PNADA: Hybrid Futures

Presented in collaboration with P.A.D. and NADA House 2021, Hybrid Futures presents work that exists at the junctures between the organic/digital and the past/future. Blending shifting biological and technological references and techniques, Gracelee Lawrence, Joiri Minaya, and Esther Ruiz draw on futuristic and historical sources, materials, and forms to create disarming structures, sculptures, and prints. 

Gracelee Lawrence examines the relationship between food, the body and technology, building uncanny hybrids in content and structure. Her work considers histories of food production, capitalism, gendered bodies, and the contemporary dominance of the digital environment. In her 3-D printed “banana feet” and “glitch gals,” Lawrence seamlessly blends the virtual and the physical to create points of confusion and reflection. Lawrence operates between two worlds, interweaving the physical act of making with her digital means of production. 

Joiri Minaya’s “Dominican Women Google Search” postcards combine fragmented photographs of women’s bodies found through a standard Google search for “Dominican women.” Featuring disjointed limbs and stereotypical tropical imagery, the prints highlight the objectification of women while evoking acts of aggression towards their bodies. Drawing from a virtually unlimited digital bank of photographs that Minaya reconstructs into hybrid figures and environments, the prints reflect on the online appropriation of Dominican women’s bodies as objects of exoticized pleasure, while seeming to reassert the women’s powerful presences.

Esther Ruiz constructs objects that simultaneously act as historical remnants and futuristic space junk. Creating playful interactions between materials like cement, plexiglass, metal, and rubber, Ruiz’s sculptures transform everyday, earthly materials into intimate, supernatural relics. In her screenprint Index, Ruiz organizes her cement, stone, and neon works by size, creating printed documentation of her sculptural practice. The orderly arrangement of these objects in drawing form replicates an anthropological record keeping system that acts as a catalog for her technologically driven works. 

//

Gracelee has attended twenty residencies in the US and abroad and opened her first solo show in New York at Thierry Goldberg in May 2019. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University at Albany, SUNY. Recent exhibitions include Postmasters Gallery (New York, NY), Greenpoint Terminal Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), SPRING/BREAK Art Fair (New York, NY), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles, CA), and The Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY). She has installed large-scale outdoor sculptures at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Museum of Museums (Seattle, WA), Franconia Sculpture Park (Shafer, MN), Mary Sky (Hancock, VT), and others.   She is a member of the collective MATERIAL GIRLS, a 2019 Jerome Fellow at Franconia Sculpture Park, a 2016-17 Luce Scholars Fellow, a recipient of the 2015 UMLAUF Prize, 2013 Eyes Got It Prize, and the 2011-12 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artist Grant. 

Joiri Minaya (1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian NY based multi-disciplinary artist. She attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales (DR), the Chavón School of Design, and Parsons the New School for Design. Minaya has exhibited across the Caribbean, the U.S. and internationally. She has recently received a Jerome Hill Felllowship, a NY Artadia award and the BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize, as well as grants from foundations like Nancy Graves, Rema Hort Mann, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She been awarded in two Dominican biennials (XXV Concurso León Jimenes; XXVII National Biennial) and has participated in residencies at Skowhegan, Smack Mellon, Bronx Museum, Red Bull House of Art, LES Printshop, Socrates Sculpture Park, Art Omi, ISCP and Vermont Studio Center.

Esther Ruiz was born in Houston, Texas, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in studio art from Rhodes College in 2011. She has shown nationally and internationally at various galleries including solo exhibitions at The Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon, Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, yours mine & ours in New York, New York, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Platform Baltimore. She has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Deslave, LVL3, Jacob’s LA, New Release Gallery, and Hollis Taggart. She has been featured in The Washington Post, Art News Magazine, Art F City and VICE. She was also a visiting lecturer at School of Visual Arts, New York, New York, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Santa Barbara City College, among others.

Eliana Blechman is a curator and arts worker based in New York. She is the Associate Curator at Time Equities Inc. Art-in-Buildings, a public art program that brings contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists to non-traditional exhibition spaces. Previously, Eliana held positions as Curatorial Associate at AC Institute, a non-profit experimental gallery space, and as Project Coordinator at CITYarts, Inc., a non-profit public arts and education organization. She is the founder of ebb curatorial, an independent exhibition and project-based curatorial program. Eliana is pursuing her MA in Art History at Hunter College, where she is also enrolled in the Advanced Curatorial Certificate Program, and she received her BA as a double major in Art History and History from New York University.

//

P.A.D. is an art exhibition space in historic SOHO (South of Houston) District in New York City. It reflects the bustling economy of artists making, selling and promoting their artworks on the street year-round, weather permitting. The aim of the space is to platform small and editioned works by artists that are interested in embracing new contexts for exhibiting.