Playdemonium
Robin Kerr & Coco Ma
July 12 – August 24, 2024
Main Gallery
Reception: Friday, July 12, 5:30 – 7PM
Artist Talk: 6PM
Image: Excuse Me Coming Through, Robin Kerr
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Playdemonium, a fusion of play and pandemonium, underscores the profound energy and enduring impact of playful experimentation in art. The exhibition explores the multicultural experiences of Chinese born artist, Coco Ma and New Zealand born artist, Robin Kerr. Both artists utilize playful and multifaceted abstraction to explore complex themes of identity and personal relationships. The open-ended nature of their work provides viewers with an opportunity to engage with dynamic, sometimes contradictory expressions, transcending culture and eluding alienation.
Kerr and Ma join TAC curator, Jennie Castle, for a conversation about Playdemonium on TAC Makes: A Podcast, available now Spotify and YouTube.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Coco Ma is New-York based Chineses artist who works primarily in mixed-media installation, sculpture, and sculptural painting. Her art delves into the complex emotions experienced by women navigating cross-cultural environments between China and the United States. With an interest in exploring how cheap and disposable materials carry psychological denotation related to daily lives, Ma often transforms and conceals common objects into larger evocative structures.
Ma graduated with a BA in studio art and philosophy from Bard College in 2020. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions, including Tones Shaking Out (Pop-up Show by Chashama), A-Pou’s Taste (Pop-up Show), A-Pou’s Taste, Brooklyn, NY (05.2023), Trash, Local Project Art Space, Long Island City, NY (11.2022), New Voices for the Twenties I, Susan Eley Fine Art, New York, NY (05.2021), Escape Clause, Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY (11.2020), Utopia, and Castleton University’s Christine Price&Bank Galleries, online exhibition (09.2020). She had her solo exhibition The Presence of The Absent at Bard College Exhibition Center, Red Hook, NY (04.2020) and her online solo exhibition Shuffle And Reshuffle at Littman + White Galleries (01.2021). Currently Ma is an MFA candidate at Hunter College.
Robin Kerr is a self-taught artist inspired by everyday experiences, including the fact that I am an accidental immigrant, originally from New Zealand, now living in Portland, Oregon.
Her art reflects the state of limbo on experiences as an immigrant. With a mash upof large bold shapes and tiny scribbly lines, blocks of dominant color and specks of contrast, clean edges and smudged overlays, much like her lived experience, she is positive about some of the elements but others are mere educated guesses. The approach creates a level of tension and confusion with in the work
She works in a variety of mediums; acrylic paint, textile collage, wax pencil, wax pastel, ink and graphite, to name a few. Color, shapes, texture and movement drive her process. Paint and ink is usually poured straight from the bottle or applied with big fat house painting brushes, or rags. Many layers ensue and then she spends lots of time scraping and wiping things off again with sharp objects to get to what’s underneath. Top layer marks and elements are often created using very fine ink pens or wax pastels and pencils or graphite pencils.
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