Exhibits & Events

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FJORD is pleased to announce Composed Matter, a group exhibition featuring works by Kerri Ammirata, Sarah Gamble, Ava Hassinger, Livia Ortiz Ríos, Tracy Thomason, and Jackie Tileston.  The exhibition is curated by co-director Natessa Amin and Kerri Ammirata and will be on view June 1st – June 29th. The opening reception will be June 1st, 6 – 9 PM.

Composed Matter brings together artists from Philadelphia and New York City who use abstraction to investigate our material and metaphysical existence. These artists use paint, chalk, pigment, plexiglass, metal, wires, water, and mica to dig, layer, touch, brush, and intertwine with the aim of connecting to the sublime. They compose each visual space to see our experience more clearly by activating a heightened sense of the physical world.

Jackie Tileston’s heterotopic spaces are atmospheric expressions of cosmic play, ethereal fogs with lines and dots that create order, like atoms forming in the air. She uses automatic drawing processes and trance-like breathwork to knit together dimensions and altered realities into a majestic explosion of color. Ava Hassinger’s ‘Grid’ employs the same interconnected lines and webs by physically using wires and fingers to relate to our experience with technology. Her work explores our preoccupation with technology and questions if new modes of connection create more intimacy or isolation.

In ‘Dionysus,’ Sarah Gamble uses her dot motif to show energy and matter reorganizing itself. She explores ideas of transcendence and parallel realities using nature, such as flora and crystals, eliciting a sense of awe. Gamble’s work presents all realities for consideration whereas Livia Ortiz Ríos’s work pushes the bounds of containment. Ríos uses the transparency of plexiglass to show how negative space, shadow, and reflections connect the artwork to the external world. She distorts our understanding of our physical boundaries.

Tracy Thomason investigates the painting object by building crushed marble layers, flaked pigment, and color to compose a map or a physical manifestation of the body. She intricately charts each movement across the painting surface helping the viewer see the interconnectedness of our world. Kerri Ammirata builds layers of paint to excavate and find the topography of the painting surface. She references deep space and planetary bodies to move our vision to the macro and then brings us back to our physical bodies through the materiality of the paint.