chashama at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2017
Clockwise from top left: details of work by Danny Licul, Caleb Nussear, Nicholas Fraser, John Lee, and Christina Massey
chashama at the 2017 SPRING/BREAK Art Show | Featuring Nicholas Fraser, John Lee, Danny Licul, Christina Massey and Caleb Nussear
March 1 - 6, 2017
4 Times Square
(Entrance on 43rd St.)
New York, NY 10036
Nearest Trains: 1, 2, 3, 7, B, D, F, M, N, Q, R, S
Preview Day: Tuesday, February 28, 2017
- Collector's Preview, 11am-5pm (Invitation Only or VIP Card)
- Press Conference & Preview, 3pm-5pm (Press Accreditation Required)
- VERNISSAGE Opening, 5pm-9pm (VERNISSAGE PASS or SPRING/BREAK VIP Card Only)
Daily Hours: March 1- 6, 2017, 11am-6pm*
*VIP Hours run from 11am-12pm
Get Your Pass Here!
*Proceeds from guest passes help support SPRING/BREAK Art Show's initiative to offer free exhibition space to independent curators.
chashama is honored to be curating an exhibition at the 2017 SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York City's curator-driven art fair during Armory Arts Week! This year's curatorial theme, Black Mirror, explores the artist's identity within their work; engaging, defying, or upholding the idea that art should 'hide the artist'. chashama's exhibition features five of our Studio Artists- Nicholas Fraser, John Lee, Danny Licul, Christina Massey, and Caleb Nussear. Their artwork documents and memorializes their pasts; twists and bends memories into alternate universes; and deconstructs objects from their pasts and even the possibility of self-reflection.
"In the process of living through time, we bring memory and objects with us from moments past into the Now, creating our sense of self, and providing the means to obscure and highlight the person we are today via the choices we’ve made, and continue to make, in what we carry forward. Or might memories self-propagate into the future, giving us no choice in the matter, unless we somehow find ways to destroy them?" - Janusz Jaworksi, chashama's SPRING/BREAK Art Show Exhibition Curator
Nicholas Fraser new text-based works, collectively titled Left Hanging, quote unanswered messages he sent to women on internet dating sites. His failed efforts to spark a connection are hand cut into delicate sheets of black Tyvek, the letters left dangling. These personal notes are transformed into public shrines to longing, whose tireless sense of hope belies a weary awareness of the artificial, projected nature of these online communications.
John Lee documents a specific action, and the actions that others took “on his behalf.” A one day performance turned into a two year process of re-claiming his artistic action and bringing into focus various walls that are built around those who would seek to encourage critical thought in others.
Danny Licul's paintings explore rudimentary social dynamics and identities among adolescents interacting with each other or with sock puppets as part of a classroom assignment. Using a model based on his elementary school, populated with clay figures and furniture, he photographs and Photoshops sets that become the basis for larger works. More Recent works involve the sock puppets as sentient beings.
Christina Massey’s sculptures work in another direction, removing the recognizable history of the objects, thereby bringing to the forefront the materials’ physical properties, and removing their historical content. The "Artisanal" series of wall hung sculptures is a unique and different approach to an old subject, the question of what is and isn't Fine Art versus Craft.
The re-purposed and re-configured mirrors of Caleb Nussear’s sculptures have reflected spaces and visages in the past that will never be known. Standing before his sculptures, the viewer’s own reflection joins those unknown multitudes as their images are scattered in various directions, very few of them reflecting back to the viewer.
