leftovers
Kerri Ammirata | Cecile Chong | Saba Farhoudnia | Sihan Guo | Erick Hernandez | Anna-Ting Moller | Tin Nguyen | Pacifico Silano | Motohiro Takeda | Thiang Uk
02–22–2024 reception from 6 to 8pm
leftovers explores the premise of materials, stories, and ecologies that are unconsumed, undesirable, or unloved and re-birthed through the care of the artist.
Roots from trees in upstate New York are scavenged by Motohiro Takeda with the help of his children and blackened with the traditional shou sugi ban technique, becoming totemic installations. Anna-Ting Moller uses symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast intended for Kombucha-making and grows the living membrane in her studio. She harvests the skin of this membrane as the surface for her sculptures and wall works. She calls this material, “mother”, a reference to her own displacement from China to Sweden as a child while acknowledging the replicant nature of her primary material. Her forms are bodily and offal, recalling a torn limb or a butcher’s cut.
In all the works, the artist as birther, regenerator, spawner of things in the world acts as a red thread – gathering traces of the overlooked and the invisible in order to build new worlds. Pacifico Silano sifts through discarded gay porn magazines from the 70s and 80s as his primary material. Tear sheets from these archives are blown up, a gaze or a uniform gets rendered into a psychological object cast in metal, their meaning charged with Pacifico’s own relationship to the source material and his care in dissecting their pervasive symbols. Erick Hernandez’s sculpture of an ambiguous hybrid dog/lion watches over his painting, its tail fashioned from a bundle of Erick’s own hair sheared off and now animated as part of a personal mythology. There is a direct lineage between the artist and artwork, its existence spawned not only from the imaginary but indexed to the body.
Cecile Chong is a multimedia artist working in painting, sculpture, installation, public art, and video, layering materials, identities, histories, and languages. Her work addresses ideas of cultural interaction and interpretation, as well as the commonalities humans share both in our relationship to nature and to each other. Inspired by materials as signifiers, she’s interested in how we acquire and share culture, and how world cultures now overlap and interact in ways previously inconceivable. Chong was born in Ecuador to Chinese parents and grew up in Quito and Macau. Her public art installation EL DORADO - The New Forty Niners was installed in the five boroughs of New York City (2017-2022). Fellowships and residencies include Marble House Projects, Surf Point Foundation, Dieu Donné Workspace, BAC - Brooklyn Arts Fund, Asian Women Giving Circle, NYSCA, LMCC Creative Engagement, Urban Field Station, The Hispanic Society’s Vilcek Artist Research Fellowship, Block Gallery/Bronx Museum, BRIC Media Arts, Joan Mitchell Center, Wave Hill Winter Workspace, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant. Solo exhibitions include Art in Buildings/125 Maiden Lane, Kates-Ferri Projects, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, Selenas Mountain, ICFAC at Pinta Miami, Smack Mellon, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Five Myles, BRIC House, Emerson Gallery Berlin, and Honey Ramka. Chong’s work is in the collections of El Museo del Barrio, Museum of Chinese in America, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Center for Book Arts, Bryn Mawr Hospital, Citibank Art Advisory, and private collections internationally. She received an MFA from Parsons, an MA in education from Hunter College, and a BA in Studio Art from Queens College.
Anna Ting Möller (b. 1991, Yueyang, China) is an artist living and working in New York City and Stockholm. Möller received an MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY and a BFA from Konstfack University, Stockholm, SE. The artist had a solo exhibition at Gallery Tutu and a forthcoming solo exhibition will be held at Galleri Dueer, Stockholm, Sweden. Möller has exhibited at Liljevalchs Art Gallery, Stockholm, SE; Kristianstad Konsthall, SE; Gustavsbergs Konsthall, SE; ArkDes, Stockholm, SE; Carl Eldh Ateljemuseum, Stockholm, SE; ICPNA La Molina, Lima, PE; Titanik Gallery, FI; Urban Glass, New York, NY and Alexander Bergruen, NY. They participated in the 45th Tendencies Biennale in Norway. Their work has covered the front page of the National Daily News Paper, DN, Sweden (2020).
