How to Love Many in Many Ways:
Yujin Lee, Engy Mohsen, Sagarika Sundaram, Thierry Tomety
July 22 – August 21, 2022
Opening Reception: Friday, July 22, 2022, 6-8 pm
New York, NY- Iron Velvet is proud to present a group exhibition of four 2022 summer residents of Art Omi, How to Love Many in Many Ways. In this exhibition, Yujin Lee, Engy Mohsen, Sagarika Sundaram, and Thierry Tomety will share their recent works during a month-long residency program in Upstate New York and show their labor/process of art-making. Artists from Jeju Island, Korea to Lome, Togo establish an intimate dialogue with themselves and with others showing their paintings, drawing, sculpture, game, and books. It is a diverse range of practices, material choices, and conceptual innovation.
Yujin Lee makes relational projects that interlace everyday life and the practice of art. Painting Conversation (that is to be a placemat) is an extension of an on-going project, Drawing Conversation, where two or more people work collaboratively on a single image (either on paper, the digital screen, or fabric) for varying durations. It is both a visual and conceptual framework where the language of image-making is used to form a deeper sense of connection with one another.
Engy Mohsen’s How to Love Many in Many Ways is a collection of games and exercises based on the assumption that one can intentionally perform falling in love and subsequently fall out of love. Mohsen works with conversation as a medium, text, drawing, and photography while leaning on performative research. Her work continues to foster an interest in the tension between spaces and conversations, and how one can lead to the creation and shaping of the other.
Sagarika Sundaram creates felted tapestries that investigate the materiality of wool and its relationship to human biology and psyche. She treats textile like a body –rupturing the flat surface, revealing what lies beneath layers, interrogating what it means to be both of, and alien to this world. Sundaram will exhibit her new models and color patch books for the show.
Thierry Tomety’s work deals with the process of creation, human emotions but also questions the meaning of life. His works are centered on the idea of perpetual restarting through destruction and reconstruction. He “materializes” using sand, cardboard, paint, and whatever comes into his hands intuitively. In the show, he will install a painting made with cardboard and sand from his homeland and a site-specific work on the entrance floor.
About Yujin Lee
Yujin Lee (b. 1986, Daegu, South Korea) is a visual artist experimenting with process and relational art. Lee uses various mediums and methods such as drawing, video, performance, site-specific projects, audience participation, and collaborations to crystallize the idiosyncratic “interrelationships” encountered in life. She does so by obscuring normative boundaries, welcoming unexpected variables, and in many ways admiring amateurism and imperfections in the final work of art. Lee received her BFA in painting at Cornell University in 2009 and MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University in 2015. Since 2018, Lee has been based in Jeju Island, South Korea, where she continues her artistic and curatorial practice. In 2019, she opened an alternative creative artist residency, Next Door to the Museum Jeju.
About Engy Mohsen
Engy Mohsen (b. 1995, Cairo, Egypt) is an artist, originally trained as an architect. Her work examines notions of ‘participation’ and ‘collectivity’ by creating frameworks that invite non-artists and artists to think about how spaces can be organized to include the ‘other’. While the spatial design remains at the core of her interdisciplinary practice, she works–solo and collaboratively–with text, drawing, photography, performance, discursive acts, and conversation as a medium. Mohsen wrote her Bachelor’s thesis at the Brandenburg University of Technology in 2017, completing her Bachelor’s studies in Architecture at the German University in Cairo in 2018. She is also one of the five founding members of the artist group, K-oh-llective.
About Sagarika Sundaram
Sagarika Sundaram (b. 1986 Kolkata, India) works with textiles, creating sculptures and installations. Compressing hand-dyed fiber into dense forms, she creates felted tapestries that investigate the materiality of wool and its relationship to architecture, biology and the psyche. Sundaram graduated with an MFA in Textiles from Parsons/The New School, studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and at Maryland Institute College of Arts in Baltimore. Living and working in New York, Sundaram was awarded the 2022 Hopper Prize, and works for Talking Textiles Journal as a deputy editor. She teaches at Pratt as a Visiting Assistant Professor.
About Thierry Tomety
Thierry Tomety (b. 1993, Lome, Togo) is an artist with an education and career background in computer science. Tomety graduated from the African Institute of Computer Science and continued working in computer development and web design until 2017, when he started painting and his art career. His pictorial works—rough assemblages of materials collected in their natural environment—are centered on the idea of the perpetual restarting through destruction and the reconstruction of matter.
About Art Omi
Art Omi, located in Columbia Country in Ghent, New York, is a non-profit international arts organization providing residency programs for artists, writers, musicians, architects, and dancers. Also presenting contemporary art in their Sculpture & Architecture Park. Art Omi believes that exposure to internationally diverse creative voices fosters acceptance and respect, raises awareness, inspires innovation, and ignites change. By forming a community with creative expression as its common denominator, Art Omi creates a sanctuary for the artistic community and the public to affirm the transformative quality of art.
About Iron Velvet
Iron Velvet is a project gallery space led by Young Jeon. The gallery takes its name from the phrase Iron hand in a velvet glove. Located in an apartment on the UES, Iron Velvet invites artists to create a site-specific installation responding to the residential space. Additional programming will be made available, such as artist-led workshops and an accompanying parallel online exhibition highlighting research on the exhibiting artists in the metaverse space.
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Hours: Monday – Sunday: By appointment only
For further inquiries, please contact: ironvelvet.art@gmail.com
