Collapse of Vision: Eva Davidova, Dakota Gearhart, Ryan Kuo and Farideh Sakhaeifer

Opening reception: Thursday, November 30th, 6-8pm
Exhibition dates: November 30 – December 15, 2017
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Friday, 1 – 7 PM and Saturday, 12 – 6 PM 
Equity Gallery, 245 Broome Street, NY, NY 10002
Curated by Jessica Porter.

Residency Unlimited is pleased to present Collapse of Vision, a group exhibition in collaboration with Equity Gallery, featuring the works of Eva Davidova, Dakota Gearhart, Ryan Kuo and Farideh Sakhaeifer. The exhibition will be on view from November 30th through December 16th, 2017 with a public opening reception on Thursday, November 30th, 6-8pm.

Collapse of Vision combines the perspectives of four artists whose work each uniquely addresses environmental, social and behavioral issues. Eva Davidova explores the transfer of cruelty from an individual decision to a facet in a complex network of decisions through performance, photo-based animation and computer generated 3D sculpture. Dakota Gearhart works to collapse hierarchical standards whether social, material or informational through video and multi-media installations and the use of abandoned materials. Ryan Kuo uses interactive programming to create puzzles to build families and uses video game technology to digitize furniture porn leaving us to question the anthropocentricity in contemporary mass-manufacture. Farideh Sakhaeifer, through the use of photographs, sketches and collage deconstructs the remnants of war and crisis to explore the collapse of the individual through despair and loss.

With thoughtful consideration and shared views of technology and innovation, each of the four engages the audience through creative enterprise.

Eva Davidova is a Spanish/Bulgarian multidisciplinary artist based in New York. The issues in her work—behavior, cruelty, ecological disaster and manipulation of information emerge as paradoxes rather than assumptions, in an almost fairy-tale fashion. Davidova has exhibited at the Bronx Museum in New York City; Everson Museum, Syracuse; Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo; MACBA, Barcelona, CAAC Sevilla and Instituto Cervantes, Sofia among others. She received the 2008 M-tel Award for Contemporary Bulgarian Art and the 2009 Djerassi Honorary Fellowship. Recent shows include Birds Birth at the ASU Emerge Festival and at the PhotoEspaña Festival in Madrid; a curatorial project Happenland at Radiator Gallery in NY; Playground for Drowning Animals; and Transfer and Disappearance at the Media Center by IFP. Her latest institutional solo exhibitions were at the Contemporary Arts Center La Regenta and the Everson Museum’s Urban Video Project, Syracuse.

Dakota Gearhart makes video and installation that bundles together her interests in perception, the role of care and intimacy, and the importance of fantasy in articulating less oppressive futures. Her work has been shown at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY; Tacoma Art Museum; Tacoma, WA; Disjecta Contemporary Art Center; Portland, OR; On The Ground Floor, Los Angeles; Vulpes Vulpes, London; KARST, Plymouth, UK; and Taiyuan Normal University, Shanxi, China. She is a finalist for the Neddy Artist Award and has received the Artist Trust GAP award, the 4Culture Individual Project Grant, and a Puffin Foundation Grant. Her completed residency programs include the NARS Foundation, Residency Unlimited, the Bronx Museum AIM program, Recology, Studios of MASS MoCA, Wassaic Project, and Vermont Studio Center. Currently, she lives and works between Seattle, WA and Brooklyn, NY.

Ryan Kuo is an artist and writer based in New York, NY and Cambridge, MA. His work is often process-based and diagrammatic, utilizing techniques from video games, web design, motion graphics, and sampling. Among his current projects, Ryan is maintaining File, a hypertext document collected by Left Gallery (Berlin) and inspired by agile process management; and building an artist’s book about aspirational workflows, File: A User’s Manual, modeled after software guides for power users. He received a Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT in 2014. His works and writing have appeared at Spike Art Quarterly (Berlin), Goldsmiths (London), Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA), Art Journal Open (NYC), Boston Cyberarts (Boston), MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, MA), Front/Space (Kansas City), and Minibar (Stockholm).

Farideh Sakhaeifar  is a New York-based artist born in Tehran, Iran. Sakhaeifar’s work ranges from photography to installation and sculpture attempting to look past forms of ethnic, political, and cultural control in order to reflect upon new forms of expression that highlight the human struggle while establishing autonomous forms of self-expression. She received her MFA from Cornell University in 2011 and her BFA from Azad Art and Architecture University in Iran (2008). She was awarded a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Residency in 2012-13 as well as the 2017 Bric Media Arts Fellowship. Selected solo exhibitions include: Sacrosanct at William Holman Gallery, New York 2015, Laugh track at Cathouse FUNeral, Brooklyn, New York in 2015, The Master’s voice, Barcelona, Spain. Select group exhibitions include: Memory of Oblivion, CP projects space, new York, NY, 2017, On belonging and the void between, Gallery Aferro, New Jersey, NJ, 2017, Leaving Home, Cathouse FUNeral harvested group show, Beacon, NY, 2017, Cathouse FUNeral Harvested:The Hunt Intensifies at Coustof Waxman Annex, New York, NY 2017, Future memories at Pfizer building, Brooklyn, NY, 2016, #makeamericagreatagain at WhiteBox, New York.

About Equity Gallery:

New York Artists Equity Association, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 1947 by artists and art patrons with the mission to promote opportunities for artists. It operates Equity Gallery, an art space located on the Lower East Side of New York City. It simultaneously serves as a gallery for artists to exhibit and sell their work; a hub for professional workshops and innovative programming exploring critical issues of interest to artists and curators; and a gathering place for artists, curators and patrons. For more information, please visit http://www.nyartistsequity.org.

This exhibition is made possible in partnership with Equity Gallery and with support from the National Endowment for the Arts / Art Works Grant.