About the Artists
Nicholas Fraser creates installations, videos and sculpture. His ongoing project, Left Hanging, was exhibited at Hofstra's Rosenberg Gallery in 2016. He also created a site-specific video installation for No Longer Empty's Jameco Exchange project in Jamaica Queens in 2016. All Consuming, a public sited sculpture, was commissioned for Randall's Island in 2015, the same year he participated in the Bronx Museum's AIM program. His video Follow was featured in the Museum's 2015 AIM Biennial. A solo exhibition of his work was on view at York College/CUNY during February of 2015. He was awarded a 2014 NYFA Fellowship for his ongoing video project Fronts. Other recent projects include Ground Rules, for the 2nd Ural Industrial Biennial and installations for the Art Prospect Festival in St. Petersburg. Recent exhibitions include JCAL's JFLUX Festival and No Longer Empty's Jameco Exchange, both in Jamaica, Queens. Fraser has completed residencies at Skowhegan, Art Omi, Sculpture Space, LMCC’s SwingSpace and was a BRIC Media Fellow in 2012. He's exhibited work at the Drawing Center, Interstate Projects, Flux Factory, Bronx Art Space, Art in Odd Places, La Mama La Galeria, Jack the Pelican and Taller Boricua. His work has been shown in Paris, Seoul, Toronto, Cuba and Germany. He earned his BFA at the Atlanta College of Art and his MFA at the School of Visual Art. Born in the U.K., he lives in Brooklyn. For more information, visit http://nicholasfraser.com/
Danny Licul is a painter living and working in New York City. His work has been exhibited at Owen James Gallery (Greenpoint), Gallery SENSEI (LES), Bull and Ram Gallery (Bushwick), UMass (Amherst), White Box Gallery (NY), The National Museum and Art Gallery (Trinidad), The Wall Street Journal Lobby (NY), Center for Book Arts (NY), Sara Meltzer Gallery (NY), Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery (Chicago), Scope and Bridge Art Fairs, and was selected for the MOCA (Chicago) Benefit Auction. He has been awarded an LMCC Swing Space and multiple Studio Space Grants by chashama (NY). Other awards include an artist-in-residence at The Herzliya Center for Creative Arts (Israel), the Elias Friedenshon Memorial Art Award, and the Yale Summer School of Art Fellowship. Articles featuring his work have appeared in the "W The New York Art World" and "NYArts Magazine". Licul attended Pratt, SUNY Purchase and Queens College, from which he received a B.F.A. For more information, visit http://www.dannylicul.com/
John Seung-Hwan Lee was born in Austin, Texas in 1987 and moved to Seoul, Korea in 1991. Having spent most of his youth in a suburban area near Seoul until 2002, the foreign environment in Midland School, aThoreau-ian boarding school teaching ways of self-reliance in a small outdoor community in California, presented him with language and cultural barriers. Interested in physicality, Lee often explores his body movement as a core medium for drawing and digital film. By exploring themes such as Asians in Hip-Hop cultures, North Korea, and linguistics of Korean and English, Lee shares his process and methodologies to address questions concerning the dynamic relationship between East and West. For more information, visit http://www.johnshlee.com/
Christina Massey's work teeters on the edge of painting, fiber arts and sculpture. Her work is exhibited frequently around the US and has been shown abroad in cities such as London, Toronto and Tokyo. Her work is in multiple private and public collections, has won several awards and residencies, and has two upcoming solo exhibitions later this year. Artists such as John Chamberlain, Susan Bengali, El Enatsui and Lee Bontecou have influenced her work. Massey's work shares a sensitivity to materials, form and process, with a inspiration from textiles and re-purposed products. She blends and blurs the lines between sculpture, fiber arts and painting in her colorful, abstract, textural, two and three-dimensional artworks. For more information, visit http://www.cmasseyart.com/
Caleb Nussear is an American artist living in New York City. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from Bard College at Simon's Rock and an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. Mr. Nussear is a self-taught artist, and his work is tinged conceptually with his early education in philosophy and religion. Overall, his work is based on the overlap between complex formal geometries, physical and mathematical concepts of higher dimensionality, the natural landscape as it is found, and finally, a sensual and tensile drawn line. He is comfortable working in drawing, sculpture, performance, photography, and installation; perhaps his favorite method of working is within project-based collaborative ventures with fellow artists and thinkers from a wide range of disciplines. Mr. Nussear exhibits his drawings and sculptures regularly in New York City and the surrounding environs, including the following non-profit and commercial exhibition spaces: Leslie Heller Project Space; Danse/Corey Gallery: the Katonah Museum of Art; No Longer Empty; NURTUREArt; Marymount Manhattan College; and Vaudeville Park. For more information, visit http://www.calebnussear.com/
In addition to partnering with SPRING/BREAK Art Show and The They Co., chashama has been chosen as the 2017 Beneficiary for the Artsy Benefit Auction! A portion of the proceeds from the online benefit auction will be donated to chashama. chashama supports artists and nurtures creative communities in New York City, and beyond, by partnering with property owners to activate unused real estate into spaces for artists to work and present.
