The Selves

Overview

Julia Chiang
Sally J. Han
Sheree Hovsepian
Na Kim
Anina Major
Nickola Pottinger
Elizabeth Schwaiger
Uman
Alberta Whittle

“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell what it is like to be alive.”
—James Baldwin, LIFE magazine, May 24, 1963

Nicola Vassell is pleased to present The Selves, a group exhibition featuring work by Julia Chiang, Sally J. Han, Sheree Hovsepian, Na Kim, Anina Major, Nickola Pottinger, Elizabeth Schwaiger, Uman, and Alberta Whittle.

The Selves considers the ways in which the assembled artists are uniquely attuned to notions of memory, growth, transience, illumination, and self-awareness—forces that shape consciousness—and are thus individually equipped to translate the psychic into the physical. Armed with the power of articulation, they invite consideration and response beyond their own experiences. In the work on view, anima is molded into forms corporeal, elemental, architectural, and otherworldly—objects from which viewers can excavate the artist’s compounding conditions, conventions, and compulsions.

These artists wager that through seeding the fixations of their particular existence in artistic practice, a variegated conception of being is destined to germinate. Chiang’s intricate geometries bridge the anatomical and phantasmagoric; Han’s self-portraits offer portals into exaggerated realities; Hovesepian’s photographic compositions frame and fracture unnamed bodies; Kim’s imagined portraits describe perceptible differences between altered states; Major’s woven sculptures displace and preserve inherited tradition; Pottinger pulps family archives and organic matter, then shapes structures indicative of psyches; Schwaiger’s abandoned interiors house looming spirits and dystopian visions; Uman’s mental migrations unfurl in swirling cosmos; Whittle’s figures carve soulful mythologies from stark panoramas.

Inherent to each portrait is a confrontation with the iterative nature of self. Tracing metamorphoses from person to persona and back, the exhibition’s narrators are conscious of, but unrestrained by, the systems that mold who they have been and will become. The Selves posits the artist as the mediator between obstacle and potential, interior and exterior, individuation and collectivism—charting the oscillations, rather than conclusions, that persistently sculpt self-knowledge.