Friday, August 14 | 7pm
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Join us from the comfort of your own home for an online celebration of new exhibitions, artists, and ideas.
Take a virtual tour of Melanie Kehoss’s Through the Kitchen Door, on view now in the New Project Studio.
This month we host an in-depth panel discussion with the participating artists and jurors from Target Gallery’s 2020 Emerging Artists exhibition. For this panel discussion, the exhibition jurors and artist participate in a virtual roundtable discussion about the current climate for emerging artists in the area.
The selected artists are: MK Bailey, Mahsa R. Fard, Zia Palmer, and Latrelle Rostant.
The participating jurors are: Alexandra “Rex” Delafkaran and Amy Lokoff.
We will also highlight current projects you can visit at the Art Center, and a glimpse of what’s coming in the months ahead.
Schedule of Activities:
7:00 – 7:02 pm: Introduction
7:03 – 7:10 pm: Virtual Tour: Melanie Kehoss: “Through the Kitchen Door”
7:10 – 7:30 pm: Emerging Artists: Meet the Artists
7:30 – 8:25 pm: Featured Late Shift Talk: “Emerging Artists” Roundtable Discussion
8:25 – 8:30 pm: Closing Remarks
About the Emerging Artists
MK Bailey, is a Washington, D.C. based artist working primarily in oil paint. Her work explores themes such as femininity, kinship, and death through unexpectedly colorful paintings. Each painting contains layers of imagery that are individually pleasant but collaged together to create a darker narrative. The work featured in this exhibition, take a slightly different approach to presenting the deeper world reference her own feelings of nostalgia encapsulated by a specific thought, memory, or dream. She received her BA in Studio Art from the University of Virginia.
Mahsa R. Fard, is a painter currently residing in Baltimore, MD. She often paints man-made large scale structures such as cities, stadiums, and apparatuses. She tends to create a new association by introducing unusual color and spatial relationships. Growing up in Iran, she has always been conscious of the dominance of rigid patriarchal gaze both in the public and private sphere. Accessing public and private domains as a female requires subversive strategies. Her imagery reflects a woman’s forced duplicitous roles in these domains. Mahsa contemplates and practice these strategies in her painting and writing through metaphors of censorship, sarcasm, camouflage, cover, and disguise. Mahsa has recently graduated from LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.
Zia Palmer, is a D.C. metro area based artist focused on graphic design and photography. She received her BFA in photography and minor in graphic design from George Mason University. Zia’s photography practice focuses on historic photographic processes and explores the relationship and liminality between time, memory and place. The artwork featured in this exhibition will explore Zia’s “Las Orillas Del Mundo” series, a project that investigates being Mexican, American, and neither. The work is a compilation of photography, found objects, and family photos. Over the past two years Zia has traveled to specific ghost towns in New Mexico where her grandmother and ancestors were born. She brings her mother and grandmother with her each time which has served as a way to reconnect to their heritage, some thing that has felt distant from them over time.
Latrelle Rostant, is a Maryland-based artist who primarily works with textile and fiber. She has a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and MFA at School of Art Institute of Chicago, with a concentration in Fiber and Materials. Through woven textiles, Latrelle explores what it means to be too foreign for the place she comes from, and the spaces she now occupies. Her work embraces the the carnival culture of her native Trinidad and Tobago which has become a space where the culture of those who were bought or came to the island are able make something that reflected, this third place for the new culture they became a part of. Each culture taking their own culture and adapting it to what they encountered when they arrived to the islands. Taking the prompt of adaptation Latrelle has adapted the loom to make objects, that like the artist, do not inherently reflect how they were made. The modular loom she created for this exhibitions, allows her to make woven objects that not only respond to how they are warped on it, but they also respond to what the artist sees as she is weaving on the modular loom. Looking at and understanding how tools, technique, space, and material can be used to make objects that cause to reflect her own understanding of self. A third place that is the intersection of the place that she came form and the places that she now occupies.
Juror Bios
Alexandra “Rex” Delakaran is a interdisciplinary artist from San Francisco, California. After earning her BFA in Sculpture and Performance Art from the San Francisco Art Institute, she relocated to Washington, DC working in local galleries. She performs and exhibits her work along the coast, working out of Red Dirt Studios, and on curatorial projects of her own.
Jaynelle C. Hazard develops, implements and oversees progressive, contemporary programming initiatives in the main gallery spaces at Workhouse Arts Center. In her brief time with the organization, she has implemented over 30 exhibitions with blockbuster shows including: Imagination is the Medium – an exhibit highlighting the works of Jim Henson’s original illustrator, Guy Gilchrist and puppeteer, Bill Diamond; and Compounds Not Required – a group show co-curated with Tiffany Williams from Art in Embassies exploring works of six artists and the origin of metals back to the periodic table.
In previous roles, she has supported various art programs and worked with some of the most celebrated artworks through her experience in managing the corporate contemporary art collection at UBS, the Union Bank of Switzerland, and via her work at Blank Projects, contemporary art gallery in Cape Town, South Africa. Significant milestones throughout Hazard’s career include curating lounge installations at Art Basel Miami Beach, administering the production and launch of the publication UBS Art Collection: To Art its Freedom published by Hatje Cantz and in supporting the transition of a historical, promised gift to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Jaynelle Hazard recently relocated to Washington from New York where she earned a Master of Arts degree at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Hazard is committed to being an ambassador of cultural heritage and looks forward to continuing the development of rich, inspirational experiences in the community locally and globally.
Amy Lokoff is a creative economy catalyst based in Washington, DC. She uses her work to explore inclusive community building, the power of the arts as a tool for social engagement, the value of resource sharing, and financial sustainability for creatives. Over the past 10 years, she has worked with over 250 visual and performing artists and coordinated exhibitions and arts programming in a variety of venues across the DC metropolitan area including Anacostia Arts Center, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, Otis Street Arts Project, and Torpedo Factory Art Center. Her exhibitions have been covered in The Washington Post, DCist, 730DC, and East City Art. Amy currently works as the project manager for WRAPture, temporary public art piece addressing climate change by artist and activist Monica Jahan Bose created in collaboration with DC residents and organizations. She also serves as the Visual Arts Curator for Little Salon, a monthly arts event that takes place in intimate spaces around DC.
