Currently On View
Becoming Buoyant
Opening this Saturday, March 20th 1-6pm, 2021
March 20th - April 25th, 2021
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Becoming Buoyant, a three person exhibition featuring work by Melissa Alcena, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, and Adrienne Elise Tarver from March 20th - April 25th, 2021. The exhibition is curated by OyG Co-Director Tiffany Smith.
Becoming Buoyant centers water as a symbol of life, departure, and return for Black bodies of the diaspora; how water functions simultaneously as a site of freedom and leisure, ritualistic healing, and generational trauma. The collected works present varied contextual relationships to the physical, spiritual, and psychological realm, that describe the process of becoming buoyant as an act of resistance, and the need to find freedom in an unrelenting tide as an act of survival for lives swept up in the wake.
Melissa Alcena’s tenderly composed photographs demand attention and command a degree of care emphasized by their life sized presentation. Countering this energy, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s seemingly delicate and intimate collages summon ancestors from the deep sea of the past to contend with the present/future, channeling the measured intensity of Yemoja. Adrienee Elise Tarver’s watercolor paintings of figures seen floating and in repose claim ownership over the rituals of rest, relaxation, and restoration that chart the way to safe harbour.
“I am interested in ways of seeing and imagining responses to terror in the varied and various ways that our Black lives are lived under occupation; ways that attest to the modalities of Black life lived under occupation; ways that attest to the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, and despite Black death.
Where is the breaking point, the breath, the pause, where the circulation, production, and reception of images of Black suffering and, importantly, the pleasure in them are concerned?”
— Christina Sharpe from ‘In the Wake: On Blackness and Being’
Melissa Alcena is a Bahamian portrait and documentary photographer based in Nassau, The Bahamas. In 2012, she completed an Applied Photography course at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. Melissa moved back to The Bahamas in 2016, where she became inspired to take portraits of working class and marginalised Bahamians in their environments. Her work focuses on shifting the paradise narrative of the Caribbean, by directly engaging with the people of The Bahamas in the everyday and tapping into the humanity of its citizens.
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Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer, and performer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. A term that has become a mantra for her practice is the "Historical Present," as she examines the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective.
Her artwork and experimental writing has been exhibited and performed at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Project Row Houses, The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire, SF MOMA, The BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and Páramo Galeria, Guadalajara, Mexico. Hinkle’s work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
Hinkle is also the recipient of several awards including The Cultural Center for Innovation’s Investing in Artists Grant, Social Practice in Art (SPart-LA), The Jacob K Javits Fellowship for Graduate Study, The Fulbright Fellowship, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artists Award, and the SF MOMA 2019 SECA AWARD. She has artworks in the private collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire, The San Jose Museum of Art, and SF MOMA. Her writing has appeared in Obsidian Journal, Artforum and Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics. She is the author of Kentifrications: Convergent Truths & Realities (2018) published by Sming Sming Books & Occidental College and SIR (2019) published by Litmus Press
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Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist based in Atlanta and Brooklyn with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. Her work addresses the complexity and invisibility of the black female identity in the Western landscape--from the history within domestic spaces to the fantasy of the tropical seductress.
She has exhibited nationally and abroad, including museum shows at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Children’s Museum of Manhattan, as well as solo exhibitions at Ochi Projects in Los Angeles; Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY; Victori+Mo in New York; BRIC Project Room in Brooklyn; and A-M Gallery in Sydney, Australia. She has been commissioned for an upcoming New York MTA project, a Google Artist-in-Residence commission, and received the inaugural artist commission prize for Art Aspen in 2019. She has been featured in online and print publications including the New York Times, Brooklyn Magazine, ArtNet, Blouin Art Info, Whitewall Magazine, Hyperallergic, Ingenue Magazine, among others. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from Boston University.
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Tiffany Smith is an interdisciplinary artist from the Caribbean diaspora working in photography, video, installation, and design. Using plant matter, design elements, patterning and costuming as cultural signifiers, Smith creates photographic portraits, site responsive installations, user engaged experiences, and assemblages focused on identity, representation, cultural ambiguity, and displacement. Smith’s practice centers on what forms and defines communities of people of color, in particular; how they are identified and represented, and how they persist.
Smith received her BFA from S.C.A.D., Savannah, GA and her MFA from SVA, NY. Her work has been exhibited internationally including shows at National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, The Bronx Museum, MassArt, The National Gallery of Jamaica; during Photoville, Photo NOLA, and Spring Break Art Show; and in solo exhibitions at The Wassaic Project, Recess Assembly, Brooklyn, NY, and Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA. Her work has been published in Womanly, Nueva Luz, Field Magazine, Bitch, Culture, and Posture Magazine. Tiffany Smith is a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Interdisciplinary Work from The New York Foundation for the Arts, an EnFoco Photography Fellowship Awardee, a Cameron Visiting Artist at Middlebury College, VT, and a current Artist in Residence in The Bronx Museum Block Gallery Residency Program. Smith is currently based in Brooklyn, NY where she serves as Co-Director of Ortega y Gasset Projects and teaches at Pratt, Parsons, and ICP.