Queens Women’s Collective
chashama and Greater Jamaica Development Corporation present
Queens Women's Collective
featuring artworks of Kate Lacour, Tishawn Gonsalves, & Jennifer Andrews
curated by Samantha Lewis
November 7 - December 15, 2009
90-26 161st Street
Jamaica, Queens, NY
The Queens Women's Collective features emerging and established female artists who live and work throughout the Borough of Queens. Through comics, illustration and mixed media collage the artists explore the ways in which the physical landscape of the city shapes the social and emotional urban experience. Whether critical, irreverent, or introspective, the artists in the Collective capture the relationship between the human patterns impressed upon the layers of our natural environment and the ways we individually and collectively construct knowledge. The artists wrestle with complex topics such as the veracity of poverty, the nature of imagination, subjective versus objective truth, and the capacity of common objects and spectacles to create powerful narratives about urban life.
Sponsored in part by the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation
www.gjdc.org
Queens Women's Collective
featuring artworks of Kate Lacour, Tishawn Gonsalves, & Jennifer Andrews
curated by Samantha Lewis
November 7 - December 15, 2009
Opening Reception, Saturday, November 7, 6 - 9p
FREE and open to the public
chashama Jamaica Studios90-26 161st Street
Jamaica, Queens, NY
Between 90th Street and Jamaica Avenue, E to Jamaica Center, F to Parsons Boulevard
Jamaica Station on the LIRR.
By car: Take Long Island Expressway (I-495 E) to exit 22A-E to Grand Central Parkway East. Remain on Grand Central Parkway until exit 16 (164th St-Parsons Blvd.) Turn right onto Parsons Boulevard, left onto Jamaica Avenue, then left onto 161st Street. Our building is on the left side of the block.
The Queens Women's Collective features emerging and established female artists who live and work throughout the Borough of Queens. Through comics, illustration and mixed media collage the artists explore the ways in which the physical landscape of the city shapes the social and emotional urban experience. Whether critical, irreverent, or introspective, the artists in the Collective capture the relationship between the human patterns impressed upon the layers of our natural environment and the ways we individually and collectively construct knowledge. The artists wrestle with complex topics such as the veracity of poverty, the nature of imagination, subjective versus objective truth, and the capacity of common objects and spectacles to create powerful narratives about urban life.
Kate Lacour was born in New York and has traveled widely. Most recently, she visited Romania and is initiating a community art project with Gypsy (Roma) street children. She studied art and biology in college and recently earned a Master's Degree in Creative Arts Therapy from the School of Visual Arts. Kate is currently one of the few professionals in the field studying the effects of art therapy on children with autism.
"In the backyard of the old house where I lived as a teenager, there was an area where the last owners had buried their rubbish, most of it dating back to the turn of the century. I spent a lot of time digging up old bottles, rusty silverware, broken watches, and most of a rust-eaten wood burning stove. My pristine and orderly home seemed sterile and joyless. In the backyard, in the dirt, the underground junk was like a little cache of secret stories that seemed more real, more special, than the world indoors.
"Occasionally, I would uncover shapeless glass blobs of different colors and sizes, which must have been formed when an especially hot fire melted them down, maybe a house fire. Here was a little story, the long-ago fire, that was exciting and private, because I had discovered it from the hundred-year-old garbage. In itself, this kind of event is uninteresting, but discovered and owned, it can be willed into a story, with a life and value of its own.
"My drawings are an attempt to inject this imagined life into arrangements and ideas that, in and of themselves, have little value. Science, a recurring subject in my comics, is a generally unemotional topic, but can become special, intimate and strange when its facts and objects are recruited as part of an imagined narrative. Comics are a perfect medium for manipulating time, space and sound to make, with the viewer's collusion, an imagined world that is self-contained and private. By virtue of being stories, these stories have meaning."
Currently attending Pratt Institute, Tishawn Gonsalves is a student of the arts, seeking to capture the beauty within poverty. Her work blends the ideas and methods of readymade art to convey visual conceptual interpretations of society. By using found objects, collage and a limited palette of colors she depicts the grim realities of urban poverty and questions the traditional idea of visual art. For her art is not the ability to paint pictures, but the power to speak through its mediums, immersing the viewer into one's own reality.
NYC based painter Jennifer Andrews was born in Buffalo NY and holds a BFA in painting from Hartford Art School. Working in thin layers of oil paint and beeswax, Andrews' paintings investigate the structure of memory, myth and our connection to the natural world. She has previously worked on location in countries including the Netherlands, Vietnam and Costa Rica. In addition to painting, Jennifer works as part of the collaborative team AndrewsLeFevre Studios, which creates site-specific commissions. Her public work seeks to unearth the untold or forgotten histories of an area – including the native species, peoples and myths that disappear as concrete and pavement take over a landscape. Working in collaboration with communities across the US, the studio's bronze relief sculptures layer these stories with contemporary life.
Queens often provides her with the material to achieve this richness and depth. She sketches the neighborhoods along her daily walk from Astoria to her studio in Long Island City and loves the details she discovers. "I love the patterns of the elevated subway lines; the arched train underpasses; the puzzle of colored rooftops; and the business signs and graffiti scattered across industrial buildings in every language".
Sponsored in part by the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation
www.gjdc.org
