promoting conversation, advocacy and awareness around taboo subjects. She is known to “bring the essence of punk rock to her ephemeral printmaking.”
Bivona is the author of “Salon Style: A Critique Practice for Self-Awareness and Proactive Learning.” She holds an M.A. in printmaking from Penn State University and is studying for her doctorate in education at Columbia University.
Lederer’s art marries the gestural marks of painting with the graphic quality of monoprints. Her portraits of domestic space feature recurring objects, shapes and patterns that point directly to the repetitive nature of printmaking and the routine of life. She weaves together references to art history, popular culture, literature and New York City.
Lederer lives and works in Brooklyn. She has presented her art in solo and group exhibitions throughout New York. She has been an artist in residence at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Lower East Side Printshop and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. In addition to her studio practice, she teaches at LaGuardia Community College and several art centers and workshops.
She holds an MFA in printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design.
“All that is Gathered” runs through March 14.