2020 EFA New Member Exhibition:

Freedom is an Act

Curated by: Natalia Nakazawa
Opening: 6 - 8 pm, September 9, 2020
Exhibition Dates: September 1 - January 9, 2021

2020 New EFA Studio Member Artists:

Allen Ball
Laura Anderson Barbata
Odette England
Jason File
Katya Grokhovsky
Anina Major
Nazanin Noroozi
Whitney Oldenburg
Susan Silas

2020 Jury Panel: Carmen Hermo, David Everitt Howe, Sarah S. King, Alex Paik and Sarah Watson

The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program is thrilled to welcome visitors back with an exhibition introducing our New Studio Member Artists who joined EFA this spring. The nine artists were chosen by a jury panel from a competitive pool of applicants. Member Artists are awarded a subsidized studio for a period of two years which may be renewed indefinitely based on continued professional excellence. To view the exhibition in person, please visit: https://www.efanyc.org/reservations

Encompassing a breadth of media and approaches, the nine EFA New Member Artists engage with their respective practices in deeply physical ways. Using clay, dirt, indigo, built up layers, protest, and subversive acts of failure, the artists confront personal history and day-to-day drudgery with action.

Allen Ball's work considers humankind's relation to the land and its future habitability. Using primal marks and materials such as dirt, clay, oil and ash, his work is suggestive of cave painting and neolithic embodiment.

Laura Anderson Barbata is a bicultural, transdisciplinary artist who sees art as a social practice that can connect, educate, and transcend borders. She collaborates with unlikely individuals and groups including stilt dancers from Brooklyn, Oaxaca, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Odette England explores relationships between autobiography, gender, place, and vernacular photography. England grew up in a small rural dairy farm. The memories of the male-dominant community and the many snapshots made by her family serve as raw materials and inspiration for England's work.

Jason File is a former war crimes prosecutor for the United Nations. He embeds law in his art practice and art in his legal practice. He explores the poetics of juridical language and materials. In the art world, this takes the form of performances, videos, installations and objects. In the legal world, it is called testimony, evidence, contracts and administration. In both worlds it is an archive.

Katya Grokhovsky works in installation, performance, sculpture, video, painting and drawing, exploring ideas of gender, identity construction, alienation, labor, history and the self. Through research and autobiographical experience, Grokhovsky builds worlds and characters, through which she examines and underscores stereotypes, assumptions, prejudices and injustice.

Anina Major was born and raised in the Bahamas. Her work investigates the relationship between self and place as a site of negotiation. By utilizing the vernacular of craft to reclaim experiences and relocate displaced objects, her practice exists at the intersection of nostalgia, identity and commerce. Her work and process reference historical and contemporary ethnography, taking form in a wide range of media; installation, sculpture, video and performance.

Nazanin Noroozi makes handmade films, prints and paintings using images from her personal and family archives overlaid with drawings, found imagery, and lo-fi graphics. She creates broken narratives recalling collective human experiences of memory, displacement, and diaspora.

Through a post-minimalist positioning, and in the lineage of artists such as Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou, and Louise Bourgeoise, Whitney Oldenburg’s work becomes propositions for understanding control in relation to excess. She uses materials such as rocks, fabric, paint, and household objects to construct terrains, armatures, skins, or containers.

Susan Silas uses performance, film, photography, and digital sculpture to examine the meaning of embodiment, the index in representation, and the evolution of our understanding of the self over time. She is interested in the aging body, gender roles, and the potential outcomes of the creation of idealized selves through modern technologies and artificial intelligence.