Midori Harima, Selena Kimball, and Jen Mazza
Recurrent
October 28—December 16, 2022
Opening Reception: 6—8 pm, October 28, 2022
Jen Mazza, Terpsichore (1785), 2022. Oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches / 101.6 x 152.4 cm
Ulterior Gallery is pleased to present Recurrent, with works by Midori Harima, Selena Kimball, and Jen Mazza. When we see the same images repeatedly, it can be haunting or reassuring—or one might even experience déjà vu. This exhibition comprises works that are distilled from images that lingered for an extended time in each of the artists’ visions. Three women artists, each contributing three pieces; the resulting set of nine works form a cycle, a constellation of images in the process of rewriting themselves. The exhibition opens on October 28 with a reception for the artists from 6 to 8 pm.
Jen Mazza's new paintings are based on Zebra (1763) by George Stubbs, which hangs in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art. Mazza presents three different interventions into the work: the zebra as a blank void, as a white solid, and a third, meticulously rendered version that appears to reproduce the original. The female zebra depicted in Stubbs' painting was the sole survivor of a pair brought to England in 1762 as a gift for Queen Charlotte. Completed a year later, Stubbs’ painting reads as a historical record, seemingly chronicling a chapter in time. By re-presenting the work at this moment, Mazza interrogates the layers of meaning sedimented in the painting.
The vision that lingered in Selena Kimball’s mind was of the floor in Thomas Jefferson’s study strewn with text he excised from the bible—all the miracles and irrational bits. The “Jefferson Bible” as it came to be known, is Jefferson’s cut-and-paste version of this unruly text. Reenacting this act of cutting, not on the Bible, but on the daily newspaper beginning in 2017, Kimball attempts to both rescue and make explicit the irrationality of an historical breakdown which has roots in Jefferson’s era, at the very founding of the United States. The silkscreen paintings on view represent small moments in this epic work which suggest catastrophic landscapes. Recognizable images appear, such as the pentagon, but when recontextualized through montage—disorientation results. The dimensions of the largest diptych painting is specifically scaled to the artist’s height, suggesting a physical connection between her body and this enigmatic landscape, an insertion into this circulation of images.
Midori Harima focuses on the context of the "print.” The very action of reproduction enacted through the silk screen process is captured in the video, This is a Mirror, after Camnitzer. In the video—an homage to Camnitzer’s text based work of 1966-68—we are placed inside Harima’s studio, looking out through the window. Harima places a silk screen frame with a photographic image of the surrounding woods over this window and we watch as she appears to "print" the image into the air. Harima physically enacts the reproduction process but does not fix the image—overlaying reality with mere copy of nature and blurring their boundaries. Harima diverted her action into three different media: video, lightbox, and direct silkscreen on the wall.
Midori Harima (b.1976, Yokohama, Japan) received a B.A. in oil painting and printmaking from Joshibi University of Art and Design in Kanagawa, Japan in 2000. She spent 16 years in the U.S., first living on the West Coast and later relocating to New York City. In 2017 she returned to Japan and spent the following year in Hong Kong on an artist’s research grant provided by the Japanese government. Harima has exhibited at the Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan; Fujisawa City Art Space, Japan; Deitch Studios, NY; and Honey Space, NY; also participated in numerous residencies including Art Omi, NY; MMCA Goyang, South Korea; and 18TH Street Art Center, Santa Monica. Harima lives and works in Kanagawa, Japan.
Selena Kimball (b. 1973, Bangor, ME) obtained an M.F.A. from Hunter College, in combined media in 2007 following a B.F.A. and sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI in 1997. She has exhibited at the Katonah Museum of Art, New York, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, and the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Bucharest. Her work has been reviewed in The Boston Globe, The New York Observer, and Frankfurter Allgemeine. Selena is a MacDowell Fellow, a NYSCA/NYFA fellow, a recipient of two Pollock-Krasner awards, a Jerome Foundation grant, and an Asian Cultural Council award. She is based in New York, NY.
Jen Mazza (b.1972, Washington D.C.) received an M.F.A. from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2001, and is currently based in New York, NY. A committed educator, as well as an avid thinker and writer, Mazza finds her inspiration across a range of disciplines which include philosophy, literature, and visual culture. Mazza’s work has been recently exhibited in a mid-career retrospective at The James Gallery at the Center for the Humanities, as a digital project for Artist Alliance Inc., and as part of her recent talk on art and nature at the Getty Museum. Mazza’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Art News, and Hyperallergic. Mazza is represented by Tibor de Nagy, New York, NY.
