sample-exhibition
Oct 15–Nov 14, 2022
Northern Exposure: The Artists Behind Black Ball Projects
Kelly Chang
Palma Blank
Pia Dehne
Diana Delgado
Jen DeNike
Laleh Khorramain
Jac Lahav
Rachel Owens
Ana Wolovick
Opening reception:
Sat Oct 15, 5–7 pm
Bushel is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring nine of the artists who lead Black Ball Projects (BBP), a nonprofit that supports underexposed artists. Also on view will be photos, clippings, and other ephemera tracing the activities of BBP over seven years in its support of more than 150 artists.
“Run by artists for artists, from the start it was always a labor of love,” states BBP co-founder Ana Wolovick. Black Ball Projects is a NYC nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that supports artists through exhibitions, online viewing rooms, and a micro-granting program. BBP’s mission is to serve and support contemporary artists who are underexposed and who have been working diligently on the periphery of the greater art world. Diversity of all kinds, be it gender, racial, or economic, is at the core of the Black Ball Projects organization. https://www.blackballprojects.com
As a nonprofit, artist-run space, Bushel is thrilled to host this exhibition, a cross-pollination between two groups that share a collective ethos. This exhibition is the second in a new series of Bushel-alumni-curated shows, proposed by Pia Dehne whose work was shown in “Beaver Fever,” a three-person show curated by Jennifer Kabat for Bushel’s old space at 84 Main Street in Fall 2017. Bushel-alumni-curated shows are exhibitions and happenings proposed by artists who have exhibited at Bushel in the past, with a single constraint: to use the opportunity to invite or engage at least one other artist or maker who has not yet been part of a Bushel program.
Palma Blank is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Juxtaposing concepts of deep space and flatness, illusion and objecthood, minimalism and maximalism, the handmade and machined, her paintings emerge as charged futuristic spaces for experience and reflection.
Kelly Chang is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist whose work combines the use of digital tools and methods with ceramics and other traditional media to explore themes of personal memory, humanity’s legacy, and the future of life in the universe.
Pia Dehne is a German-born painter living in New York for the past 22 years and in Andes, NY since 2011. Her interests as a painter lie in re-using and transforming images and pre-existing materials from a particular time, ideological moment or movement, into new abstracted and evocative forms.
Diana Delgado is an American-born painter, based in Westchester, NY, whose work combines abstraction and representational drawing to evoke themes of love, whimsy, and childhood nostalgia.
Jen DeNike is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY and Glasgow Scotland. Her multimedia sensory installations function as places of intervention navigating both real and imagined utopias with a sense of sublime temporality.
Laleh Khorramain is a visual artist whose work of the past decade has spanned stop-motion animations, sound, monoprints, drawings, painted landscapes, portraits, and collage. She removes cultural or historical specificity from her narratives in a search for worlds just beyond the concrete, material one around us.
Jac Lahav is an artist, curator, and community organizer, born in Israel and currently living in Connecticut. His work involves re-telling new and old narratives about his community, belonging, and shared cultural history.
Rachel Owens is a sculptor and Associate Professor of Art & Design and Chair of the Sculpture Department at SUNY Purchase College. Her recent work explores the precarious nature of existence, where the limbs of people, plants, and trees fold together. She currently lives and works in Armenia, NY.
Ana Wolovick is an artist and curator, born and raised in New York City, now living and working in Brooklyn. She makes intuitively driven composite-paintings that have quasi-political abstract narratives.
image: Laleh Khorramain, detail of Fallout, 2021, 49 x 28 inches, acrylic, dye, ink, silk and thread on canvas.