The Atavistic Homeschooling of Espalier

Sam Cockrell, Cameron Cameron, Poppy Delta Dawn, Brett DePalma, Sasha Fishman, Joseph Dolinsky, Colleen Marie Foley, Paul Sebastien Japaz, Cima Rahmankhah, Kent Rhodebeck, Jeenho Seo, Peat Szilagyi

September 3 - October 8, 2022

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ArtViewer.

All of your siblings are off to college. Distanced from them by enough years, the silhouette of their experience is unfamiliar. The things they have learned become misaligned, don’t fit right, by the time they get to you. 

You find yourself rejecting the things you loved when they were here. All of it– the bands, the movies, your hobbies, anything they may have known you for you now reject. You’ve promised yourself to change as much as they have, to be as strange to them as they are hoping to be to you when they come back on break. 

Homeschooled, you’ve always been both the cool kid and the poser in your class of one. You are your own counterculture– a recursive but energetic discourse of your own. No one has ever told you that Whitney Houston, Thrasher, and Fassbinder films are incommensurate interests. Left alone, you might start drawing pictures of the devil on the cross while listening to Dolly Parton. You’re always looking for a third way, a way to drop out; something that keeps the tension between all of the different sides and makes each side feel unsettled.  

Looking out the window, you watch the hedge between your house and the neighbors grow taller. The wild shapes and forms of the espalier are mimetic to weird animals, ancient shapes, Solomonic symbols– a growing, luxurious tathata. The spaces in the trellis form flourishing lacunae between your yard and the outside world. Your eyes keep moving to the ground as you feel yourself drawn to the rhythmic cycles of nature over the false arrow of your older siblings; preferring its vertical wilderness to their horizontal progress. It’s both a memory and something you can lean on. It needs pruning, but you let it grow abstract. 

Sam Cockrell makes a painting every day of an animal he sees. His art centers around the natural world, beings that were and are, that lived and live, that had consciousness and have it still, and the things we all share in existence and understanding. He was born in 1989 in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia and received his BFA from the University of Tennessee and his MFA from Columbia University. His work has been exhibited in New York at Mery Gates, Launch F18, and International Waters, among others, as well as at Fjord in Philadelphia, PA. He lives and works in Queens, NY.

Cameron Cameron (b. 1991) was raised in Texas and now lives in Los Angeles, CA. Cameron uses sculptural interventions to compensate for generic imagery, questioning how the mundane may represent feelings of loss or longing within the disorder of the day-to-day. She received her BFA (Studio Art) and BA (English) from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014,  attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2017, and received an MFA in Studio Art from University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. She is a founding and contributing member to MATERIAL GIRLS and currently teaches Visual Art at Campbell Hall School in Los Angeles.

Poppy DeltaDawn is an artist and curator making work about how we perceive the world through disseminating information like diagrams and tutorials. She holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, both in Fiber. DeltaDawn has held residencies and fellowships at Caldera Arts, Offshore Residency, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, ACRE Residency, and Wassaic Project, among others, and has participated in workshops at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Penland School of Crafts. Her most recent projects have included a solo exhibition at H Space Gallery (Cleveland, OH) and a Media Arts Fellowship at BRIC Arts Media (Brooklyn, NY), as well as exhibitions at The Heidelberg Project (Detroit, MI), Hatch Art (Hamtramck, MI), Zürcher Gallery (New York City), and The Yard (New York City). Poppy DeltaDawn is a Visiting Artist Professor in Fiber & Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Brett DePalma has shown nationally and internationally and  is an award recipient of the National Endowment of the Arts. He holds a BA from Vanderbilt University, Peabody College of Education and BFA and MFA from Tufts University, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA.  His work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Flash Art, and The Village Voice and his work in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Moderna Kunsthalle, Eli Broad Family Foundation, Tennessee State Museum, and the Maier Museum at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA.

Major exhibitions of DePalma’s have been shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Drawing Center; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; and Documenta 7, Kassel. He is a professor at The School of Visual Arts in New York. 

