Structure & Story
New Member Exhibition 2024
September 19–December 3, 2024
Opening: September 19, 6–8 pm
EFA Studios
323 West 39th St., New York, NY, 3rd Floor
Hours: Tue–Fri, 12–5 pm
Annette Cords
Camille Eskell
Kate Hopkins
Cecil Howell
Negin Mahzoun
Regina Parra
EFA Studios is proud to present the work of the 2024 New Member cohort, selected by a distinguished panel of curators from a competitive open call. The panel included Dan Cameron, Kimberli Gant, Korurosh Mahboubian, Amanda Millet-Sorsa, and Carolina Wheat. We welcome six new artists to our community of 75 New York City-based artists. The group is connected through formal and conceptual threads including myth, craft, and creative responses to social and built contexts. Their work demonstrates a strong commitment to studio practice and well-developed aesthetic programs.
Curated by Deric Carner and Alexandra Unthank.
Regina Parra (b. Brazil) employs mythology and pagan references in performances, installations, and paintings to reclaim the female body from male narrativization. Parra’s painting Venus Intoxicating Mars depicts a lush spread of tropical fruit suggestive of female potency. Contrasting this is Cecil Howell’s (b. New York) abstract pastel drawings, which are inspired by objects and marks on the ground. The ground she renders is synthetic, ephemeral, and teeters between reality and dream. Negin Mahzoun (b. Iran) reveals the pressures that repressive societies place on women through striking work incorporating photography, folding, and stitching.
Camille Eskell (b. New York) comes from a textile trading family from Bombay. Her work links personal photographs, vintage fabrics, and fez hats to deconstruct a family legacy of patriarchy and global trade. The digital jacquard woven works of Annette Cords (b. Germany) emerge from a study of graffiti, urban signage, and typography. At times hung from doorway-like metal frames, her work is in dynamic dialog with architecture and space. Kate Hopkins’ (b. Colorado) systematic paintings reference repetitive crafts such as weaving or Swedish rosemaling (a kind of tole painting) and natural phenomena like butterfly scales. Hopkins’ work negotiates a generative space between decorative pleasure and solemn abstraction. The artists in the exhibition create works that reflect a subtle understanding of the present filtered through the stories and traces of the past.
For all inquiries, please contact Deric Carner at deric@efanyc.org.
Kate Hopkins, Painted Weaving No. 5 (Thank you, Rosemarie), 2023