Press Release: 2020 show
"Touching Without Touch" at the Hive Art Community
"Touching Without Touch" is a group show at the Hive Art Community and a series of performances online that respond to the current events of pandemic and reflect on the expression of care for oneself and our communities, health care, alternative ways to provide and receive mental support, care for art and art education that are essential to a functioning society and desire for social and systemic change.
Touch suggests a broad range of physical, intellectual, and emotional connections. It is also a form of care for oneself and others. Artists in this show contemplate and tell their personal stories on "Touching Without Touch" and ways to practice and show care while socially distanced. Artists respond to the current events when one is forced to live and cope with political agendas that do not support the health and well being of citizens. By looking closer at a history of objects that they live with, artists highlight the root of past oppressions that are so vivid in gestures and mottos of the present moment.
We are encumbered, overwhelmed, weighed down by the reality of a new normal that urges us to find ways to cope, connect, and touch others. In this climate, spirituality becomes a necessity, not a luxury. We decay in loneliness and find hope in care and mental support for oneself and others. We create cocoons of isolation and contemplation, dissolve, and coming back together. Artists build protection symbols, objects, and micro-environments to find safety and power within one's own gestures during these uncertain times. They explore new means of archiving oneself and performing on social media to stay in touch with the outside world despite the lack of physicality.
Vivian Babuts
Live Performace "Hagiographies"
Vivian Babuts is a Brooklyn based artist working in photography, video, drawing, writing and performance. They received their MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Photo & Media Program, where they included Dance Theater among their studies. Vivian received their BFA from the University of Michigan, with a concentration in Photography and Painting. Through performances, movement studies, and often utilizing the genre of self-portraiture within the visual arts, their work investigates queerness and existence in relationship to illusory paradigms. Their work has been exhibited and performed in New York and Los Angeles and they have received awards from Light Work Grants in Photography and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art. They are currently a Part-time Faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Jacqueline Bishop
"Touching History Series"
Jacqueline Bishop is an accomplished visual artist with exhibitions in Belgium, Morocco, Italy, Cape Verde, Niger, USA and Jamaica, Ms. Bishop was a 2008-2009 Fulbright Fellow to Morocco; the 2009-2010 UNESCO/Fulbright Fellow. In addition to the OCM Bocas Award, Bishop has received several additional awards, including The Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for short story writing, The Arthur Schomburg Award for Excellence in the Humanities from New York University, A James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as several awards from the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission.
When Jacqueline was a child growing up in the Caribbean her great grandmother, her grandmother, my mother and all the women around her had extensive mahogany cabinets with these China planes in them with beautiful paintings in them that Jacqueline was always attracted to. Looking back now she realized that these luxurious paintings obscured a pretty violent historical past that has often been obscured because of the lush tropical setting in which the past took place. In these works then she is literally going back to touch that history. If you look at the works too Touch is literal with people actually touch one another.
Sunny-Moxin Chen
Video+Live Performance "Breathing"
Moxin Chen is an interdisciplinary artist who combine traumatic memories with imagination to investigate and construct new forms and spaces in their art. They brings the arena of life, both physical and mental, onto the two dimensional plane or into the three dimensional space to allow audiences to perceive in the fourth dimension and beyond. Through exploring relationships between color, body, material, and space, Chen challenges their works to break and rebridge the boundaries between the private and public. Chen's interdisciplinary art approaches allow them to vigorously experiment and address issues include but not limit to migration, displacement, and disassociation. As a global citizen, who grew up in Russia, China, and the U.S., Chen also works with symbols that indicate and respond to the consciousness of the personal, cultural, and universal.
Chen received BFA degree in Painting and Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and currently a MFA candidate of Boston University.
