Artists: Emmanuel Amoakohene, Stephano Espinoza Galarza, Hunter Foster, Rina Lam Goldfield, Daniela Gomez Paz, Nina Hartmann, Erick Alejandro Hernández, Jonathan Herrera Soto, Soren Hope, Christopher Paul Jordan, Phoebe Little, Estelle Maisonett, Tura Oliveira, Maya Perry, Gabriela Rassi, Bryan Ali Sanchez, María Vargas Aguilar, Can Yağız

SPURS Gallery is pleased to announce the initiation of its long-term collaboration with the Yale MFA Painting & Printmaking program. At the same time, the gallery will present “A Breath on the Glass—Yale MFA Painting & Printmaking Class of 2023” on September 1, 2023. In the post-pandemic world, inspiring and maintaining independent agency seems to have become a crucial way of relearning the world. Thus, how to carve out a space of conversations within this context was naturally the shared vision during the preparations for this collaboration. “A Breath on the Glass” provides an image of hope — a trace of warmth shining in coldness. The 18 young artists from Yale MFA Painting & Printmaking Class will demonstrate, through various mediums and terms, their explorations, thinking, and attendance inwards and outwards.

Emmanuel Amoakohene
Born 1993, Kumasi, Ghana.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Emmanuel Amoakohene was born and raised in Kumasi, Ghana and received his BFA from Rutgers University in 2020. Amoakohene’s work probes the everyday textures of his milieux to reflect on time and memory. His practice oscillates between traditional, experimental, conceptual and material possibilities of drawing. This culminates into ensembles that utilize drawing, printmaking, collage, photographs and installation. His works employ materials such as charcoal, ink, and tape, as well as wooden structures that extend the boundaries of his pieces, creating spaces of dislocation between scenes. He encourages viewers to linger and find meaning in his works as mediated through their own subjectivities. Recurrent in his work are motifs of constraint, the in-betweenness of diasporic identity, and transformation.

Stephano Espinoza Galarza
Born 1992, Guayaquil, Ecuador.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Stephano Espinoza Galarza was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador. He received a BA in Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University in 2015. His work explores primal narratives, fantasies, and lost memories through an interdisciplinary practice. His subject matter are forms undergoing transformation, oscillating between physical object and depiction. He sources the content from memory, photos, and observation. Circular time, non-sequential narratives, and signifying chains frame the inner experience of his work. Through color, shifts in scale, and both pictorial and sculptural renderings, he proposes new forms of perception.

Hunter Foster
Born 1993, Little Rock, USA.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Hunter Foster was born in Little Rock, USA and received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Foster’s works blur the boundary between painting and sculpture, incorporating a variety of materials, such as textiles and metal. He constructs his paintings by winding 2” strips of dyed canvas around a wooden core, creating a densely packed field upon which he applies pigment. His practice is deeply informed by post-War American painting, and interrogates topics of faith, art history, spatial politics, and labor. He has exhibited work at Good Weather in Chicago, The Anderson, VCU in Richmond, Lock Up International in London, Gern en Regalia in New York, among others.

Rina Lam Goldfield
Born in Northampton, USA.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Rina Lam Goldfield was born in Northampton, USA, and received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2010. She is an artist and educator whose practice is both experimental and research-based. She is interested in topics of language, chance, creation, mythology, and continuity. Most recently, her work has engaged books as a subject. She uses calligraphy, installation, and abstraction to create works that confound the experience of reading.

Daniela Gomez Paz
Born 1992, Cali, Colombia.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Born in Cali, Colombia, Daniela Gomez Paz immigrated to Queens, USA. She acquired a Double Degree: BFA in Printmaking/Painting & BA in Art History from SUNY Purchase School of Art and Design, a MAT from Queens College. Her pursued path in the arts and background in pedagogy led her to facilitate a wide range of programs with children, youth, seniors, and families in schools, museums, and community centers. Utilizing various kinds of natural and synthetic fibers and objects, Daniela Gomez Paz crafts intersections between weaving, drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture. Her work threads itself from the autobiographical to the familial as she engages in social grounds with perceptions of femininity, and ideas about nature—what is natural, unnatural and the layered tensions these oppositions hold. She has exhibited with Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, UNTITLED Art Fair with Latchkey Gallery in NYC, and Plain Gallery in Italy.