Kerri Ammirata (b. 1983) is an artist who lives and works in Ridgewood, NY. She earned her MFA from Boston University in 2010. She is the recipient of the following awards and residencies: Woodstock Brydcliffe Guild, Woodstock (2022), The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, New York (2019), Ne'Na Contemporary Art Space/Monfai Cultural Center Residency, Chiang Mai, Thailand (2019), Vermont Studio Center, Clowes Full Fellowship (2012), HUB-BUB, Spartanburg, SC (2010-2011), and Chautauqua School of Art, New York (2005 and 2006). Recent exhibitions include: Currents, curated by Alex Feim, Morris Adjmi Architects, NYC; More Trees than People!!, curated by Beatrice Modisett and Kerri Ammirata, P.A.D., NYC; Dissolving Boundaries, Gertie’s Window Project, NYC; City Limits, Park Place Gallery, NYC; The Scenic Route, 1969 Gallery, NYC; Along the M Train, The Yard, NYC; Horology, Jack Hanley, NYC; Winter Group Show, Orgy Park, NYC.
Tin Nguyen (b. 1989) is a Vietnamese-American visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. His paintings are a collection of quiet moments based on what has occurred in his space and surroundings, often starting first as photographs. Nguyen’s paintings explore emotions arising from the subtleties of everyday life while weaving in themes of queer identity, intimacy, and vulnerability. His work has recently been included in group exhibitions with New York galleries, such as Auxier Kline, Queer Naturalism (2024); Alexander DiJulio, Springs Eternal (2023); and a duo exhibition with Ed. Varie, I Feel Everything at a Moment’s Notice (2023). His paintings have also been included in the West Bund Art & Design Fair in Shanghai, China (2022) with Capsule Shanghai. Nguyen received his BA from the University of Virginia and an AAS from Parsons School of Design.
Erick Alejandro Hernández is an artist from Matanzas, Cuba living and working in New Haven, CT. He received his BFA in Painting from RISD and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Hernández’s practice is invested in exploring how traditional techniques like oil painting and drawing can shift material forms in order to hold complex individual and collective histories. Revolving around overarching narratives such as a car crash or the death of a loved one, his paintings are investigative allegories exploring individual and shared experiences like grief, assimilation and exile. Hernández has been a fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Oxbow, Yaddo, Macdowell and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, among others. Recent group and solo exhibitions include Murmurs (Los Angeles), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles, CA), Perrotin (New York, NY), Yossi Milo (New York, NY), and Wilding Cran (Los Angeles)
Motohiro Takeda utilizes sculpture, ceramics, and photography to explore the impermanent nature of life. He investigates the transient core of time and memory and the space between man and nature in his work. Takeda was awarded the Tierney Fellowship in 2008. He participated in the Artist in Residency program at Baxter St. CCNY in 2011 and at Woodstock Center for Photography in 2015. He is a 2024 AIM fellow at the Bronx Museum. His work has been exhibited in various venues, including Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami), Half Gallery (New York), Storage Gallery (New York), Ibasho Gallery (Antwerp, Belgium), Unseen Photo Festival in Amsterdam, PhotoLondon, Photo España, among others. He received his BFA in photography from Parsons The New School for Design in 2008 and his MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2023. He was born in Hamamatsu, Japan, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Saba Farhoudnia was born in Tehran, Iran in 1987, in the midst of war. She currently lives and works in New York. Saba’s paintings are monumental in scale and explore the challenges facing the human condition. Saba merges the art of drawing, painting, language, and verse, through brushstrokes, geometric forms, calligraphy, and gestural marks to evoke drama, pain, humor, and beauty. The forms are intended to plumb the depths of the grotesque and elevate the humor in beauty. Her work explores humanity poised on a precipice: facing an insecure present and an uncertain future. Saba honed her skills by earning a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Master of Art from the University of Science and Culture in Tehran, Iran. Saba also received a second Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She is an alumna of the Artist In the Marketplace fellowship program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York, 2020), an awardee of the Queens Arts Fund Grant (New York) in 2022, and an Artist in Residence at the Fashion Institute Technology of Art (New York, 2023). Saba’s work has been seen worldwide: her paintings have been exhibited across the Middle East, Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States, including in the Bronx Calling: The Sixth AIM Biennial (New York, 2024). Her work can also be found in such periodicals as Studio International, Art Spiel, Thalia Magazine, Studio Visit Magazine, and Words Without Borders among others.
