Sweet To Remember: Keya Tama + Madeleine Tonzi Team Up @ Hashimoto Contemporary, NYC

Hashimoto Contemporary in NYC is pleased to present Sweet To Remember, a two-artist exhibition by NYC-based Keya Tama and Los Angeles-based artist Madeleine Tonzi. The presentation will be Tama’s inaugural exhibition at the gallery and Tonzi’s third exhibition at Hashimoto Contemporary.

Keya Tama’s paintings tell stories of archetypal heroes. Seamlessly blending his painting practice with tapestries and ceramics, his work expands into abstracted modern folktales. Utilizing a language made of ancient and contemporary motifs, people, and artifacts, he unites a surreal world with personal allegories. Geometric in composition and limited in palette, refined shapes converge with stylized illustrative figures, allowing the viewer to experience a dreamlike homage to a world painted over by time.

Tonzi’s work examines the relationships between memory, place and the environment, focusing on her experience in an ever changing landscape impacted by climate change and the passage of time. A common thread throughout her work is the concept of solastalgia, a term coined by Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher, who describes the emotional and existential distress caused by environmental change.

Her imagery is sourced from memory and personal experiences. Mediated by the distortion of those memories over time, her use of hard edges, soft color palettes, and bold organic and architectural forms reveal subtle tensions and contradictions between the built and natural world, while honoring the ephemeral state of time and memory. Tonzi’s quiet compositions are rhythmic yet orderly and balanced, inviting the viewer to consider their own contradictions and relationship to the land and their environments in context to the existential crisis we find ourselves in.

For the exhibition, Keya Tama and Madeleine Tonzi have collaborated on three original works, a large scale canvas as well as two sheep wool rugs. Blending their palettes and iconography, Tama and Tonzi have built a bridge between their practice, resulting in a new seamless dialogue.