iLLUSiONAL
Kat Ryals, joshuagabriel, Dario Mohr, Jonathan Sims and Valeria Divinorum
The artist plays endless roles in society – storyteller, trickster, archivist, agitator, rock star, activist, historian, entertainer… iLLUSiONAL examines the role of the artist as Magician/manipulator of reality. The artist takes ideas from the invisible realms and manifests them into physical or digital reality. The artist transforms raw materials into new forms and literally creates worlds out of thin air. These magical acts are conjured out of a necessity to create artifacts that express the concerns and obsessions of the greater consciousness through the individual.
About the Artists:
Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, Kat Ryals (b. 1988) is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator, and photographer. Ryals received a BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and a MFA in Photography & Adv. Certificate in Museum Education from Brooklyn College. Ryals has shown her work nationally, including in a solo booth at SPRING/BREAK Art Show in 2020, and in recent group exhibitions with ChaShaMa, Ortega Y Gasset Projects, The Wassaic Project, and the Holocenter on Governor’s Island. She is the co-founder of the arts platform, Paradice Palase, based out of Bushwick, Brooklyn. In recent years, she has been pursuing an interdisciplinary approach to her artistic practice where she creates lens-based and digital works, 3D objects, wearables, and installations.
Visit her website here.
Jonathan Sims is a New York City-based visual artist born in Austin, Texas whose practice spans digital animation, sculpture and projection installations, print, long exposure photography, graphic design, and curation. His visual arts practice is characterized by brightly colored geometric abstractions and simple, minimalist symbology that evokes language and universal, ancient design. A consistent premise underlying his work is based on the idea that a modern human’s relationship with the very ancient past is mirrored in their relationship with the distant future. He joined the Flux Factory Residency program in 2016, where he still maintains a studio and sits on the board. Major shows include a solo exhibition at Flux Factory in New York City in 2017, and installations at Lehman College in 2018 and Washington College in 2019. Sims has participated in a number of arts residencies, including Wassaic Project, the Visible Futures Lab at SVA, ChaNorth, Aros Art Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, and the Listhus Residency in northern Iceland. In 2018 Sims was invited to join the Sharjah Islamic Arts Festival in the United Arab Emirates.
Visit his website here.
Valeria Divinorum is a Queens-based visual artist and architect with formal training in the school of Architecture in Buenos Aires. She has attended residencies in Argentina and the US and has created works for a variety of contexts including galleries, live performances and site-specific installations. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Art and Urban Studies at La Guardia CC, Queens NY. Recent exhibitions include Paradise Palace (Brooklyn, NY), Rear Vision (Madrid, Spain), Bangkok Biennale (Bangkok, Thailand), The Holocenter, (LIC, NY) and Modern Love (New York, NY). She has created light-based sculptural installations at The Plaxall Gallery (Queens, NY) El Matienzo (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Flux Factory (LIC, NY), The Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY) and others. She is a member of the collective Salvia Divinorum. Press for her work includes NY Post, Stir, 440 Gallery, NY1.com, Under the Bridge Magazine, among others. She has a passion for creating works for the public and with the public, to embrace connectedness and democratize art making for people in our community.
Visit her website here.
Dario Mohr (b. 1988) is a Brooklyn-based painter, assemblage, and installation artist. He graduated with a BFA in Painting from Buffalo State College and an MFA in Studio Art from The City College of New York. Mohr reuses previously completed artworks throughout his practice, combining them with nostalgic personal objects and found objects to build sanctuaries for his audience to engage with. Mohr is the current Artist In Resident at Materials For The Arts (MFTA) and has his solo show “Archetypes: A Visual Soundtrack” on view virtually on the MFTA website. He is also a former Artist In Resident at The School of Visual Arts (SVA), Visual Muze Residency on Governors Island, Trestle Gallery, and Arquetopia in Peru, and ArtWorks Fellow at Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (JCAL). In 2018, Mohr formed the non-profit, 501c3 organization AnkhLave Arts Alliance, Inc. to present BIPOC’s work in public and alternative spaces that are accessible to their communities, and to help make for a more equitable contemporary art landscape. The exhibit, “On the Inside Looking Out”, features the AnkhLave Garden Project Fellows includes 6 female artists of color with immigrant backgrounds. This show was curated by Mohr and is currently on view at the Queens Botanical Garden Gallery.
Visit his website here.
joshuagabriel (b. Joshua Gabriel Lunsk) is a multi-disciplinary artist/musician whose work encompasses and recombines drawing, video projection, murals, performance, and music. joshuagabriel updates the aesthetic of psychedelia to create a kind of hybrid space in which a mythologized version of his own ego, constructed of variable disposable personae, is at the center. Drawing on his experiences as a visual artist and musical performer in New York’s underground scene, his work leans towards spectacle, painting on sacred objects and readymades, projecting onto walls, and combining the abstract and figurative in a riot of color. Born and raised in Philadelphia, he received his BFA from the Tyler School of Art, and his MFA from Brooklyn College. joshuagabriel has created large scale murals throughout New York City and has exhibited and performed extensively in the United States. He has received media attention in Street Art NYC, Vibe Magazine, Upper Playground, Frank 151, Village Voice, 11211 Magazine, NYPress, and other press outlets.
Visit his website here.
