Caroline Cloutier, The Oceanic States Journal, Oil pastel on digital print, 2024
Bodiless Body
March 1 - 20, 2024
Season I International Residency Exhibition
Curated by NARS Curatorial Fellow shuang cai
Opening Reception and Open Studios: Friday, March 1st, 6-8pm
NARS Main Gallery
NARS Foundation is pleased to present Bodiless Body, an exhibition featuring the Season I, 2024 International Residency Artists Maude Arsenault, Roberto Barbosa, Jacq Bebb, Hyoju Cheon, Caroline Cloutier, Mar Figueroa, Christina Freeman, Lola Lefrançois, Tianyi Sun, Corri-Lynn Tetz, wei, and Kristine White. Interweaving flesh and fable, Bodiless Body surpasses mere portrayal, inviting reflections and immersion. This collective exhibition delves deep into the realms of embodiment and identity through diverse artistic languages. Artists participating in Bodiless Body connect humans with nature, blurring the lines between self and story. They infuse life into the physical, transforming bodies into vessels of lived experiences, imagined desires, and cultural legacies. Performance, installation, and sculpture act as portals, unlocking worlds where identities shift and reshape, and bodies blur the lines between self and story.
About the Curatorial Fellow:
shuang cai is a curator, writer, educator, and multimedia artist. Their curatorial endeavors aim to bring forth the power of interconnectedness and diverse voices across communities. Their art practices focus on logic, interactions, and humor. They were an editor of Adjacent and have curated shows at LATITUDE Gallery, theBlanc, All Street NYC, and Joy Museum (Beijing). They hold a Bachelor's degree from Bard College double majoring in Computer Science and Studio Art and a Master's from New York University Interactive Telecommunication Program(ITP).
About the artists:
After several years behind the lens in the fashion world, Maude Arsenault, artist, mother and feminist, forked around 2015, towards the visual arts. Her work invests the themes of female representation, private spaces, domesticity and intimacy within the framework of a photographic and material approach that oscillates between abstract compositions, self-portraits, landscapes and documentary images. She explores from the photographic and printed image, collage, sculpture, and installation. In doing so, her projects deploy bodies as spaces and unexpected spaces of the bodies, in a perspective of self-determination for women.
Arsenault holds a degree in art history and a Master (M.A.) in Visual Arts from UQAM, Montreal. She is the recipient of the prestigious Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Arts (2023), the Yvonne L. Bombardier Visual Arts Scholarships (2021) and has received several grants from Quebec and Canada Councils for the Arts. The artist won the renowned photography Hariban Grand Prize in Japan (2020) where she was selected by Lucy Gallun from MoMA NYC, Emma Bowkett, art critic ar FT Magazine, UK, and Felix Hoffman, director of C/O Berlin Museum. Arsenault has exhibited solo and collective projects in Canada, France, USA, Latin America and Japan. She has also published Entangled (2020) and Resurfacing (2023), two acclaimed photobooks with Deadbeatclub Press, Los Angeles publisher.
Roberto Barbosa is an interdisciplinary artist and architect from Guadalajara, Mexico, based in Frankfurt, Germany. He received a Master of Arts in Architecture from the Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany (2019) and a bachelor’s in architecture by the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico (2014), supported by scholarships by the German DAAD and the Universidad de Guadalajara. He worked in cutting edge architectural offices such as MVRDV (Rotterdam) and COBE (Copenhagen). Recent shows include Heima, in Seyðisfjörður, Gallery 3AP in Düsseldorf, and Keller Kreuzberg in Berlin. He has exhibited in Germany, Netherlands, United States, Mexico, Finland, and Iceland.
Jacq Bebb (b.1977, Chester, UK) lives and works in New York. Bebb has a visual and textual practice that layers sculpture and audio works in a rumination on desire through queer and trans narratives and experiences. Their current work delves into theories of queer time, as counterpoint to chronological time. Drawing upon research and personal experience, they question the cultural implications of social norms and binary systems, particularly in relation to queer connectedness and history.
Projects and solo exhibitions include: Chester Contemporary, Chester, UK (2023); The Great Exhibition of the North, NewcastleGateshead, UK (2018); Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK (2016); Small Collections Room, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2015); and Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2013). Their work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions including Mostyn, Landudno, UK (2017); Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK (2014); and Frutta, Rome, Italy (2014).
Hyoju Cheon (b. Seoul, Korea) is an explorer and interdisciplinary artist currently based in New York. Her multimedia practice, often centered around a space, object, or moving body, responds to the specific conditions of each site. Hyoju documents bodies in motion, capturing their trajectories and archiving the material traces they leave behind. Her works have been exhibited in Seoul at Dongsomun, Meindo, Gallery Imazoo, and Gaon Gallery, as well as in New York at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, Subtitled nyc, Half Gallery, and Chashma, among other venues.
Caroline Cloutier is a visual artist based in Montreal (Tio'tia:ke), Canada, where she obtained an MA in Studio Arts at Concordia University. Her photographic and installation work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Austria, Italy, Canada and during several art fairs like VOLTA and Untitled. Recent honours include fellowships and residencies from the British School at Rome, Banff Center for the Arts, Molinari Foundation, Yvonne Bombardier Foundation, and Lande Award in Photography. She will spend the first half of 2024 in residency at the NARS Foundation, Brooklyn. Her research has been financed by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec many times.
