Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to announce our inaugural participation in Future Fair, featuring artworks by Genevieve Cohn, Angela Fang Zirbes, and Melody Tuttle. The artists approach these themes of loss and memory through their disparate styles, from Fang Zirbes’s black and white palette to the rich warm hues of Tuttle’s interior scenes to Cohn’s brightly colored imagined societies. The presentation offers three related perspectives on womanhood—the memories that form us as children and the incidents that mark us as adults
Born and raised in Iowa, New York-based painter Angela Fang Zirbes’s airbrushed paintings reckons with the feelings of isolation she recalls from growing up as a biracial woman in the American Midwest. Fang Zirbes reconstructs an old, rural house reminiscent of her childhood, unsettling it through darkness: The house is surrounded by an endless nocturnal countryside landscape visible only through windows. Painting on raw canvas, the artist activates the gray-scale paintings’ velvety texture, blending the uncanniness of dream-like memories with the softness of home. Through these re-imaginings, the artist returns to linger in these interior scenes, seeking a deeper understanding of how she interprets fear and uncertainty within her identity.
Brooklyn-based artist Melody Tuttle paints women in solitude. The secluded female figures perform daily rituals or daydream wistfully, their gazes fixed on another time and place, their orange and red skin contrast against their surroundings. Painting as a cathartic act to process her father’s recent passing, the artist incorporates vanitas as vessels for personal symbolism to commemorate that which is lost. Expressing life’s transience, the hushed privacy in Tuttle’s paintings offers compassion for moments of sudden loneliness and necessary withdrawal during our finite, infinitesimal, lives. Vermont-born painter Genevieve Cohn paints worlds of and for women, depicting stories of women in alternative realities reacting to the modified laws of physics that allow them to record history differently. The artist narrates her stories of women in alternative realities through vignettes that unfold over each painting. Based on photos the artist stages in nature, the compositions document how these women interact and negotiate space, recording history through shadows or growing food out of rocks —all metaphors for how women have historically been handed lemons and made lemonade.
The Future Fair will take place May 1—4, 2024 at the Chelsea Industrial Building.