Destination is Close
New Member Group Show
EFA Studios
323 West 39th St., New York, NY
September 14 – December 1, 2023
Hours: Tue – Fri 12 – 5 pm
Pamela Council
Noormah Jamal
Calvin Kim
Yali Romagoza
Finnegan Shannon
Curated by Deric Carner and Alexandra Unthank
EFA Studios is pleased to honor our five new member artists with an exhibition in our 3rd-floor gallery. The studio program awards jury-selected artists a two-year subsidized workspace in EFA’s 90-studio building in Manhattan’s Garment District. Memberships are renewable based on continued evidence of excellence. EFA is dedicated to providing distinguished programs to enhance community, career development, and visibility for studio members.
The exhibition brings together artists of varied backgrounds, each skilled at bringing light to their unique stories. Yali Romagoza’s work addresses her journey from Cuba to North America through performance and persona. Calvin Kim explores the liminal space between experience and memory, delighting us with spooky cats and misty spaces. Finnegan Shannon asks us to reconsider exclusion in the spaces we regularly inhabit. Noorma Jamal uses joyous color and layered symbology to discuss difficult narratives. Pamela Council’s video encapsulates her linking of fountains and black culture.
Yali Romagoza performed during the opening on September 14.
2023 New Studio Member Artists
Artist Selection Panel: Eva Mayhabal Davis, Jackie Klempay, Nina Mdivani, Jonathan Rider, Rachel Vera Steinberg
Pamela Council uses play to invent objects, performances, and videos. From concept to process to presentation, play gives them the ease to navigate the absurd precarity of Black life and invite audiences into transformative spaces. They puddle-jump into research, experiment with art materials and everyday objects like beauty products and food, and emerge with new expressions in their colorful Afro-Americana camp style.
Noormah Jamal’s multidisciplinary practice is based on human complexity and the personal baggage that people carry. It is deeply rooted in her Pukhtoon heritage and upbringing - a minority located in the north of Pakistan and Afghanistan. She visualizes the emotions behind stories that are repeatedly ignored and silenced, routinely forgotten and the ones that she carries with her.
Calvin Kim's paintings explore the tenuous relationship between naming, knowing, and feeling. Through shifts in scale, moments of magic, and enigmatic atmospheres, vestiges of feelings are stained and emanate from the familiarity of pared down glimpses of lived life: silhouettes, cigarettes, spider webs, cats… The familiar, which is deeply embedded in the personal, can intimately intimate an affective resonance far beyond what can be singularly named.
Yali Romagoza is a Cuban-born interdisciplinary artist whose work discusses issues of migration and the effects of displacement trauma on the body. She creates an alter-ego, Cuquita The Cuban Doll, as a strategy for rebuilding a cultural home within the U.S. art scene. It illustrates how she inhabits an in-between cultural space of belonging and nonbelonging and addresses feminist marginalization while poking fun at the misogynistic and racist stereotypes that particularly plague Latinas in the U.S.
Finnegan Shannon’s art practice is a series of access experiments. Their work asks: What if we approach access creatively and attentively, centering disability cultures, instead of focusing on compliance and doing the minimum? How can practices of access nourish cross-disability solidarity and connection? How do we make spaces and experiences that disabled people not only can access but want to access? Their work is rooted in their experience as a disabled person and in collaboration with other disabled artists and thinkers.
Noorma Jamal, Manzil Kareeb (Destination is close), 2022, acrylic on canvas. 5' x 5'