Mar Figueroa is an Ecuadorian-born painter currently based in New York. In her surreal autobiographical paintings, she explores her multifaceted identity and honors her Andean heritage. In 2020, she was recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient in the Art & Style and Immigrant categories. More recently, she was an artist in residence at Silver Art's Project in the World Trade Center and awarded the Hopper Prize in 2023. She currently serves as a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts. Mar Figueroa received her education at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Christina Freeman (she/her) is an artist working in performance, installation and photography. Her projects have been featured in Artforum, Vulture, Hyperallergic, and Art F City among others. Freeman is the 2023-2024 Arts Curator for a partnership with The Urban Field Station Collaborative Arts Program and The Nature of Cities. Her work has received support from The Bronx Museum, Creative Time, Queens Museum, The Trust for Governors Island, Culture Push, National Coalition Against Censorship, Danish Arts Foundation, and ABC No Rio. Freeman teaches at Hunter College, CUNY for the Department of Art & Art History and the Department of Film & Media. https://christinafreeman.net/
Lola Lefrançois (b. 1997) is a French NYC-based artist who grew up between France and India. Her work is deeply influenced by her childhood growing up in an experimental township called Auroville. She explores our ambiguous relationship with nature and animals, focusing on how violence and artifice influence it. Lola earned her Bachelor of Studio Art from The École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in 2019 before completing her MFA in Studio Art at the City College of New York City in 2023. Since graduation, Lola has actively participated in residency programs, including The Rockella Residency Program (2023) and The Nars Foundation Program (2023). Her artwork has been showcased in numerous group and solo exhibitions across New York City and France. Notable exhibitions include "Do Birds Still Fly?" at One Eyed Studios, Rockella Space, NY, USA (2023), "Fish Don't Die with Their Eyes Closed" at Compton Goethals Gallery, NY, USA (2023), "Continuation - A Tribute to Colin Chase" at the same venue (2023), and "What We Did Last Summer" (2022), Les ÉVAsions des Arts ("The Escape of the Arts"), a local art festival in Villy en Auxois, France (2020); and "Aux Seuils, Voir et Toucher le Son" ("At the Threshold, Seeing and Touching Sound") at the Conservatory of Villeurbanne, France. She has been awarded national scholarships, such as The Kenza Scholarship for the Arts in France, as well as local scholarships, like the Connor Award.
Tianyi Sun explores the re-creation of embodied experience and its inevitable failure. Through interweaving painting, sculpture, time-based mediums, poetry, and software, she composes responsive environments to excavate the affects of technology, and examine digital interfaces, communication systems, and archival structures as concurrent networks of power. Her work has been exhibited at Artist’s Space, New York, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, New York, Helena Anrather, New York, among others. She has lectured and presented at Pioneer Works, New York, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, The New School, New York, and ArtCenter, Pasadena. Tianyi received her MFA in Fine Arts at Parsons, The New School, New York, and was recently an artist in residence at 99 Canal, New York, and Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont.
Corri-Lynn Tetz was born in Calgary, Alberta and now lives and works in Montreal. She studied painting at Emily Carr University and graduated from the MFA program at Concordia University. Tetz has received support from the Conseil des Art et des Lettres du Quebec, The Canada Council for the Arts, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and in 2016, was awarded the Brucebo Residency Fellowship. Her work was featured in the Magenta Foundations Carte Blanche: A Survey of Canadian Painting and in 2012, she was as a finalist in the RBC Painting Competition. Tetz’s paintings have been exhibited widely, including at Kasmin Gallery, (NYC) Arsenal Gallery (Montreal and NYC) Blouin Division (Montreal), Anat Ebgi (Los Angeles) and Gallery 12.26 (Dallas). Upcoming, her paintings will be featured in a solo show at Sim Smith Gallery in London.
wei works at the intersection of Performance, Sound, Movement, Print Media, and Design. Their practice researches and expresses the mapping of Queerness and Foreignness. Their work investigates the betwixt & between under the homogenous timeline that is experienced by the marginalized, as well as examines the ephemeral togetherness to trace the imprints of existence by contextualizing one’s and one’s collective’s present. Their current project emphasizes reconfiguring object/subject relationships within the confines of systems that exclude queer and immigrant bodies and re-evaluates the definition and experience of authenticity within the generations of the Asian diaspora and Asian immigrants.
wei currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. They received MFA in Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI and BFA in New Media at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, CA. wei has shown in group exhibitions nationally and internationally. They have participated in numerous artist residencies and fellowships, including NARS Foundation, New York, NY; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, CO; Art Center Residency, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY; Haystack Mountain School of Craft, ME; University of California Santa Cruz, CA; Yerba Buena Center for the Art, CA; Edition/Basel, Basel, Switzerland; and Santa Reparata International School Of Art, Florence, Italy. Their works are collected by The Thomas J. Watson Library of The Metropolitan Museum, The Library of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, RISD Museum; The Wattis Institute, Kent State University, and MAPC.
Kristine White is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersections of visual art, performance, and media arts. With a background in design for theatre and multidisciplinary performance, her work often takes place in public space in collaboration with community groups. Lately, her work considers such themes as the delineations of public vs private and capitalist vs living-being-centred conceptions of space, time, and labour.
Support for NARS exhibition programs is generously provided by:
Photos courtesy of Andrew Schwartz.