Pacifico Silano (b. 1986, USA) is a lens-based appropriation artist based in New York City, where he graduated with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2012. Exploring print culture, image circulation and questions of LGBT+ identity, his work is entirely composed of repurposed fragments from gay pornographic magazines of the 1970s and 80s – an era connecting the progressive legacies of sexual revolution with the advent of the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis. Silano’s works have been exhibited in both group and solo shows at the likes of the Bronx Museum; Tacoma Art Museum; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; The Museum of Sex; The International Center for Photography, Houston Center for Photography; Baxter ST@CCNY; Rubber-Factory; Stellar Projects; Light Work; Melanie Flood Projects; Fragment Gallery & Luis De Jesus Gallery. His work is also found in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Silano is a past recipient of the Aaron Siskin Foundation Fellowship, the NYFA Fellowship in Photography, and a finalist of the 2013 Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize. He was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture First Book Award with his debut publication, I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, published by Loose Joints in 2021.
Sihan Guo’s practice meditates on the possible dissociation of human subjectivity led by today’s information technology. Her works evoke the idea of disintegration, absence, and self-erasure by experimenting with the materiality of painting. In her work, the orientation toward a human-less, subject-less, and collapsed vision of space denotes an object-oriented fantasy overriding any human perceptions. Her inspiration often comes from deserted places, dilapidated monuments, and the imagination of the present man-made world as future remains — situations where human capability is alienated and relinquished.
Thiang Uk was born in Myanmar in 1993. His family migrated to the United States in 2004 fleeing potential violence and the instability of Myanmar’s government. Uk’s paintings investigate notions of holding manifold identities, inhabiting ever-shifting landscapes, as well as exploring ancestral memory through animism, metamorphosis, distance, mystery and the formality of painting. Uk is currently based in Baltimore, MD. He received his M.F.A. in the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), his B.F.A. at Hunter College in NYC in 2017, and also completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 2023.
for more information and a full list of works, kindly reach us at: hello@island83.gallery
Roots from trees in upstate New York are scavenged by Motohiro Takeda with the help of his children and blackened with the traditional shou sugi ban technique, becoming totemic installations. Anna-Ting Moller uses symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast intended for Kombucha-making and grows the living membrane in her studio. She harvests the skin of this membrane as the surface for her sculptures and wall works. She calls this material, “mother”, a reference to her own displacement from China to Sweden as a child while acknowledging the replicant nature of her primary material. Her forms are bodily and offal, recalling a torn limb or a butcher’s cut.
In all the works, the artist as birther, regenerator, spawner of things in the world acts as a red thread – gathering traces of the overlooked and the invisible in order to build new worlds. Pacifico Silano sifts through discarded gay porn magazines from the 70s and 80s as his primary material. Tear sheets from these archives are blown up, a gaze or a uniform gets rendered into a psychological object cast in metal, their meaning charged with Pacifico’s own relationship to the source material and his care in dissecting their pervasive symbols. Erick Hernandez’s sculpture of an ambiguous hybrid dog/lion watches over his painting, its tail fashioned from a bundle of Erick’s own hair sheared off and now animated as part of a personal mythology. There is a direct lineage between the artist and artwork, its existence spawned not only from the imaginary but indexed to the body.
