NEW YORK, NY.- Abrons Arts Center, the Lower East Side arts institution that has long been a nexus of creative communities and local cultures, presents the opening of the Visual Artist AIRspace Residency Exhibition, featuring the work by 2019-2020 Visual Artists AIRSpace Artists.
Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.’s photography is being presented outdoors on the exterior of Abrons Arts Center in partnership with the Photoville Festival 2020. His photographic works visualize moments of contemplation, self-possession, and intimacy. The ambiguous nature of the photographs is in favor of an expansive, incoherent, and timeless regard for what is pictured. Similar to how experiences are layered in memory, he considers how a singular moment may be recontextualized to glean something comprehensive, new, or unplanned for.
Alicia Mersy presents photographs from her project NURSES on the windows of Henry Street Settlement Workforce Development Center (178 Broome Street). NURSES is a documentary project about the daily lives of New York City nurses. By presenting these stories and images, NURSES gives homage to those who choose a career in care and aims to remind us of the universal importance of empathy and compassion in healing.
In Abrons Arts Center’s Main Gallery, Charisse Pearlina Weston presents her new series of work, nine physical poems, which incorporates colored glass into investigations of “the fold” as a spatial realm for/of Blackness.
Elliott Jerome Brown Jr’s (b. 1993, Long Island) photographic works visualize moments of contemplation, self-possession, and intimacy. By privileging the interiority of individuals and communing groups, my work is invested in how people make space and less how they become clear to others.
Arisleyda Dilone is a filmmaker, writer, actor and multilingual translator. Her films are rooted in capturing extemporaneous conversations through a tender lens. In 2015, Arisleyda completed Mami y Yo y Mi Gallito/Mom and Me and My Little Rooster (16′) which screened at BAM (Brooklyn Arts Museum), New Orleans Film Festival, Harvard University, and Mercer Union to name a few and Two White Cars (22′) in 2018. She has been awarded fellowships at UnionDocs Documentary Art Center, Queer Art Mentorship Program, and residencies at Squeaky Wheel Media and MacDowell Colony. Arisleyda is currently working on a feature length documentary about her intersex body and the construction of femininity in her Dominican-American family. She is a member of Diverse Filmmakers Alliance, Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective and Ay Ombe Theater.
Alicia Mersy (b. Montreal, Canada, 1988) is an artist and filmmaker of Lebanese/French origin who lives and works in New York. Her work uses the camera to connect to people and to the divine, nurturing her heart through theirs. Her work explores decolonial aesthetics and political resistance through digital culture, art, documentary and technology. She is the co-founder of the art office Malaxa. Her work has been exhibited internationally including at Institute of Contemporary Art: ICA, London (2017); Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv (2016) and Migros Museum, Zurich (2019).
Charisse Pearlina Weston is a conceptual artist and writer whose practice is grounded in a deep material investigation of poetics and the uses of the autobiographical, photography, glass, and installation in the service of black people. Her work combines disparate text, sound, images and transparent materials to highlight the violability and potentiality of blackness, of black female sexuality, and of their capacity to destabilize meaning. Her work has been shown at Project Row Houses, Unit 5 (Praz-Devallade Gallery, L.A.), Garden LA, among other venues. She has received awards from Artadia, the Dallas Museum of Art, and is a recipient of the 2019 Dedalus Post-MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. She holds a MFA in Studio Art with a Critical Theory Emphasis from the University of California-Irvine and will participate in the Whitney Independent Study Program (2019-2020).
