Group Exhibition: FLOATING REALITIES

Opening Reception: August 22, 2019, 6 - 8 pm

August 22 - September 5, 2019
Sojourner Gallery, 178 Bleecker Street 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10012

Hours: Saturday-Sunday 11 am-6 pm,
or by appointment via NewYork@sojournergallery.com

Jingyao Huang, Water_2013.1 (detail), 2018
Printing on Japanese Washi paper, Xuan paper, rice sticking paste, 18 x 18 in.

Sojourner Gallery is pleased to announce Floating Realities, a group exhibition featuring Jingyao Huang, Tom Judd, and artist group Ronghui Shi & Dai Wei. Floating Realities intends to present the artists’ diverse approaches to photo collages on various mediums, such as prints, rice papers, and paintings. The "edit" photographic elements and weave these fragments of realities and happenings into histories and memories.

By these "montages," the works created conversations across time and space. The exhibition focuses on contemporary perspective on the landscape and humanity and explores the possibilities in our changeable lives. 

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Jingyao Huang (黄静瑶, b. 1995) 

Water Series 

Water is a continuous series of photographic experiments recording water senses

in the artist’s life since 2011. Jingyao puts segments of water from our living environment into her works and collages them on traditional hand-crafted paper. Through partial natural realities, she recombined her previous fragmentary consciousness. Building her works from the Chinese Wu Xing (五行) theory, Jingyao uses photo segments that relate to the abstract representation of the five elements (Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth) to express her life and memory.

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Tom Judd (b. 1952)

Divers Prints & The Myth of the Frontier Series 

Tom Judd's representative Divers series shows the potential energy of the dynamic movement. The relationship between the background and the jumping figures brings dramatic stories to the image. The fact that the edge of the collage pieces can be seen but covered with the paint from the background reveals his sense of humor. The other series in this exhibition, The Myth of the Frontier, assembles American figures from history and put them in an almost empty landscape scenery. These odd combinations build up the structure of the artist's unique visual language. His collage works applied vintage photos from history to present common memories of the U.S. culture. 

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Ronghui Shi (施容慧, b. 1986) & Dai Wei (戴薇, b. 1989) 

Glimpses Series

Ronghui Shi & Dai Wei is an artist group that experiments with contemporary conceptual photography and graphic expressions. The Glimpses is a series taken through a telescope in southwest America. With the cutting of distance and limited visibility, the focuses are separated from the real world and become vistas covered by light and shadow and full of details. Man Ray once said, "I would photograph an idea rather than an object, a dream rather than an idea." Thus, they quest the current status of that "dream."

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Wenlu Bao (包雯璐, b. 1987) is a curator, creative writer, and documentary video maker. Her exposure to hundreds of art museums and galleries globally enriches her view on contemporary curatorial practices and research. Wenlu received her M.A. degree in Museum Communication from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and a B.A. degree in Video Directing from Fudan University, Shanghai Institute of Visual Art. She received a 2016 Annual Meeting Fellowship supported by the American Alliance of Museums, a 2016 Marketing and Communications Intern Fellowship supported by the Richard C. von Hess Foundation, and a 2017 Highest Academic Achievement Award from the University of the Arts, Museum Studies Department. 

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