Traces of Omnipresence
I-Hsuen Chen, Ryan Sarah Murphy, Eleanor Ray
Curated by Leslie Kerby
February 6th – March 29th, 2013

308 at 156 Project Artspace is pleased to present the exhibition Traces of Omnipresence curated by Leslie Kerby and featuring three artists: I-Hsuen Chen, Ryan Sarah Murphy, and Eleanor Ray. 

All three artists employ a variety of media—drawing, painting, collage, video and photography — to provide provocative statements about human existence and the traces we leave as we navigate our environment. Eleanor Ray creates small windows into life with simple gestures and gem sized paintings and drawings. Her titles—Red Bike, Cracked Door, Blue Hallway, Field in Fog, etc. suggest a moment in time, a moment in one persons life, a trace of being both physically and mentally. 

Ryan Sarah Murphy uses materials ‘that come and go freely within my day-to-day experience.’ Collages constructed from cardboard a ubiquitous, very useful but often discarded material that holds little value. Ryan uses found printed cardboard and imposes limitations on her re-use of the material by cutting away any text, printing or representational graphics. The results are new constructions that like paint chips from an old house are traces of a concrete space and a natural space—the ‘interior dwelling of the self.’

I-Hsuen Chen articulates traces of omnipresence through his video work and photography documenting a feeling of being ‘in-between.’ The feeling of being in-between cultures is expressed in two video projects.In Do You Understand It? he translates a famous Italian opera into Chinese. Changing the language of the lyrics and singing them allows him to make a contradictory statement about communication ultimately expressing ‘the incapability of expressing.’ I Know shows poignantly without sound the moment when two people are fully engaged with one another having broken a language barrier by sharing intimate secrets. Nowhere in Taiwan takes us on a road trip through the artists native Taiwan where he documents scenes and situations that lie in-between that he redefines as ‘nowhere.’ His intent is to show the traces of human presence and gesture that remain

Eleanor Ray is a painter living in New York. She has a BA in English and Art from Amherst College and an MFA in painting from the New York Studio School. She has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. Her paintings will be shown at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in February 2013.

I-Hsuen Chen is a New York-based photographer, video artist and performer, born and raised in Taiwan. He received an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in 2012. His work has been selected for the New York Photo Festival’s 2012 Invitational, his series Nowhere in Taiwan is in the Permanent Collections of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and he was chosen as one of Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward Emerging Photographers 2012. In 2011 he won Jen Bekman Gallery’s Blurb book prize and a Hey Hot Shot! Honorable Mention, and was awarded the New Artist Feature by the site Culturehall, chosen by curator Tema Stauffer. Chen’s work has been published in magazines and online, including Conveyor Magazine, PHOTONEWS(Germany), American Photo, CCNY blog, and LENSCRATCH. His work has also been shown at 25CPW Gallery, hpgrp Gallery, ISE Foundation and Ed. Varie Gallery in New York. Before coming to the U.S., he was a professional opera and choir singer in Taiwan.

Leslie Kerby is an artist and curator who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her art focuses on the life of social narrative and explores how it changes when experienced on either a personal or collective perspective. Echoing the vast changes of her subject matter, the artist works in collage, drawing, painting and printmaking in order to capture how individuals use their identity as a form of cultural currency. Kerby has studied at the Arts Students League, the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and the Lower Eastside Printshop. She has exhibited her work at the Object Image Gallery in Brooklyn, most recently in 2009. Her 2012 solo exhibition at St. John’s University, Queens, NY featured the collage series Border Lines. Kerby’s art has appeared at the Masur Museum of Art in Monroe, Louisiana; the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City; the Loyola College Crown Center Gallery in Chicago, Illinois; the Arkansas State University Bradford Gallery in Arkansas State, Arkansas as well as Kunsthalle Galapagos, Storefront Gallery, Norte Maar, Sacred Gallery and the Kentler International Drawing Space in New York. She has been awarded artist residencies at at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, VA and School of Visual Arts, in New York, New York.