Artists: Noémie Jennifer Bonnet, Utsa Hazarika,

Christopher Lin, Naomi Nakazato, Steven Uccello 

Co-curated with the 2023 class of SVA MA Curatorial Practice

April 14 – April 27, 2022

Pfizer Building, 630 Flushing Ave, Brooklyn, New York

"Soft Boundary" is a group exhibition that examines the everyday distortions that occur around us, curated by nine MA Curatorial Practice students. The artists in the exhibition deploy distortion as a means of restructuring known relationships with the larger, unspoken organizing structures that we exist in, such as the natural environment, our own bodies and social narratives. Distortion of the boundaries that define these structures enables us to see beyond their limits, to be more considerate of other beings and matter and to illuminate the rich matrix that unites us all. In softness there is strength.  

Noémie Jennifer Bonnet’s sculptures and wall hangings fuse conventional materials like resin and acrylic paint with burlap, branches and bones to create hybrid forms that embody her concern for our ecological crisis and changes within her own body. Utsa Hazarika deconstructs the conventional cinematic gaze that prioritizes frontality by using a broken mirror to scatter the image across the room, blurring the line between film and sculpture. Christopher Lin combines synthetic and natural materials in art objects that demonstrate their connection with humans in the larger narrative of Earth’s time. Naomi Nakazato investigates the ways language systems are inverted through digital portals such as Google Maps and Google Translate to contemplate the authenticity of these mediators. Steven Uccello captures weight loss through photography and time-based sculptures that are made of pitch, a material that appears to be solid, but slowly melts and transforms under gravitational force.  

In concert, the works in "Soft Boundary" renegotiate how the mechanism of distortion affects our understanding of different operations of the world. By exploring diverse materials and organizing systems through the lens of distortion, the works in the exhibition traverse the thresholds we are all familiar with to redefine the known relationships with the environment, the body and society.

Artists: Yichi Zhang, Mosa(Zijun Zhao)

February 9 – February 16, 2022

CP Project Space, 132 West 21st Street, New York

Dreams can reflect "fragments of the self" beyond daily life because of their dissociation and randomness. The sense of instability, of bodily angst and fantasy, of alienation and intimacy in these works reflects the dread and longing touching us in the time of the pandemic.

Yichi Zhang, uses traditional painting materials, creating flattened human figures and mask-like faces that suggest dreamlike states of psychological distortion. Along with paintings, Zhang presents mixed-material sculptures. Mosa (Zijun Zhao) uses ink, colored pencils and pastels on paper in an old-fashioned style to bring to life the fantasy of mental chaos, containing intricate lines and over-saturated but well-arranged details, with plants and animals in wild morphological forms and erotically charged images of women as her main subjects.

The Dream Cave attempts to create a space as absurd and yet unified as Alice in Wonderland, featuring works by two artists whose works mingle profound self-analysis with images evoking the landscape of dreams.