Residency Projects in Flux

Kala Gallery is excited to present Residency Projects in Flux, featuring works by 2019-2020 Kala Fellowship and Media Residency artists: Pável Acevedo, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Jonathan Herrera Soto & R. Treshawn Williamson, Pascaline Knight, Sara Press, Aay Preston-Myint and Azin Seraj.

During the pandemic, shelter in place orders, and the growing urgency for racial and social justice, artists struggled to continue with their art practices. Like many artists, Kala fellows are reflecting on their practices, thinking deeply about the meaning of their projects and wondering about relationships with audiences. Through several meetings and discussions about how to create an exhibition in the midst of these unusual circumstances, we decided to use the exhibition space and time as a creative lab. For the exhibition, some fellows will build up their installation throughout the exhibition period, some will show works-in-progress, and some will host an event/workshop and collaborate with other artists and organizations to provide a platform to amplify voices that need to be heard.

The exhibition content will grow throughout the time of the exhibition. We will feature the progress on our website and host a series of artist’s talks online. Stay tuned for more information.

During the exhibition Kala Gallery will be open by appointment. Contact Mayumi at mayumi@kala.org to schedule your appointment.

Pavel Acevedo studied his printmaking techniques in Oaxaca, Mexico. In 2010 he moved to Riverside, California and started getting involved in printmaking projects with a social justice and educational awareness in communities of color throughout California. In 2015, he opened his printmaking studio by collaboration with “The Desert Triangle Print Carpeta” located provisionally in Riverside. At Kala, Pavel worked on his project about a hybrid language of an immigrant printmaker influenced by California; creating a dialogue between relief prints, lithography and a temporary mural installation.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is a visual and performance artist, drag queen – who goes by the Alias Faluda Islam – as well as curator of mixed Pakistani, Lebanese and Iranian descent. He is based in San Francisco, California where he received an MFA in Studio Art at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016. In his current series, Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth, Bhutto utilizes performance, video and textile collage to create an archive of a fictitious queer anti-imperialist uprising in the Muslim world.

Jonathan Herrera Soto is a print-based studio artist from Chicago, IL, now living and working in Minneapolis. Jonathan explores relationships between collective memory and historical instances of state-sponsored violence and trauma inflicted on politicized bodies. He constructs print-based objects, installations, and environments that echo lived experiences of those who are no longer with us. For this exhibition Jonathan is collaborating with R. Treshawn Williamson for a project Daily Meditations. The work consists of two collaborators sending each other daily meditations on various substrates, including post cards, archival paper, wood, and found materials. The proposed installation is a growing collection of these meditations that will expand onto the allotted space in the gallery.

Born in Prince George’s County, MD. R. Treshawn Williamson is a Chicago based essayist and multidisciplinary artist of black american descent. Currently he is in the process of earning his BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, majoring in visual critical studies and interdisciplinary studio practices. Williamson’s work is a meditation on the obstruction and surveillance of the lived histories of African-Americans. Investigating the application of cultural re-imagination in the African Diaspora through the engagement of oral histories, post-colonial theory, folklore, and ethnomusicology.

Pascaline Knight is a trans-disciplinary artist from Montreal, Canada. She uses a confluence of disciplines such as printmaking, micro-publishing, writing, concrete poetry, drawing, stop-motion animation, and performance. For the exhibition Pascaline presents her process based installation Elle était une fois, Once upon her time, Yekibud, Yeki na bud… (in Farsi) it was, it was not… (in English) exploring her time and art-making in this pandemic age. Pascaline’s work questions language, its necessity and hindrances at the threshold where words limit souls, and conversely, open up minds to souls.

Sara L. Press is a book artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She employs diverse media in her work including photography, writing, painting, drawing, and printmaking. At Kala she explored the interconnectedness of documentation & creativity, (or perhaps Fact vs. Fiction), exemplified by a peculiar relationship between photography and painting. Her paintings are based on spirit photographs from the early 1900’s. During her residency she experimented with re-photographing the paintings using selective focus and other subjective photographic techniques. The completed book consists of conceptual layers of photography/painting, and layers of reality/fiction.

Aay Preston-Myint is an artist, printmaker, and educator born in New York and living in Oakland after fifteen years immersed in the art scene in Chicago. Their practice employs both visual and collaborative strategies to investigate memory and kinship, often within the specific context of queer community and history. At Kala Aay wants to experiment with translating large-scale hand-drawn material to print, including printed fabric, offset lithography, and risography. For the exhibition they plan to build a site-specific installation in the gallery throughout the exhibition.

Through video and mixed-media installation, Azin Seraj grapples with the cultural and ideological contradictions inherent to the experience of a transnational artist. Using art, activism, and citizen journalism, she bridges genres and disciplines, bringing her ruptured worlds together to create an interdisciplinary discourse on the current international political climate of violence and enmity. The product of extensive research into Middle Eastern and Western colonial histories, her social practice artworks make use of citizen journalism, raising awareness of international political issues and connecting viewers with existing activist networks in order to foster concrete change.