EMBELLISHING THE TRUTH
Becca Van K
Claudia Santiso
Mandy Chesney
Jennifer Caviola
Curated by Morgan Everhart
The Yard City Hall Park
116 Nassau Street , Floors 5 & 6 New York, NY 10038
March 29 - July 23rd, 2021
closing reception: Friday, July 23rd 6-9pm
For information, contact morgan@morganeverhart.com
https://theyard.com/art/current-exhibitions/
Decorative and fine art is a false dichotomy informed by a systemic misunderstanding that reality should be mundanely visible. Beauty gives us different degrees of reality and this exhibition, “Embellishing the Truth”, curated by Morgan Everhart, shares four artists' convergences of their truths through adornment. The name of this exhibition is purely ironic, because there’s nothing to hide with Claudia Santiso, Jennifer Caviola, Becca Van K, and Mandy Chesney’s work. Each artist openly welcomes the implications their materials and references have. In some cases, there is so little rejection of their mediums that the works are inherently sculptural.
When something is considered realistic, it’s true to reality and involves a practical view of life. With that in mind, Santiso’s work is considerably the most matter-of-fact in this exhibition, letting paint’s sheen and viscosity run candidly and intuitively. Respectively, Chesney’s iridescence and jewels are celebratory and indulgent in a rebellious way of the possessions that give most beings desirability and advantage. Caviola’s Leaf Grids may be the most widely understood as realistic, as they clearly depict the underlying geometry that shapes how we understand relativity and space. However, Caviola completely subverts that universality through her use of color and gold. Van K explores the personality and agency embedded in evocative materials and boldly lets the viewer decide how they define us.
In a time where we are transitioning out of our solitude and re-establishing our new day to days, we deserve to celebrate what makes us who we are and share that with others. This is a chance for us to be unabashedly ourselves, like these artists are.
Jennifer Caviola jennifercaviola.com @jennifercaviola
Jennifer Caviola received her BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 2002 and her MFA from Parsons in New York City in 2007. She has had solo shows in New York City, Brooklyn, and California and has participated in group shows throughout the United States, Europe and the Middle East. She has been featured in publications such as Vogue, Cultured Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Complex Magazine, Papermag, Juxtapoz and High Fructose.
With an earnest commitment to contribute to the conversation of universal recovery from generational trauma, Caviola’s work seeks to explore the role of painting as facilitator of ancestral clearing. Caviola uses painting as a vehicle for delivery and as means of recording elusive states of existence that can sometimes get lost in passing, with the goal of each painting to have had complete transference onto the material of the wood panel through acrylic paint via brushwork. The act of painting becomes a salve, and once completed, the resulting work exists with autonomy, and with that the promising possibility for a private exchange with the person who encounters it. Caviola’s Leaf Grids are acrylic paintings about brushwork, geometry, color and gilding. They are made on wood panels, in various dimensions, and created as an ode to materials and form.
Read Jennifer Caviola’s Interview on A Women’s Thing
Book Private Artist Tour with Jennifer Caviola on Saturday, July 17th
Claudia Santiso @PREAM
Claudia Santiso is a self taught NYC based artist using various mediums to navigate her exploration of imagination and fictional, psychological landscapes perceived through color and choices of material; often using materials pushing painting into alchemy. Her work explores human nature to reimagine the ordinary in accordance to one's desire to connect and transcend the present state. An obsession to get out of, or into oneself; to travel through unknown landscapes of distant lands, real or imagined. In part she hopes to render visuals that can be viewed as realistic spaces as well as emotional nebulas activated by the act of viewing.
Santiso’s recent exhibitions include SHIM Art on Artsy, Aqua Art’s Meeting House at Art Basel Miami, and Gold Mine at Lucas Lucas Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Santiso is a co-founder of Meeting House Residency in Troy, NY.
Book Private Artist Tour with Claudia Santiso on Saturday, June 26th
Becca Van K beccavank.com @beccavank
Becca Van K (b. 1991, Chicago, IL) is a mixed media fiber artist based in New York’s Catskill Mountains. She translates her deepest passions into vibrant colors & pattern combinations with various handcraft and fiber art methods. She has exhibited widely in the Hudson Valley & Capital Regions, and firmly believes in art as a conduit for community support/engagement. She is a 2021 recipient of a NYSCA Decentralization Grant through Greene County Council on the Arts and a 2020 recipient of the NYFA “Keep NYS Creating” Grant. She has recently participated in exhibitions at Columbia College (Columbia, MO), ArtPort Kingston (Kingston, NY), and Collar Works (Troy, NY). Torn between city nightlife and the woods of the Catskills, she’d only leave New York if there were techno clubs in the desert. The happiness of her viewers is at the center of her practice.
Van K’s artistic spirit is committed to tenderness, reverence, generosity, and humor. Van K makes a diverse range of objects, which includes needlepoint landscapes, fake plant sculptures, textile-covered furniture, handmade rugs, and upcycled textile collage. Van K’s work is an amalgam of her deepest passions, drawing from the natural world, 80s/90s graphics and nostalgia, house and techno music, and comforting objects. Van K exhibits their work in various forms, with a passion for immersive tactile installations of soft sculpture, furniture, and wall works. Van K’s practice focuses on the techniques of needlepoint, latch hook rug making, and macramé, which are still largely overlooked in the fine art world. Few combine the set of techniques Van K uses, and they are a map of my self-taught and mother-taught experiences. Van K takes pride in the time-consuming nature of this work, and aims to create pieces that subvert conventional ideas about the function of handcrafts.
Read Becca Van K’s interview on A Women’s Thing
Book Private Artist Tour with Becca Van K on Saturday, June 5th
Mandy Chesney @mandychesney
Mandy Chesney’s interest in domestic craft and kitsch sensibilities is evident throughout her multidisciplinary practice. In her work, camp and kitsch function as a visual vernacular outside of traditional notions of fine art. Leveraging these “value added” materials in a way that celebrates their assumed queerness and femininity brings an agency that beguiles cultural assumptions.
Chesney is an artist living and working in Baltimore City. Originally from East Tennessee, She received her Master’s Degree in multidisciplinary art from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland. Recent exhibitions include My Queer Valentine at the Torepedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, VA; Become Again atTerrault Gallery in Baltimore, MD; and Compact Assembly at the Walter Otero Contemporary Art in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
About the Curator
Morgan Everhart morganeverhart.com @morgan_everhart
Morgan Everhart was born in Dallas, TX and currently lives in New York, New York. Everhart is an artist who works primarily in painting, installation, performance, and writing. Everhart’s practice challenges naturalism and ontology through reflection on personal experiences, identity, religion, and art history. In Everhart’s paintings, themes of memory, the passage of time and internal reflection echo through a balance of abstraction, personified forms, and traditional still-life.
In May 2021, Everhart is making a 38 ft x 11 ft mural off of Grand and Suffolk Street in the Lower East Side and opens a solo exhibition at the David Owsley Museum of Art in Muncie, Indiana. Recent exhibitions include: Flowers for my Failures at the Longwood Museum, Virginia (2019); BLOOM at Millersville University, Pennsylvania (2019); and, Four Degrees of Abstraction at Markel Fine Arts, New York (2018). From 2017-2020, Everhart was an artist in residence at PS122’s Painting Space 122 in NYC’s East Village. Everhart regularly exhibits with YCG Fine Art and AucArt. Everhart is also a contributing writer to “A Woman’s Thing” publication. Everhart received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Texas in 2013, and her Master of Fine Arts from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016.