Nina Hartmann
Born 1990, Miami, USA.
Lives and works in Long Island City, USA.
Born in Miami, USA, Nina Hartmann is a multimedia artist based in Long Island City, USA. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Her works operate at the nexus between sculpture and painting, and conceptually map the spaces connecting mysticism, alternative histories, systems theory, and critical thought. Her work has been featured at Tara Downs in NYC, Silke Lindner Gallery in NYC, Perrotin in NYC, V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, Harkawik Gallery in Los Angeles, and more.

Erick Alejandro Hernández
Born 1994, Matanzas, Cuba.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Erick Alejandro Hernández is an artist from Cuba living and working in New Haven, USA. He received his BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. Hernández’s practice is invested in exploring how traditional techniques like oil painting and drawing can shift material forms in order to hold complex individual and collective histories. Revolving around overarching narratives such as a car crash or the death of a loved one, his paintings are investigative allegories exploring individual and shared experiences like grief, assimilation, and exile. Hernàndez has been a fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Oxbow, Yaddo, Macdowell, Mass MoCA, and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, among others. Recent group and solo exhibitions include The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, Perrotin in New York, Yossi Milo in New York, Harper’s Books in East Hampton, and Vox Populi in Philadelphia.

Jonathan Herrera Soto
Born 1994, Chicago, USA.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Jonathan Herrera Soto was born in Chicago, USA and received a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2017. He is a recent recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship and Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship. Herrera Soto’s work brings to the forefront the marginalized experiences of pleasure, pain, sex, love, risks, ceremony, and grief.

Soren Hope
Born 1993, Long Island, USA.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Soren Hope was born on Long Island, USA, and received a BA in Studio Art from Carleton College in 2015. Hope’s practice focuses on the body as a site of uncertainty. With oil paint on stretched canvas and paneI, their work depicts images of bodily disarray or interruption. Imagery of costumes, pranks, double meanings, and incidental resemblances further test the trustworthiness of perception. The artist exhibited their first solo show at Duck Creek Arts Center in Springs in September 2018.

Christopher Paul Jordan
Born 1990, Tacoma, USA.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Christopher Paul Jordan is a painter and public artist from Tacoma, Washington. The artist laces salvaged materials—window screens and debris netting—with acrylic paint, simulating conditions of relocation to raise questions about human relationships. Through parallel practices in performance, installation, and sculpture, his investigations are often staged or permanently embedded in public space. Jordan’s first museum exhibition, In the Interim - Ritual Ground for a Future Black Archive, buries predictions of the end of the world by African American participants on the grounds of the Frye Art Museum until the year 2123. His 20ft bronze, aluminum, and steel sculpture andimgonnamisseverybody (2021) is the centerpiece for The AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle. Jordan is a Leslie Lohman museum fellow. His recent residencies include Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Museum of Glass.

Phoebe Little
Born 1992, Lincoln, USA.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Phoebe Little was born in Lincoln, USA and received a BFA from University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2016. Her still life paintings examine contemporary constructions of identity through consumption and aestheticization of ideologies. She contemplates the relationships between objects, personal histories, and politics of production. The objects she paints are anthropomorphized, becoming actors in staged interactions. Her source material consists of photographs created through a combination of physically constructed still lifes and digital collage. These manipulated images defy the visual logic of consistent light sources and perspective, creating subtle surrealism. Her practice is in dialogue with the tradition of trompe l’oeil painting and explores the paradox of the simultaneous legibility and deception of illusion.

Estelle Maisonett
Born 1991, Bronx, USA.
Lives in Queens, USA and works in New York, USA.
Estelle Maisonett is an interdisciplinary, mixed-media artist and educator born and raised in the Bronx, New York. She received her BFA from SUNY Purchase College in 2013. Her work is an investigation of how personal and socio-cultural relationships to objects inform preconceived notions of identity. Through a collection of photography, printmaking, sculpture, painting, found objects, and garments, Maisonett’s life-size collages explore the creation of archives. Maisonett has worked with The Parsons School of Design, NYU, The New York City Housing Authority, NYC Department of Education, the Bronx Children’s Museum and among others in NYC. She was a recipient of the 2023 Barry Cohen Scholarship, 2022 Alice Kimball Travel Grant Fellowship, 2021 New Wave Artist in Residence, 2018 Artist in the Marketplace Fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and a 2018 BronxArtSpace Artist in Residence. Estelle has exhibited at The Bronx Museum of Art, Chashama, Field Projects, Bronx Art Space, El Barrio Artspace at PS109, Longwood Art Gallery, The Andrew Freedman Home, among others.

