In conjunction with Mo’Print (regional biannual celebration of printmaking) featuring eight female artists, all of whom were born abroad.
On View: February 28 – April 5, 2020
Opening Reception: Friday, February 28, 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Foreign Born explores the unique perspectives of female immigrants from Asia, South America and Europe. Individually, each artist charted a unique path to citizenship, while collectively that path ultimately inspired a desire for artistic expression. By referencing birth, femininity, and cultural identity, their unique perspectives form a singular message around the significance of immigration and the power of the female viewpoint.
Aligned with Mo’Print, a celebration of printmaking created “to inspire, educate, and promote awareness throughout Colorado” (Mo’Print Home Page, 2020), this exhibition predominantly features printmaking in the form of lithographs, monoprints, and etchings, but also includes drawings and paintings for a diverse range of represented media.
It is within the creation of ‘prints’ that we observe intrinsic personal narratives. From artists that directly reference their home country, artists depicting figures of another time and location, or artists that abstractly depict their connection to a new environment, Foreign Born delivers a diverse collection of work from artists creating personal objects in a once unfamiliar locale: the United States of America.
Featured in this exhibition is Japanese-born artist Taiko Chandler. Trained as a nurse in Japan, Chandler found herself drawn to the arts after taking a class in 2011 at The Arts Student League of Denver. Exploring the emotional response of her day-to-day experiences and internal dialogue as a Japanese artist living in the U.S, her prints take the form of large-scale installation as well as formal framed works. Chandler’s work, unlike the majority of printmakers working in the field, produces exclusively unique prints, each print taking on a completely different appearance from the next.
Born in Nanchang, China in 1996, Danqi Cai was born to a patriarch who deeply desired a son in the midst of the Chinese One-Child Policy. Contemplating ethics surrounding biological reproduction, Cai’s practice as a printmaker further explores her concept by creating numerous ‘sibling’ prints from the ‘parent’ print matrix. Often playing with rapid visual contrasts and repeating patterns, Cai’s work questions the connection between parent and child, child and adult, self-development and familial roots.
Eriko Tsogo, born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia but raised in Hungary, creates layered works on paper that move between minimal and maximal with a consistent stylistic language. Using drawing, print techniques, collage, and embellishment, Tsogo guides her viewers through a ‘mindscape’ that is at once extremely personal and widely understood.
Born in Seoul, Korea, illustrator and fine artist Erin Hyunhee Kang mines her subconscious to create surreal landscapes that depict the subtle connections threaded through her past experiences. Often using the image of water in her work, Kang’s landscapes weave between serene and catastrophic, obscuring the definitive line between what is manipulating and is being manipulated.
Roberta Restaino, born in Rome, Italy, explores the connection between man-made technological processes and nature, finding a woven narrative between the two in which our advances as humans inevitably shape our understanding of life, and in certain ways, change our evolution. Her work often depicts the things that usually go unnoticed, taking an innovative approach to exploring the natural world, and creating works that “can be characterized as at once aesthetic and ontological” (Artist’s Site).
The exhibition is rounded out with a collection of prints from Shark’s Ink, including Mexican-born Dianna Frid, Chinese-born Hung Lu, and Argentinian-born Ana Maria Hernando. Created in 1976, Shark’s Ink is a local print studio that collaborates with artists around the world to produce unique suites of prints utilizing a sweeping range of ideas and print processes.
Growing up in Mexico City, Frid has always been inspired by the language found within textiles. The lithographs on view are her first-ever created, but clearly reference textiles and demonstrate her desire to continually discover and transform herself.
Hernando grew up in Buenos Aires surrounded by familial women who spent their afternoons crocheting, sewing, embroidering and talking. Creative female gatherings are at the heart of her work. Hernando states “the persistent feminine force cannot be denied any longer” and references visions of beauty in her prints on display.
Liu is one of the first Chinese artists to establish a career in the West, and is regarded by many as “the greatest Chinese painter in the U.S.” (The Wall Street Journal). A suite of her work includes three collaged prints that represent the ID cards and permits documenting her “official” citizenship status, and two prints that explore the history of her homeland through anonymous photographs.
Foreign Born will open on Friday, February 28th, starting at 5:00 pm. At 6:00 pm a brief introduction and discussion of the works on view will be made. The reception is an opportunity to meet and mingle with the artists and curators. Enjoy live music and refreshments available for purchase. All receptions are free and open to the public.
