Independent Art Fair 2020: Spring Studios, New York, NY

Independent Art Fair 2020

March 5 - 8, 2020

Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street, New York NY 10013

Fazakas Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the Independent Art Fair featuring works by Beau Dick and Maureen Gruben. 

This grouping of works by Kwakwaka'wakw artist Beau Dick and Inuvialuit artist Maureen Gruben is, in a sense, a bi-coastal meeting. Beau was from the village of Alert Bay on the northern coast of Vancouver Island; Maureen is from the Hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk on the northern arctic coast of Northwest Territories. This is an interface between two practices that are deeply rooted in the specificities of place and culture, but also, notably, in which the 'shock of the new' becomes an a-temporal phenomenon. The works presented here are engaged in continuous emergence. While cultural forms exist as materials, they also persist beyond materials; they can shift, withdraw, and (re)materialize at infinite points in place and time. Kwakwaka'wakw ceremonial burning of Atlakim masks, which the community will endlessly recreate, is a formalized expression of this perpetual emergence. As Candice Hopkins has described with reference to this, "Ceremony ruptures the division between the historical and contemporary." This temporal division is also ruptured by the assertiveness and vision with which Beau and Maureen bring traditional forms into their contemporary practices and decisively reimagine them-these works simultaneously hold within them striking innovation and intimate familiarity.

Words by Kyra Kordoski.