Joseph Dolinsky (b. 1983 Bristol Connecticut) is a Brooklyn, NY based artist. Dolinsky received his BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 2007. His work has been an ongoing conversation about space and how we interact with and are affected by it. The process is a driving force in his work and is rooted in the concept. Pigments and dyes are mixed into the material before casting. The works can be seen as a painting existing within the same space as the sculpture, reflecting the interconnected nature of the physical and the metaphysical.

Sasha Fishman (b. 1995, Baltimore, MD) is a sculptor and researcher based in Los Angeles. Working with materials such as hagfish slime, algae, and cicada shells, Sasha's work investigates marine biomaterial extraction, toxicology and genetic engineering as points for critical analysis and mechanisms for sculpting. Sasha has exhibited her work at Hesse Flatow (New York, NY), Navel LA (Los Angeles), RESORT (Baltimore, MD), the Visual Arts Center (Austin, TX), Monte Vista Projects (Los Angeles, CA) and has been a research fellow at Caltech (Pasadena, CA). She has presented her work, run workshops and given talks at Genspace, Navel LA, UCLA, UDenver, UColorodo Boulder, Kenyon College, Caltech, and CSULB. Sasha is currently a Sculpture MFA candidate at Columbia University.

Colleen Marie Foley is an interdisciplinary artist and experimental videomaker. Her artistic process is an affirmation of the poetic and the magical. Her understanding of magic as latent or unexpected connections between things comes not only from myths, fairy tales, science fiction and the natural world, but also from digital tools like Photoshop, After Effects, and Ableton live. Revealing and mapping these connections drives her practice.  

Colleen received her BFA in painting from BU and her MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from Alfred University. Her work has been exhibited and performed in Boston, Buffalo, New York, Miami, Chicago, and internationally in Italy, Iceland, and France. She is also a member of Thorn Collaborative, an ongoing creative partnership with artist Erin Ethridge.

Paul-Sebastian Japaz is a painter from New York, NY. His work focuses on the idea of space used as a material to explore privilege, accessibility, exclusivity, queerness and his cultural background. 

Paul received his BFA from The Fashion Institute for Technology. He attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2022 and has exhibited at Nathalie Karg Gallery. 

Cima Rahmankhah obtained her MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, and then did postgraduate work at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Through her paintings, she reflects on the otherness of things that are somehow neglected – especially as regards their relation to time. Cima’s work has been exhibited at Nicodim Gallery, LA; RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Denver; Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art, Puerto Rico; Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico; Fundación Canal de Isabel II, Madrid; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg; Benzene Gallery, Hamburg; and LAGE EGAL Gallery, Berlin. Her work has been published or reviewed by New American Paintings, Murder Magazine, and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (Carla).

Kent Rhodebeck (b. 1991 Mount Gilead, OH) is a Brooklyn-based artist who makes things that affix moments as part of an ever-growing personal archive of stuff. 

 Jeenho Seo (b. 1989) is a multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in South Korea and raised in the UK and Korea, Seo received his MFA at Yale University in 2021. He transforms his everyday writing drawn by his personal experiences as an outsider to a culture and communities into diverse visual forms such as sculpture, installation, photography and moving images. 

Peat Szilagyi is a non-binary artist creating colorful, sensorial works exploring consciousness, belief and ecotopias. They were raised in a queer, culturally diverse household of New Age spiritual orientation in Hollywood, CA, influencing the brightly aestheticized spiritual worldbuilding process in their sculptures, paintings, installations and performances. They have taken frequent trips to West Africa to study traditional African systems of knowledge and divination and draw from not only the spiritual traditions but the visual culture, employing minimally synthesized materials such as soil, wood and pigment to create art and artifacts that reflect contemporary values as well as traditional practices, prime examples being Ghanaian fantasy coffins and the soil-based sculptural architecture Osun Sacred Grove. Their current work concerns the development of the internet as a spiritual entity and how it may be influenced by the technologies of nature and folklore. Peat graduated with their BA from Williams College and their MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University. They are a member of the Parapsychological Association and have spoken about their work at conferences in London, Paris, Vietnam, Kumasi, Ghana, and Lagos, Nigeria. They currently teach at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.