Reset is the first edition of NADA Curated, a new series of online exhibitions highlighting artists and galleries from NADA’s international community through curated thematic presentations.
Curatorial Statement:
The prompt was: reset. Artists were asked to stop, pause, and reconsider everything that has happened in the last two years. Reset presents 19 international artists who express personal narratives, fantasies, new technologies, and unjust realities. The exhibition includes a variety of media including video, painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and installation. Proclaiming alternative ways of being and pointing to systems of oppression, Reset considers the intersections of an unexpected phenomenon with our political lives.
The prompt was: reset. Artists were asked to stop, pause, and reconsider everything that has happened in the last two years. Reset presents 19 international artists who express personal narratives, fantasies, new technologies, and unjust realities. The exhibition includes a variety of media including video, painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and installation. Proclaiming alternative ways of being and pointing to systems of oppression, Reset considers the intersections of an unexpected phenomenon with our political lives.
In Reset, the works address the absurd, surreal imagery, color, nature, and violence to challenge the ideologies that sustain subjugation. In their paintings, Ali Salazar depicts ideas of memory, nonsense, and child’s play with colorful brushstrokes. Atong Atem’s enigmatic portrait photographs highlight her harmonious use of color to explore her own identity through African mythologies. Similarly, Antwoine Washington’s paintings allude to Black myths, underscoring the importance of hope within the social landscape of both pandemics and racial injustice. Madjeen Isaac uses a figurative approach to depict the magical realism that characterizes her Haitian American upbringing in New York. Timothy Yanic Hunter and Alex Gibson propose new possibilities for an expansive definition of gender and Caribbean history. Embracing non-binary systems, diasporic consciousness, artists take on courage and play through painterly, imaginative, and thought-provoking investigations.
Some of the artists in the exhibitions reflect on the literal sense of what it means to reset an artwork or change its configuration or meaning. This is the case with Laurie Kang, who considers her works as an ongoing process—an artwork constantly being rearranged. In contrast with this approach, others make propositions that explore avatars and tech-aesthetics to interpret the tensions of the everyday. Maria Antelman’s photographs address how the human body is defined as a collection of data and information, and how this system affects our psyche. Sumire Skye Taniai creates digital collages using pop strategies to point to the rise of Asian-American violence in the internet and beyond.
Reset grounds the viewer within the artists’ poetic narratives to reconsider what our humanity means to us today. Symbolizing complex emotions and competing realities, the exhibition takes the pulse of how artists working within communities and as individuals continue to negotiate complex social dynamics through artistic practice. The outcome of the prompt was a kaleidoscope of artistic expressions articulating Reset—an exhibition that reflects on the potential of our moment.
– María Elena Ortiz, Curator, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)
