'7th AIM Biennial' Culminating Open House Dialogue on Fugitivity in Art
7TH AIM BIENNIAL:
CULMINATING OPEN HOUSE
DIALOGUE ON FUGITIVITY IN ART
Saturday, August 29 • 1:30 – 3:00 PM
Free • For All Ages • Optional RSVP
This dialogue with Skip Brea, Ricki Dwyer, Bryan Fernandez, and Erick Alejandro Hernandez is part of the 7th AIM Biennial Culminating Open House, featuring a variety of activities and ways to engage with artists currently exhibiting work at The Bronx Museum in The Seventh AIM Biennial: Forms of Connection.
The artists describe this event, which they’ve titled Fugitivity: Systems at Large and Acts of Resistance, as follows:
“A 1-hour dialogue (with an additional 30 minutes for questions) will center around the concept of fugitivity and the way in which personal actions can subvert one’s subjecthood into an act of resistance. Featuring artists Bryan Fernandez and Skip Brea (with more artists potentially joining), the dialogue will center on the subject matter of current works in the shows, explore themes present in both object-based and pictorial practices, and further engage with ways in which we, the viewers, can seek liberation. This will be in the style of a panel discussion/teach-in, and alongside artists, academics will be featured to situate the conversation in current times.”
ABOUT SKIP BREA
ABOUT RICKI DWYER
My works examine the sadistic entanglements that make up our visual culture, language, and world history. By using a combination of digital illustration and painting tools, I weave, stitch, and mesh together paintings of our past that precede copyright laws with pieces of contemporary information to create a new unified image. Similar to sampling in music, I take a section of one painting and metamorphosize it into a greater idea with parts of other paintings. At first, the spatial cohesion in the painting maintains an illusion of conventional space, yet the composition is intended to break apart under scrutiny. In many of the paintings I source from, the images of people of color are described in an unfortunate event or positioned as the undermined figures in the painting.
My practice investigates the poetics of self-construction. From the lens of a transgender experience, my work speaks to untangling a personal inner truth from the collective voices of community and culture. Much of my work plays with the power dynamics of an exterior gaze as it shapes or attempts to define one’s identity. Cloth to me is the mutable material of self-determination; the substance known most sincerely by our sensing flesh; the strongest visual access we have to tapping in with our psychic and emotional depths. I choose to present cloth as an abstraction of drapery because it requests a bodily engagement from a viewer rather than a rational interpretation of pictorial imagery.
ABOUT BRYAN FERNANDEZ
ABOUT ERICK ALEJANDRO HERNANDEZ
‘It’s one thing to be looked at, and another to be seen.” Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water.
Bryan Fernandez (b. 2000 New York, NY) is an artist from Washington Heights, New York—whose artistic practice centers around the Visibility of marginalized communities of his Cultural Background. As an Afro-Dominican, he observed his demographic’s lack of authentic representation in white media. In reaction, Fernandez creates large-scale figurative mixed media pieces to tell stories of who people are—countering Colonial and anti-black narratives portrayed within the mainstream.
Taking root in highly temporal narrative settings like the death of a loved one, the length of a subway commute, the confines of a waiting room, or the impact of a car crash, Erick Alejandro Hernandez’s (he/him) practice explores how traditional techniques like oil painting and drawing can shift material forms in order to hold complex individual and collective histories.