“After Our Bodies Meet” Exhibition

TSA

[Image: Cyriaco Lopes "Sunset (documentation of a performance)" (1997), Inkjet Print, 4 x 6 in.]

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Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York presents After Our Bodies Meet, a group exhibition curated by Daniel Johnson, featuring works by Margrethe Aanestad, Daniel Arturo Almeida, Dalia Amara, Cyriaco Lopes, and Randy West.

In the novel Tar Baby, Toni Morrison wrote, “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.” Exploring themes of love and memory, the artists in this show have created works that grapple with how we relate to each other and ultimately posit the question: What is enough? Whether through the investigation of familial bonds as with Almeida and Amara’s work, romantic love in West’s series, or the nature of being in the work of Aanestad and Lopes, the works in this show evoke an ethos of delicateness and a celebration of impermanence.

Margrethe Aanestad is a Norwegian-born artist (1974), living and working in Brooklyn, NY and Stavanger, Norway. Aanestad studied fine arts at the Rogaland Art College and graduated with a BA from the University of Stavanger in Culture&Art Management (2000). She works in drawing, painting and sculpture, and has exhibited internationally at galleries including Open Source Gallery, NY; Torrance Shipman, NY; Dimensions Variable, Miami; Interface gallery, CA; Kunsthall Stavanger (Norway), Abingdon Studios, England. Since 2001 she has worked independently to initiate, produce, and curate projects at the art scene in Stavanger, where she also co-founded and co-directed the artist-run, non-profit, space Prosjektrom Normanns (2011-2020). She is one of the co-founders and co-owner of the creative studio/working space ELEFANT (est 2013-). Aanestad serves on the advisory board of Kunsthall Stavanger and Open Source Gallery (NYC). Currently she is working on a commission for NYU/Clive Davis Institute, and will soon enter a 3 month-residency at Residency Unlimited, NY.

Daniel Arturo Almeida (b. 1992. Caracas, Venezuela) is a cultural producer and artist working through photography, installation, archiving, journalism, and public engagement. His practice chronicles intimate and collective stories that shape belief systems and hierarchies of power in the Americas. The product of generational migrations, Almeida researches images, music, anecdotes, and documents portraying national pride, nostalgia, and collective amnesia. The work observes shared culture through loss, decadence, hope, and empathy. He has exhibited in The U.S.A in various institutions, galleries, and festivals, including La Salita Project, Columbia Teachers College, Project for Empty Space, Satellite Art Show, Doral Contemporary Art Museum, and the SVA Chelsea Galleries, among others. Almeida holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (2020) and a BFA in Painting and Installation from Florida International University (2017). He currently lives and works in Queens, NY.

Dalia Amara is an American-Jordanian multidisciplinary artist in New York working in photography, video, performance, and sculpture. Amara was raised in the US, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, and UAE. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and her BFA from Columbia College Chicago. Amara has lectured, screened, and exhibited in New York, Toronto, and online at White Columns, Gallery 44, and Selena Gallery. Her work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, Artnet News, and The Art Newspaper.

Cyriaco Lopes is a New York-based Brazilian artist has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, the Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP), El Museo del Barrio in NYC, the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles in Paris, Casa Degli Artisti in Milan. His work has been curated by artists such as Lygia Pape, Janine Antoni, and Luciano Fabro. He is the winner of the NYC World Studio Foundation Award, the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis Project Award, the São Paulo Phillips Prize of trip to Europe. He received grants to attend the London Project residency and Skowhegan. Lopes is an associate professor of art at John Jay College / the City University of New York. He also teaches in the Stetson University low residency M.F.A. of the Americas in Poetry in the Expanded Field.

Randy West (born 1960 in Indianapolis, Indiana) is an American fine art photographer, perhaps best known for his distinctive and avant-garde scanner use of the photographic medium, as seen across several series of his work. West is also on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, and a director of the school’s Master of Fine Arts program for photography, video, and related media. West has been represented by the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York and the Craig Krull Gallery in Los Angeles. He has had solo exhibitions at Jan Kesner Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, the Houston Center for Photography, and as part of the Here Theater Project. His work has also appeared in group exhibitions, including exhibitions with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the International Center for Photography, the San Diego Contemporary Art Museum, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, and the Marlborough Gallery.

Daniel AnTon Johnson is an artist with a diverse practice based in photography, language, film, and video. His work examines how technology shapes notions of identity within popular culture and contemporary visual media. Focusing on authorship and representation, Johnson’s practice explores cultural and visual literacies and how they form worldviews. Johnson has taught and lectured at School of Visual Arts, Adelphi University, Rutgers University-Newark, and Columbia University, and mentored teens at ICP and The Harlem School of the Arts. Johnson holds an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, and an MA in English from Washington College. He currently resides in Brooklyn.