ARC presents the ATHENA FUND EXHIBITION WINNERS: Jasmine Elizabeth, Jessica Swank, Rivers Qinnan Zhu
Jasmine Elizabeth: Love, Lies, and Everything Else We’ve Ever Done Wrong
It can be compelling to think we understand something, to assert that we understand what a story is, and have that be what defines us. Art should never be clear. It should never have an easy conclusion.
Love, Lies, and Everything Else We’ve Ever Done Wrong implores the viewer to look closer than is comfortable. Subjects reduced to their most basic forms narrate the quiet moments: moments of contemplation, otherness, and selfhood. In this series of paintings, the amount of visual information stripped away in each painting varies, allowing the viewer to bring in their own conclusions about what they are seeing.
Jessica Swank: Muscle Memory
Muscle Memory is a meditation on the significance of labor and the body in a time increasingly shaped by automation and post-biological ideals. This series represents an extension of my own body detached from myself, exploring how the body may become detached from consciousness in the digital age.. Through repetitive processes and actions, I think of my labor in creating this work as itself an act of resistance against the idea that human beings can be reduced to machines. While the work is not directly performative, I consider the labor embedded in the making of these works as a quiet performance.
Rivers Qinnan Zhu: Thread’s Return along the Equinox
I come from a lineage of four generations of female artisans, with a strong tradition of lace-making in Xiaoshan, China. Lace, with its intricate yet fragile structure, carries a tension between visibility and absence, labor and ornamentation, history and transformation. Lace-making is not just about preserving techniques; it’s about understanding them as shifting, unstable, and deeply connected to the people who practice them.
Thread’s Return along the Equinox asks how traditions continue— by preserving sameness or through adaptation? Lace becomes a way of holding time, of returning through making.
https://www.arcgallery.org/exhibitions-archive/jasmine-percell
https://www.arcgallery.org/exhibitions-archive/jessica-swank
https://www.arcgallery.org/exhibitions-archive/rivers-qinnan-zhu
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