On View: June 12th - July 26th
Artists: Victoria Smits, Ashley Dawn Addair, Bianca Gabrielle Goyette, and Katherine Demetriou Sidelsky
‘The air we breathe is no simple being.’ — Antoine Lavoisier
relating to or resembling a degree of disorder designates anti-structure as ontological determination; it is exergonic — light liberated from its frame. The convergence of this work in this exhibition, at this moment, becomes an act of transience, of echoes among parts at a particular time; it reverses the abstraction of the self as ideology in lieu of a quest for absorption, compressed into a truth: we are I am. We exist and speak in parafictive time, resonating as soundwaves — forming a mnemonic device, an atom, a whole.
relating to houses the correlational work by four artists: Ashley Addair, bianca gabrielle goyette, Katherine Demetriou Sidelsky, and Victoria Smits — artists in various stages of life, from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, racial structures, and lived experience, who, in 2020, uprooted their lives to prospect a form without form, absent of hierarchies, systems of control and categories, and instead generate conscious relation.
The collective work mines perceived disconnect into a new cognition. Correspondence in the form of letters, voice notes, discourse, Zoom ruminations, and dialogic exchanges circled a making within the and/both. These became a shared, novel verity — of construction, deconstruction, durational processes, and marks made in immediacy. Distinct elements from each artist “form a matrix… as a new entity, a creative dynamic… a new cultural form as revolt.”
relating to gathers uncodified passive memory and funnels it through a nexus. It asks, what do we see, what do we hear, what do we feel amid raw discordant experience? What relation emerges as we listen and be through time? What happens when we know community instead of boundary, when the self dissipates and a new inviolate universe becomes our air?
Ashley Dawn Addair
ashsunbirddawn@gmail.com
moreofavirusthanasite.us
@ashsunbirddawn @williewolfbro
Ash is the powdery remains of fire.
Bianca Gabrielle Goyette
b@orenblack.com
@bgoesrogue
notesonbeing.me
Bianca Gabrielle Goyette (b. 1980something) is a mechanic. In the sense that she practices constructing and deconstructing, dissecting and analyzing, listening and looking. She makes things. One might call her a transdisciplinary artist, but she prefers to be called by her name. She studies the materiality of sound, the cadence of fibers, and the nature of being together. She practices, and she makes.
Bianca works with materials that speak to the dichotomy between strength and fragility, the inextricably intertwined nature(s) of being. She is a vocalist working in acoustic resonance. She is a papermaker building and breaking fibril bonds through constructive synthesis and destructive laser processes. She is a writer analyzing the poetics of dialectics within the pathology of language, speech, phatic language, interjected sound, and non-lexical vocables. She is a photographer and videographer producing layered approaches to visual and auditory storytelling. She is a designer specializing in the fabrication of digital assets and experiences that reposition interaction models.
Bianca holds an MA in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, an MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA in Photography and Design from Parsons School of Design. She has studied Audio Engineering at Tribeca Flashpoint Academy and Papermaking at Oxbow School of Art and Artist Residency. She has performed and exhibited in venues, festivals, art fairs, museums, and galleries across the United States and Mexico. She has released multiple EPs, Publications, and Short Films and has been featured in others. She runs a statewide community arts organization in New Mexico (TAAC) and is a member of three (3) artist collectives (Southwest Black Arts Collective, nHnT, and One and Three Chairs).
Bianca currently stays in Brooklyn, NY, and Angel Fire, NM, splitting her time between the sounds of the city and those of the mountains.
Victoria Smits
victorialsmits@gmail.com
victorialsmits.com
@victorialsmits
Victoria Smits is an interdisciplinary artist and writer living in Eugene, Oregon. Her practice begins in attention: what she sees, what she notices, what energies affect her body. Smits explores the intersection of these discoveries with generational stories and epigenetic markers through research-driven work including installation, textiles, sculpture, video, sound, drawing, and writing. It is a practice of material and matter congealing with idea and form; text and visual converge, science and cheesecloth hold hands, and the abstraction of the natural environment intersects with the maternal. She integrates the plausibility of strife and discord as moments of evolution and growth. Her twenty-year career as a public school educator casts a distinct, research-driven foundation for pedagogical and experiential knowing, for how we hold space for each other in community.
Smits’ work has been shown at Manchester Craft and Design Centre, Scalehouse Gallery, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Old Stone House, and Craft Contemporary, among others. Her poetry can be found in the edited collection Gone Feral: Unruly Women and the Undoing of Normative Femininity through Demeter Press. She studied English, Art, and Secondary Education at Calvin University, received an MA in English Education with a concentration in Creative Writing from the University at Buffalo, and an MFA through the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Victoria is a member of the artist collective nHnT and was recently accepted into membership at Carnation Contemporary in Portland, OR.
Katherine Demetriou Sidelsky
kdsidelsky@gmail.com
https://www.kdsidelsky.com
@kdsidelsky
Katherine Demetriou Sidelsky is a New York–based artist working primarily in sculpture and installation, incorporating lens-based and imaging processes within an expanded material practice. Drawing on her background in architecture, she investigates perceptual boundaries of place, the dynamics of display, and the relationship between surface, structure, and support through constructed topographies.
Sidelsky received a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University, where she was awarded the William Kinne Fellows Traveling Prize for post-degree study abroad, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Arizona. A theatre design she contributed to was featured in MoMA’s Light Construction exhibition and earned her an Honor Award from the California Council of the American Institute of Architects.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including selected group exhibitions in New York City, Chicago, Richmond, Northampton (UK), and Barcelona (Spain). She has attended residencies at Poor Farm’s Living Within the Play in Wisconsin and ChaShaMa’s ChaNorth in New York’s Hudson Valley, and she will attend the Vermont Studio Center as a fellow in 2027. Sidelsky is a member of the artist collective nHnT.
