OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, July 14, 6:00 -8:00pm
Transformer is proud to present A Body to Follow – the culminating exhibition of our 15th Annual Exercises for Emerging Artists Program – E15: FIBERS, featuring artists Aliana Grace Bailey, Rachel Schechtman, Dulcina Abreu, and Alanna Reeves. E15: A Body to Follow focuses on fiber and textile as medium, history, and a means of survival. Considering the concept of the ‘survival thread’, artists Aliana Grace Bailey, Rachel Schechtman, Dulcina Abreu, and Alanna Reeves explore issues surrounding the body, security, identity, and connection to nature and family. These themes are introduced through new installation-based projects, varying in material, production, and sustainability. Founded in 2004, Transformer’s annual Exercises For Emerging Artists is a peer critique & mentorship program created to support a selected group of DC based emerging artists each year who are at critical points or crossroads in their professional growth and creative development. Designed to stimulate and encourage the participating artists as they create new work, the artists participate in bi-weekly critiques & as well as studio and museum visits over several months period resulting in a group exhibition or comprehensive concluding program. Focusing on a different artistic discipline each year, E15 brought together four emerging DC-based artists exploring the use of fiber & textile for rigorous peer & mentor critique as they created a new work or new body of work. Over the course of the program, the invited artists received guidance and feedback from a series of visiting mentor artists, curators, and gallerists including; Dominie Nash (Artist; Washington, DC), John Paradiso (Resident Artist/Curator at Portico Gallery and Studios; Brentwood, MD), Julia Kwon (artist, Founder of DC Artist Talks, Professor at Northern Virginia Community College; Woodbridge, VA), John Chaich, (Curator; New York, NY), Ramekon O’Arwisters (Artist; San Francisco, CA), Padma Rajendran (Artist; New York, NY), Jesse Harrod (Artist, Head of Fibers & Material Studies at Tyler School of Art; Philadelphia, PA) as well as Transformer staff and their peer E15 artists.
