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CROSSLEY GALLERY
A Kiss Goodnight
José Linares
Musa Kunene
Rohini Maiti
Alé Salamán
Athena Nugent
Emily Heiler
A Kiss Goodnight presents a reminiscent landscape; an exhibition reflecting on the echoes of memory, the present, and projection into the future. It invites the viewer to enter this space of diverse contemplation on ideas of spirituality, home, alienation, life, death, the transpersonal, and technology. A climactic conclusion of the graduating class of 2021, featuring works by Musa Kunene, Emily Heiler, José Linares, Athena Nugent, Alé Salamán and Ro Maiti.
The Artists
Alé Salamán
@namales
The work derives from an exploration of the digital landscape and those who inhabit it. In my paintings, I use figures with distorted proportions in order to represent large bodies going through the trials and tribulations of relationships, exploring identities, and how we’re making connections today. These connections are heavily informed by the internet and social media.
More often than not, I see a disconnection between people and myself as if there’s a wall between us. Differences in interpersonal relationships, empathy, and experiences drive home a sense of isolation that I’m invested in practicing in my oil paintings and my sculptures. Coming from curiosity about how we interact with the world, I use architecture as a tool to explore the psychology behind our settings and to demonstrate uncanny detachment and discord.
Emily Heiler
@emilyheiler
Home is a complex space; it’s where we learn to understand ourselves, others, and the roles we’re meant to play in the world. I paint images of my childhood home and my family. Focusing more closely on the dynamics between the women in my life. By looking at my past childhood surroundings, I explore my own connection to the concept of home. Our home was cluttered with plants, catholic iconography, and objects girls collected. The strange objects that filled our home continue to influence me and my sisters; acting as icons of our shared experience.
Athena Nugent
@athenanugent
I fully render animals in their natural colors, giving them a true-to-life appearance. When painting dual animals, the emphasis shifts to their present or past dependent relationship. By examining these animals, through texture, color & stance, they take on the power and presence that they still or once exhibited.
I am fascinated by my chaotic and unorganized stream of consciousness. The questioning of my mind translates into the questioning of sensory perception. My material is often composed of gears, cogs, wires, and many more inner workings of domestic household machines that we are used to upgrading and discarding. The plastic shells, metal frames, and chipboards have transformed into a personal type of clay to sculpt with. While referring to the intersection between machine and sentience, hardware and software are seen as more than just their technological components. They function as allegories to our computational processes. The work blends subjective perception with external reality and reimagines a new yet familiar world.
Musa Kunene
@musa_bkart
Through drawing, video, and photo-based images,I explore the intersections between my family and Swazi traditional spirituality, and how these two elements make themselves apparent in my family’s lineage and dynamic. Memory and its unreliability also come into play through my hazy and layered imagery that incorporates family photographs. Drawing from memory and the lived experiences of my closest relatives, I discuss the complex relationships between memory, spirituality and the family.
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