Tura Oliveira
Born 1990, Fall River, USA.
Lives and works in Brooklyn, USA.
Tura Oliveira was born in Fall River, USA and received their BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013. Tura is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans textiles, sculpture, installation, and performance. They use the dual languages of craft and science fiction to center marginalized visual culture including that of queer communities and Latinx leftist political movements. Their practice is rooted in the sensual materiality and inescapable politics of cloth; hand dyeing, mono printing, quilting, and beading transform silk and found fabrics into objects that straddle past and future, human and non-human. Oliveira creates sculptural works that recall internal organs, humanoid hybrids, egg sacs, and tropical creepers with tentacles outstretched. They have had solo exhibitions at Geary Contemporary, LaMama Galleria, BRIC, and Wave Hill (all in New York), and a 2023 solo booth at Material Art Fair in Mexico City. They have been awarded fellowships and residencies at the British School at Rome, BRIC, the Museum of Arts and Design, Wave Hill, Ars Nova, A.I.R Gallery, Yaddo, and the Tides Institute.

Maya Perry
Born 1994, New York, USA.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Maya Perry spent her formative years as a drummer/singer in the experimental duo “Laila” and lives as a painter/performer. She’s performed both solo and collaboratively in venues and art spaces across cities such as Tel Aviv, Haifa, New York, Berlin, Leipzig, and etc. She became a prominent figure in the counterculture art scene in Tel Aviv, where she lived for seventeen years before returning to the United States for her degree. Her work and experimental films have been installed and projected at festivals, museums and galleries. Her goal is to create sources of light where the internal and external can exist simultaneously and forgotten, repressed, and/or present experiences can come to the surface. She centers moments of contemplation, repetition, passivity and rest. Her practice oscillates from mediums and techniques such as painting to 16mm film to stop-motion animation, writing, sound, and performance. She is recently incorporating themes of live performance and sound composition into her practice.

Gabriela Rassi
Born1983, Goiânia, Brazil.
Lives and works in Providence, USA.
Gabriela Rassi was born and raised in Goiânia, Brazil in a family of Arab immigrants. She received a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2020. Prior to art school she toured nationally and internationally as a musician and was a member of the DIY music scene in New York City. She has an expansive practice that includes painting, performance, projection, video, and sound. She layers materials and mediums in order to abstract information and generate meaning through contradiction, ambiguity or tension. She is interested in the emotional processing that leads to mutation, and dissipation of information. She implicates the viewer by allowing space for their own subjectivity to enter the work. In January 2023, her work was shown at Thierry Goldberg in New York City.

Bryan Ali Sanchez
Born 1989, San Diego, USA.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Bryan Ali Sanchez was born in San Diego, USA and earned an AA from San Diego City College in 2016, a BFA from California State University, Long Beach in 2019. His paintings address the effects and hardships of belonging to a working class community. He explores moments between stillness and tension. He achieves a blurred, ephemeral quality in his paintings through a range of paint application, and color combinations which emit a sensorial quality. His practice engages in a dialogue between past and present which reveal a fragmented understanding of two halves reflecting each other based on family history and childhood along the U.S-Mexico border. He recently exhibited at VETA Galeria in Madrid, Spain and GROVE in London, United Kingdom.

María Vargas Aguilar
Born 1994, Guatemala City, Guatemala.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
María Vargas Aguilar is an artist and educator from Guatemala City, currently residing both in Guatemala and the United States. She received her BA in Painting and Video from Bennington College in 2018 and graduated High School from the United World Colleges program, where she later was a Visual Arts teacher at UWC Mahindra from 2018 to 2020. Vargas Aguilar’s work considers the long-established artistic dialogue between abstraction and figuration in the context of images of state-sponsored violence. Her practice explores the use of disembodied viewpoints and their potential for meaning and new expressions of subjectivity. She has participated at residencies such as RAPACES/Emerging Central American Artists in Nicaragua, and the Henry Moore Artists in Residence program in England. Vargas Aguilar has been the recipient of various academic scholarships and awards from UWC, Bennington College, Yale School of Art and the Shelby Davis Foundation.

Can Yağız
Born 1996, Istanbul, Turkey.
Lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Can Yağız was born in Istanbul, Turkey and received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018. The artist’s practice incorporates discarded materials, such as crumpled paper, used wrappers, and receipts. The degradation of these elements is integral to the narratives constructed within Yağız’s pieces, which contemplate themes of belonging, selfhood, and decay.