Sonja John Ackee
sold out
Sonja John Ackee
$450.00
Sonja John
Ackee
collage on paper
15 x 15 in
2015
Painting and Drawing
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Dot Conference is traveling! Come see the second edition at Room 83 Spring in Watertown, MA with a reception on September 7th! :)
Dot Conference
May 20th – August 15th, 2019
Opening Thursday May 23rd, 2019 / 5:30-8pm
The Yard, Williamsburg
33 Nassau Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11222
Kirstin Lamb Curatorial and The Yard, Williamsburg are pleased to present a twenty-eight person show featuring artists utilizing dot forms as marks. Collectively this group forms a larger conversation around mark making and image-making.
The dot is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a round mark or small spot” but also “used to refer to an object because it is far away.” Dot is alternatively defined as a verb “to mark with a small spot or spots,” “be scattered over,” “mark” or “hit.” Dots are the literal vocabulary of much artwork, its consummate parts, and also a way of describing how the thing is made. Short, staccato, yet implying accumulation even if there is only one, a dot showcases repetition and a kind of community response to craft.
This show grew out of a conversation had in a gallery in metro Boston, Room 83 Spring, run by Cathleen Daley and Ellen Wineberg. Artists Liza Bingham, Zehra Khan, Cathleen Daley and Kirstin Lamb started discussing the ways in which mark making, specifically the dot, spoke about our larger practices. In a moment when we can struggle to delineate ourselves as apart from one another aesthetically and struggle to define ourselves as a coalition politically, it felt comforting to agree upon this one basic, the dot as foundational building block – something to be accumulated and appreciated.
There is a kind of elemental quality to repeated mark and repeated touch. It is a to nod forbears in folk and aboriginal art, meditative or religious practice, and self taught and visionary work. The show references historic dotted works such as Impressionist Georges Seurat’s visual displays, Larry Poon’s gridded projectiles, the elegant repetition in the work of the Pattern and Decoration painters like Miriam Schapiro and Joyce Kozloff, and Roy Lichtenstein’s ben-day Pop icons among many others.
In all, the works gathered serve less as a polemic, but rather a gathering. Conference is used lightly in the title, to serve as a meeting of artists and a meeting of mark making, a kind of comparison and accumulation of approaches.
Hours for the Yard, Williamsburg
Monday-Friday 9:30am – 4:30pm and by appointment