***
Cecile Chong is a multimedia artist working in painting, sculpture, installation, public art, and video, layering materials, identities, histories, and languages. Her work addresses ideas of cultural interaction and interpretation, as well as the commonalities humans share both in our relationship to nature and to each other. Inspired by materials as signifiers, she’s interested in how we acquire and share culture, and how world cultures now overlap and interact in ways previously inconceivable. Chong was born in Ecuador to Chinese parents and grew up in Quito and Macau. Her public art installation EL DORADO - The New Forty Niners was installed in the five boroughs of New York City (2017-2022). Fellowships and residencies include Marble House Projects, Surf Point Foundation, Dieu Donné Workspace, BAC - Brooklyn Arts Fund, Asian Women Giving Circle, NYSCA, LMCC Creative Engagement, Urban Field Station, The Hispanic Society’s Vilcek Artist Research Fellowship, Block Gallery/Bronx Museum, BRIC Media Arts, Joan Mitchell Center, Wave Hill Winter Workspace, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant. Solo exhibitions include Art in Buildings/125 Maiden Lane, Kates-Ferri Projects, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, Selenas Mountain, ICFAC at Pinta Miami, Smack Mellon, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Five Myles, BRIC House, Emerson Gallery Berlin, and Honey Ramka. Chong’s work is in the collections of El Museo del Barrio, Museum of Chinese in America, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Center for Book Arts, Bryn Mawr Hospital, Citibank Art Advisory, and private collections internationally. She received an MFA from Parsons, an MA in education from Hunter College, and a BA in Studio Art from Queens College.
Anna Ting Möller (b. 1991, Yueyang, China) is an artist living and working in New York City and Stockholm. Möller received an MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY and a BFA from Konstfack University, Stockholm, SE. The artist had a solo exhibition at Gallery Tutu and a forthcoming solo exhibition will be held at Galleri Dueer, Stockholm, Sweden. Möller has exhibited at Liljevalchs Art Gallery, Stockholm, SE; Kristianstad Konsthall, SE; Gustavsbergs Konsthall, SE; ArkDes, Stockholm, SE; Carl Eldh Ateljemuseum, Stockholm, SE; ICPNA La Molina, Lima, PE; Titanik Gallery, FI; Urban Glass, New York, NY and Alexander Bergruen, NY. They participated in the 45th Tendencies Biennale in Norway. Their work has covered the front page of the National Daily News Paper, DN, Sweden (2020).
Kerri Ammirata (b. 1983) is an artist who lives and works in Ridgewood, NY. She earned her MFA from Boston University in 2010. She is the recipient of the following awards and residencies: Woodstock Brydcliffe Guild, Woodstock (2022), The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, New York (2019), Ne'Na Contemporary Art Space/Monfai Cultural Center Residency, Chiang Mai, Thailand (2019), Vermont Studio Center, Clowes Full Fellowship (2012), HUB-BUB, Spartanburg, SC (2010-2011), and Chautauqua School of Art, New York (2005 and 2006). Recent exhibitions include: Currents, curated by Alex Feim, Morris Adjmi Architects, NYC; More Trees than People!!, curated by Beatrice Modisett and Kerri Ammirata, P.A.D., NYC; Dissolving Boundaries, Gertie’s Window Project, NYC; City Limits, Park Place Gallery, NYC; The Scenic Route, 1969 Gallery, NYC; Along the M Train, The Yard, NYC; Horology, Jack Hanley, NYC; Winter Group Show, Orgy Park, NYC.
Tin Nguyen (b. 1989) is a Vietnamese-American visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. His paintings are a collection of quiet moments based on what has occurred in his space and surroundings, often starting first as photographs. Nguyen’s paintings explore emotions arising from the subtleties of everyday life while weaving in themes of queer identity, intimacy, and vulnerability. His work has recently been included in group exhibitions with New York galleries, such as Auxier Kline, Queer Naturalism (2024); Alexander DiJulio, Springs Eternal (2023); and a duo exhibition with Ed. Varie, I Feel Everything at a Moment’s Notice (2023). His paintings have also been included in the West Bund Art & Design Fair in Shanghai, China (2022) with Capsule Shanghai. Nguyen received his BA from the University of Virginia and an AAS from Parsons School of Design.
