Featured artists include Andrew Eklund, Sarah Julig, Yasemin Kaçar-Demirel, Dustin Klare, Elizabeth Knowles, Hilary Lorenz, Nesta Mayo, and Gelah Penn.

Since the phenomenal explosion of New York City as a center of art and culture, budding artists and like-minded creative types have flocked to the metropolis. Inevitably, these transplants bring with them the past – innumerable different stories that must somehow be understood from a new, often radically different, perspective. Present Perfect Continuous presents 8 emerging artists who have immigrated to New York City from elsewhere, and whose works in painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation interweave past memories with their new urban present.

The present perfect continuous verb tense speaks of things that began in the past, continue into the present, and are still happening – actions rooted in the past that simultaneously create a sense of anticipation as to what will transpire in the immediate future. For these artists, the process of creation is often more important than the finished product. Through the process, they recall memories, document the past, and work to understand their new surroundings and how they fit in. Memories are broken apart, analyzed, and incorporated into current experiences to create new realities and give the artists new methods for situating themselves in the present. The works become narratives that relate the past, engage the present, and propose methods for navigating the future.

Dustin Klare’s works document an exploratory method of navigating the metropolis. In Journey to Somewhere Like This, Klare exited random New York City subway stations and followed the same previously created list of directions, to arrive at a final, unknown “destination.” Upon arrival, he photographed his surroundings, and the photos became the basis for the painting.

Hilary Lorenz, Elusive Garden #2Similarly, Hilary Lorenz engages in a process of visual mapping to document her experience of traveling through changing landscapes. Her works on paper, such as Elusive Garden #2, reflect her observations of nature and record, via mark-making, the physical and visceral experience of exploring remote landscapes.

Also using nature as a means of interpreting and understanding memory, Andrew Eklund contemplates what makes an experience meaningful. The lives of the young are often infused with such irony that their experiences cease to be real. Eklund constructs environments based on his memories of real experiences, and these new environments function as places for others to experience similar ‘real’ moments. In his sculpture A Life’s Pursuit…, he takes visitors to a park to feel the warmth of the sun, a soft breeze, and the cool shade.

Sarah Julig uses the patterns and geometry of nature as a framework for investigating how her experiences and internal world fit within the natural patterns that surround her. Her interactive sculpture, For the Heart, consists of photographs from her years spent in Finland, cut into patterns and assembled along metal spirals, shaped to resemble fish traps. These fragmented and reassembled memories serve as a commentary on the ways in which memory resides in the body.

Yasemin Kaçkar-Demirel engages in a similar process of assembly. Breaking down her memories of places to their constituents, she then reconstructs and re-maps them onto an image’s surface using colors, shapes, and patterns. She aims to create abstract narratives to be discovered and interpreted by the viewer. In Take it all away, she plays upon the architectural and emotional elements of place, partially obscuring a home-like structure in a chaotic harmony of swirling, dappled paint.

Invoking the growth of natural forms, Nesta Mayoinvestigates minuscule events and living structures Peter Dobillthrough paintings and drawings. Form and subject develop through a process of nurturing, vandalizing, destroying, and re-creating. In the Illegible Writing Series, she documents the ritual of diary writing. Focusing on process and not content, Mayo, using her elbow as a fixed pivot point, creates repeated shapes out of illegibly written diary entries. She first ponders these recorded experiences, then translates them into a visual representation of personal accumulation.

Similarly, Elizabeth Knowles links the organizational structures of everyday life with human emotions and memory. POD, a work comprised of dendrite-shaped paper cutouts from biological texts and illustrations, flows over the gallery wall, changing and adapting to the gallery space. The work alters and reconstructs memories by juxtaposing the original elements with other patterns.

Gelah Penn creates images akin to microscopic activity while investigating the linear language of drawing in three-dimensional space. In Big Scribble #8, Penn manipulates colored monofilament and other tendril-like materials to construct a “substantive ephemerality.” This accretion of marks and shadows suggests cellular structures, arterial systems, dust, and weather – elements basic to human experience, growth, adaptation, and movement forward.

Curated by Denise Wong