Now in its third year, the Torpedo Factory Art Center’s Post-Graduate Residency Program is the subject of Target Gallery’s newest exhibition. Target will feature the work of the four residents in a group exhibition, Saturday, October 28 – Sunday, December 3, 2017.
Fumi Amano completed her undergraduate studies in art education at the University of Education in Aichi before refining studies of her medium at Toyama Institute of Glass Art in Toyama, Japan, and at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington. Amano has won several awards including best student work at Niijima Glass Art Festival in Tokyo and also at Pilchuck Glass School. Her work was selected at the International Exhibition of Glass in Kanazawa, Japan; the Contemporary Glass Triennial in Toyama, Japan; and the Itami Craft Triennial in Osaka, Japan. She has shown her work in group and solo exhibitions in both the U.S. and Japan. She completed her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in May of 2017.
The Torpedo Factory Post-Graduate Residency is a competitive program for recently graduated art students, housed in Studio 12, where four emerging artists have an opportunity to create and sell work, interact with the public, and build a network.
“The residency space provides artists with both studio resources and professional development opportunities in the critical period shortly after graduation,” said Leslie Mounaime, director of Target Gallery. “This culminating exhibition is both a celebration of their time here as well as a stepping stone to their professional career.”
The 2016 artists are: Fumi Amano, Lindsay Hall, Jay Hendrick, and Samantha Sethi. All were juried into the program by Kayn Miller, director of exhibitions at the Arlington Art Center.
Amano (October through December | Virginia Commonwealth University) entered graduate school to expand her expertise with glass as a medium, but her work shifted more into the conceptual space as she began using her art as a primary means to express her emotions, given English is her second language. Her work is inspired by her strong desire for connection as well as a deep sense of loneliness. Through her performance work, she can speak to others beyond spoken language’s normal spectrum. Her performance series Worries of a 30-Year-Old Single captures the social pressure and anxiety she feels as an unmarried woman without children. Amano’s work Look at Me was featured in the Target Gallery group exhibition Please Touch in 2016.
Hall (July through September | Indiana University-Bloomington) creates creates colorfully titillating works that engage the notions of pleasure, beauty, and the perverse as they relate to the body, sexuality, and the intimacies and vulnerabilities of human interaction. She uses an eclectic range of materials including silicone, textiles, clay, spray paint, and glitter to combine contrasting textures, forms, and materials. She presents dualities: attraction/repulsion, hard/soft, feminine/masculine, interior/exterior, made/found. Her resulting pieces and installations fantasize these shared human experiences, often sugarcoating shame and disgust with humor and playfulness. Recent Target Gallery visitors will remember her piece Blinged Out in the Material as Medium group exhibition in 2016.
Hendrick (January through March | George Mason University) questions the value of value in his work. He creates paintings, then analyzes their importance, worth, and merit by exposing his work to different methods, such as digitization, duplication, and performance. His visual vocabulary is based on grids, a stable and reliable form, and color to assess the form’s value. His sundry palette draws from high and low culture, bringing together pop-music pink with cave-born ochers.
Sethi (April through June | American University) explores the natural world around and humanity’s relationship with and impact on it. Her work reference a broader view of our world as a landscape both inhabited and studied by humankind, altered even as it is observed. In the exhibition, her sculpture, Cause and Effect, was constructed as a model of an “iceberg”. The blue polystyrene foam is an effective thermal insulator and commonly used as building insulation It’s also used for sculpture, but is typically coated and concealed. In Sethi’s sculpture, it remains visible as part of the content. Polystyrene foam, untreated, naturally has an icy appearance. Rather than produce a realistic reproduction, this work was imagined as an “in process” theatrical monument to the icebergs or as a form to protect them from rising temperatures.
About the Artists
Fumi Amano completed her undergraduate studies in art education at the University of Education in Aichi before refining studies of her medium at Toyama Institute of Glass Art in Toyama, Japan, and at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington. Amano has won several awards including best student work at Niijima Glass Art Festival in Tokyo and also at Pilchuck Glass School. Her work was selected at the International Exhibition of Glass in Kanazawa, Japan; the Contemporary Glass Triennial in Toyama, Japan; and the Itami Craft Triennial in Osaka, Japan. She has shown her work in group and solo exhibitions in both the U.S. and Japan. She completed her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in May of 2017.
Lindsay Hall, a West Coast native, is currently based in Arlington, Virginia. She received a MFA in Painting from Indiana University in 2016, as well as a BFA in Painting and Drawing (2012) and a BA in Journalism and Media Studies (2010) from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her work has been exhibited nationally at venues such as the Janet Kurnatowski Gallery in New York, the New Hampshire Institute of Arts, and Kent State University in Ohio and will be featured in a summer 2017 issue of Studio Visit magazine. Lindsay Hall has co-curated group exhibitions in Indiana and New York. She received the Ilknur P. Ralston Memorial Award in Visual Arts in 2016.
Jay Hendrick, based in Fairfax, Virginia, has shown work in the U.S., England, and Japan and his work was featured in New American Painting. In 2015, Hendrick received his MFA from George Mason University. He completed his undergraduate degree with Abilene Christian University in Texas with degrees in applied studies and a bachelor’s of fine art. He teaches at Northern Virginia Community College in Woodbridge, Virginia, and is a contributing writer for East City Art.
Samantha Sethi is a multi-media artist working primarily in drawing, installation, sculpture, and video. Sethi received her MFA from American University where she explored concepts of ephemerality, entropy, human impact on the environment, mapping, and our experience of time. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in NYC where she lived and worked until moving to Washington DC in 2013. She is currently based out of Baltimore, MD where she is currently an Artist - In Residence at Creative Alliance.
