Opening Reception: Thursday, November 9th 6 – 8 pm | Artist Talk 7 pm
Target Gallery Presents the 2017 Torpedo Factory Post-Graduate Residents: Jay Hendrick, Samantha Sethi, Lindsay Hall, and Fumi Amano. This group of artists have each spent three months over the past year developing new work in our Residency studio 12. This exhibition is a sampling of their best work created during their time here.
Jay Hendrick ● George Mason University
January – March
Jay Hendrick, Falling Down the Stairs, 2016.
Jay Hendrick questions the value of value in his work. He creates paintings, then analyzes their importance, worth, and merit by exposing his work to different methods, such as digitization, duplication, and performance. His visual vocabulary is based on grids, a stable and reliable form, and color to assess the form’s value. His sundry palette draws from high and low culture, bringing together pop-music pink with cave-born ochers.
Based in Fairfax, Virginia, Jay Hendrick has shown work in the U.S., England, and Japan and his work was featured in New American Painting. In 2015, Hendrick received his master’s of fine art from George Mason University. He completed his undergraduate degree with Abilene Christian University in Texas with degrees in applied studies and a bachelor’s of fine art. He teaches at Northern Virginia Community College in Woodbridge, Virginia, and is a contributing writer for East City Art.
Samantha Sethi ● American University
April – June
Samantha Sethi, Cause and Effect, 2017.
Samantha Sethi‘s work embraces a blend of physical and digital objects exploring the way the world we see and move through can be modeled both visually and experientially. Through natural materials and processes, such as ice, tar, and sediment, Sethi creates works which are simultaneously actions and images, both the event at hand and the drawing or trace used to represent it through time. These works find their source in the artist’s view of our world as a landscape both inhabited and studied by humankind, altered even as it is observed — understanding the world as both the location and the material of our pursuit of meaning.
Sethi is currently based in Washington, D.C. She completed her master’s of fine art at American University in May 2016. She is currently teaching art as an adjunct at AU and will teach at George Washington University in Spring 2017. Sethi completed her bachelor’s of fine art at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Her work has shown in New York, Washington, and Berlin and has appeared in publications including The Washington Post, Time Out New York, and Studio Visit magazine. Sethi was awarded a Mellon grant in 2015 as well as the Elizabeth Van Swinderen Award in 2016.
Lindsay Hall ● Indiana University-Bloomington
July – September
Lindsay Hall, Pink and Gold Sack, 2015.
Lindsay Hall’s interdisciplinary practice sources an eclectic range of materials including silicone, textiles, clay, spray paint, and glitter to create colorfully titillating pieces that engage the notions of pleasure, beauty, and the perverse as they relate to the body, sexuality, and the intimacies and vulnerabilities of human interaction. Desire and temptation become valuable components for interaction and interpretation. She combines contrasting textures, forms, and materials to present preexisting dualities: attraction/repulsion, hard/soft, feminine/masculine, interior/exterior, made/found. Her resulting pieces and installations fantasize these shared human experiences, often sugarcoating shame and disgust with humor and playfulness. Recent Target Gallery visitors will remember her piece Blinged Out in the Material as Medium group exhibition last year.
A West Coast native, Lindsay Hall is currently based in Arlington, Virginia. She received a MFA in Painting from Indiana University in 2016, as well as a BFA in Painting and Drawing (2012) and a BA in Journalism and Media Studies (2010) from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her work has been exhibited nationally at venues such as the Janet Kurnatowski Gallery in New York, the New Hampshire Institute of Arts, and Kent State University in Ohio and will be featured in a summer 2017 issue of Studio Visit magazine. Lindsay Hall has co-curated group exhibitions in Indiana and New York. She received the Ilknur P. Ralston Memorial Award in Visual Arts in 2016.
Fumi Amano ● Virginia Commonwealth University
October – December
Fumi Amano, Worries of a 30 year old single woman–Hysteria (video still), 2016.
A native of Aichi, Japan, Fumi Amano seeks to do new and creative things with glass and demonstrate new possibilities within the medium. Amano entered graduate school to expand her expertise with glass as a medium, but her work shifted more into the conceptual space as she began using her art as a primary means to express her emotions, given English is her second language. Her work is inspired by her strong desire for intimacy as well as a deep sense of loneliness. She is obsessed with communicating with others and creates work that elicits visceral, gut emotions in her audience. Amano’s work Look at Me was featured in the Target Gallery group exhibition Please Touch in June 2016. Viewers were invited to lick the frosted glass pane to reveal themselves to a person on the opposite side.
Amano completed her undergraduate studies in art education at the University of Education in Aichi before refining studies of her medium at Toyama Institute of Glass Art in Toyama, Japan, and at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington. Amano has won several awards including best student work at Niijima Glass Art Festival in Tokyo and also at Pilchuck Glass School. Her work was selected at the International Exhibition of Glass in Kanazawa, Japan; the Contemporary Glass Triennial in Toyama, Japan; and the Itami Craft Triennial in Osaka, Japan. She has shown her work in group and solo exhibitions in both the U.S. and Japan. She is presently enrolled in the master’s of fine arts program at Virginia Commonwealth University to study glass art and will be graduating in spring 2017.
