About the exhibition:

This exhibition involves three artists; Lexi Arrietta, Monroe Isenberg and Jordan Tierney. Each of these sculptors are exploring elements of nature to compose profoundly relevant work; beyond the tangible and easily explainable. This art lingers in the liminal space of the known and the felt; leaving the viewer with a sense of the common ground on which we all stand. Creating a woven fabric of our collective history. Re-membering what it is to be human. Putting back what we have lost. Standing within the moments of now and hearing what it has to say. Changing the future.

All three of these artists are mining through memories recognising deeply personal trauma, the stress of local environmental concerns, or a more global angst of what it means to piece back together the histories of ourselves and finding how we fit into a community.

Memories are ineffable. They come to us generationally, through our personal experiences, and are stored in the air, earth and water. This collection of memories makes up who we are and who we might become. We need to honour these for so many reasons. Most importantly, so that we find commonality and build community. If we can expand the perimeters of who we think we are and how we see others, the connections are endless.

Remembering Ourselves will be on view in Gallery 1 at Da Vinci Art Alliance starting February 29th until March 24th. The opening reception will take place on Saturday March 2nd, from 4-7pm.

ABOUT THE CURATOR:

Kit Donnelly (she/they) is a painter and printmaker living and working in South Jersey. Recently, they also have been constructing small sculptural works. Their work has been shown in different venues throughout Vermont, parts of New England, Philadelphia and Baltimore. While in Vermont. Donnelly received several awards and honors for their work. Donnelly was invited to participate in the Boston Young Contemporaries as well as speak during a group show at the Provincetown Art Association in 2014. They have taught community classes, served on a local arts board, helped start and run small galleries in Vermont and New Jersey, and initiated numerous artist critique groups.  In 2014 they received an MFA from Mass Art’s Low Residency Graduate Program. In the summer of 2015, they moved from Vermont to Cape May, NJ in order to allow more time to pursue a career as a professional artist. They are a member of DaVinci Art Alliance in Philadelphia and served five years on the exhibitions committee there; helping shape the goals of the gallery to support the marginalised and underserved community of Philadelphia. This year, they are curating for the first time for a show in Philadelphia. More of their work can be seen at www.kitdonnelly.com or on Instagram as @kitddonnelly

ABOUT THE ArtistS:

Jordan Tierney

Jordan’s work begins by wandering daily in her immediate environment. An urban form of beach combing, the things she finds on the ground each have a story to tell. The crumbling alleyways of a 1990’s socio-economically divided and struggling Washington DC. functioned as twilight zones of lives ignored and feared by the marble columned institutions looming a few blocks away. Baltimore’s urban streams and tangled forest buffers are designed to channel storm water out of sight, from all our impervious surface developments. The water transports all the trash it collects along the way, to the Jones Falls, then the Chesapeake Bay, and out to the Atlantic Ocean.

These zones are between-worlds. The marginalized, unwanted, forgotten, or unprofitable. Strung with invasive vines, they feel post-apocalyptic as industrial era machine parts rust away to join with mushrooms and bones. Her intimate knowledge and nurturing of the plants and animals trying to survive here and the resourceful use of her finds makes her indigenous to her place as our ancestors were.

Her works change the valence of the trash she collects from negative to positive and conjures the magic of the universe that connects us all.

Learn more about Jordan’s work at jordantierney.com or at @auntiemojo

Monroe Isenberg

Through sculpture, installation, performance, and time-based media, Monroe Isenberg’s work broadly explores human entanglement with the Earth. He earned his MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Arts from the University of Maryland and is based in Los Angeles.

His work has been recognized by notable institutions like the Trawick and William and Dorothy Yeck foundations and International Sculpture Center. Additionally, he received a grant from the Puffin Foundation for his Dune Drawing series— a cross-disciplinary effort between the Delaware State Parks and Past Present Projects.

His work is held in private collections and was further recognized by international art magazines Stirworld, Feminist, and Aesthetica. His work was also presented during the Aesthetica Symposium, UK, and Media Architecture Biennale, Australia. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at notable institutions like the Delaware Contemporary Museum and Museum of Art and History, Lancaster. 

Isenberg has participated in multiple residency programs both domestically and abroad including the LungA School’s invitational Visiting Artist Residency program in Iceland and Between the Sky and Sea: Temporal Horizons in Norway. He has taught at multiple institutions including Minneapolis College of Art and Design and University of Maryland. He is currently the Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Orange Coast College, CA. 

Lean more about Monroe’s work at monroeisenberg.com or @monroe_isenberg

Lexi Arrietta

Lexi Arrietta (she/they) is a mixed media sculptor whose work deals with absence, grief, madness, and memory—with the ways in which we try to compensate for loss and compartmentalize wilderness. Arrietta marries elements of nature with remnants of human life to create a material intersection that obscures her hand as the artist, and arouses the sense of happening upon something reverent in the woods—something both otherworldly and familiar. In this liminal space, viewers glimpse the growth and dilapidation of emotional lifeforms abandoned to their own devices. The artist’s practice reckons with feelings of ferality and transience, with how individual trauma or instability can move us to the outskirts of shared society, marking us, and drawing us nearer to a metaphorical wood’s edge, where the dividing line between nature and culture becomes shaky and blurred.

The artist grew up among the fields, woods, and waterways of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. They hold a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, where they studied with Rico Gatson and Dawn Clements, and where they were awarded the Lori Hertzberg Prize for Creativity. Arrietta has had her work exhibited at The Delaware Contemporary, Ely Center for Contemporary Art, Rhizome DC, The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, George Washington University, Chesapeake Arts Center, and Van Der Plas Gallery, among others. She currently lives and works between Washington, DC and Philadelphia.

Learn more about Arrietta’s work at lexiarrietta.com or at @salt.meadow.studio