Erick Alejandro Hernández is an artist from Matanzas, Cuba living and working in New Haven, CT. He received his BFA in Painting from RISD and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Hernández’s practice is invested in exploring how traditional techniques like oil painting and drawing can shift material forms in order to hold complex individual and collective histories. Revolving around overarching narratives such as a car crash or the death of a loved one, his paintings are investigative allegories exploring individual and shared experiences like grief, assimilation and exile. Hernández has been a fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Oxbow, Yaddo, Macdowell and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, among others. Recent group and solo exhibitions include Murmurs (Los Angeles), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles, CA), Perrotin (New York, NY), Yossi Milo (New York, NY), and Wilding Cran (Los Angeles)
Motohiro Takeda utilizes sculpture, ceramics, and photography to explore the impermanent nature of life. He investigates the transient core of time and memory and the space between man and nature in his work. Takeda was awarded the Tierney Fellowship in 2008. He participated in the Artist in Residency program at Baxter St. CCNY in 2011 and at Woodstock Center for Photography in 2015. He is a 2024 AIM fellow at the Bronx Museum. His work has been exhibited in various venues, including Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami), Half Gallery (New York), Storage Gallery (New York), Ibasho Gallery (Antwerp, Belgium), Unseen Photo Festival in Amsterdam, PhotoLondon, Photo España, among others. He received his BFA in photography from Parsons The New School for Design in 2008 and his MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2023. He was born in Hamamatsu, Japan, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Saba Farhoudnia was born in Tehran, Iran in 1987, in the midst of war. She currently lives and works in New York. Saba’s paintings are monumental in scale and explore the challenges facing the human condition. Saba merges the art of drawing, painting, language, and verse, through brushstrokes, geometric forms, calligraphy, and gestural marks to evoke drama, pain, humor, and beauty. The forms are intended to plumb the depths of the grotesque and elevate the humor in beauty. Her work explores humanity poised on a precipice: facing an insecure present and an uncertain future. Saba honed her skills by earning a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Master of Art from the University of Science and Culture in Tehran, Iran. Saba also received a second Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She is an alumna of the Artist In the Marketplace fellowship program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York, 2020), an awardee of the Queens Arts Fund Grant (New York) in 2022, and an Artist in Residence at the Fashion Institute Technology of Art (New York, 2023). Saba’s work has been seen worldwide: her paintings have been exhibited across the Middle East, Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States, including in the Bronx Calling: The Sixth AIM Biennial (New York, 2024). Her work can also be found in such periodicals as Studio International, Art Spiel, Thalia Magazine, Studio Visit Magazine, and Words Without Borders among others.
Pacifico Silano (b. 1986, USA) is a lens-based appropriation artist based in New York City, where he graduated with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2012. Exploring print culture, image circulation and questions of LGBT+ identity, his work is entirely composed of repurposed fragments from gay pornographic magazines of the 1970s and 80s – an era connecting the progressive legacies of sexual revolution with the advent of the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis. Silano’s works have been exhibited in both group and solo shows at the likes of the Bronx Museum; Tacoma Art Museum; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; The Museum of Sex; The International Center for Photography, Houston Center for Photography; Baxter ST@CCNY; Rubber-Factory; Stellar Projects; Light Work; Melanie Flood Projects; Fragment Gallery & Luis De Jesus Gallery. His work is also found in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Silano is a past recipient of the Aaron Siskin Foundation Fellowship, the NYFA Fellowship in Photography, and a finalist of the 2013 Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize. He was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture First Book Award with his debut publication, I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, published by Loose Joints in 2021.
Sihan Guo’s practice meditates on the possible dissociation of human subjectivity led by today’s information technology. Her works evoke the idea of disintegration, absence, and self-erasure by experimenting with the materiality of painting. In her work, the orientation toward a human-less, subject-less, and collapsed vision of space denotes an object-oriented fantasy overriding any human perceptions. Her inspiration often comes from deserted places, dilapidated monuments, and the imagination of the present man-made world as future remains — situations where human capability is alienated and relinquished.
Thiang Uk was born in Myanmar in 1993. His family migrated to the United States in 2004 fleeing potential violence and the instability of Myanmar’s government. Uk’s paintings investigate notions of holding manifold identities, inhabiting ever-shifting landscapes, as well as exploring ancestral memory through animism, metamorphosis, distance, mystery and the formality of painting. Uk is currently based in Baltimore, MD. He received his M.F.A. in the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), his B.F.A. at Hunter College in NYC in 2017, and also completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 2023.
for more information and a full list of works, kindly reach us at: hello@island83.gallery
