Partner Videos:

Suzan Frecon's recent oil paintings at
David Zwirner Gallery 

Jordan Casteel Stays in the Moment
Art21 "New York Close Up"

 

EFA Open Studios 2014
Produced by Simba Productions 

Panel: Mid-Career Boost: Challenges and Opportunities 2015

MODERATOR: Amei Wallach, Art critic, Journalist, Author, Filmmaker

PANELISTS: Sanford Hirsch, Executive Director, Gottlieb Foundation Sharon Louden, Artist, Educator, Editor Rachel Selekman, Artist, Archivist and Project Coordinator, Dan Flavin Estate Sue Scott, Former Gallerist, Curator, Writer. 

Music by: El Triple Filtro
OPEN STUDIOS 2014 is an annual event of the EFA Studio Program that invites the public to come explore and interact with our member artists in the intimate setting of their studios.

 

Inside the Artist's Studio Documentary Series

Karina Skvirsky (EFA Studio Program Member)

Mattia Casalegno (EFA Studio Program Member)

Mattia Casalegno is an Italian interdisciplinary artist, live-media performer and installation artist working in a broad range of media. His multidisciplinary work is influenced by both post-conceptualism and digital art, and has been defined relational, immersive, and participatory. Shot and edited by Sushama Parmar.

Cheryl Molnar (EFA Studio Program Member)

The fictional landscapes depicted in my collage paintings are inspired by places I've been, but reimagined into exaggerated environments that reflect man's alteration of nature. So often, land is razed to make way for prefabricated housing developments, strip malls and industrial parks, which alter the natural beauty that initially attracted developers to these sites. -Cheryl Molnar. Shot and edited by Sushama Parmar.

Steed Taylor (EFA Studio Program Member)

This Inside the Artist’s Studio gives insight to the work and practice of Steed Taylor. Born in Cumberland County, NC, Taylor went to the University of North Carolina, American University and Skowhegan. Taylor has shown at the Bronx Museum, Mint Museum, San Bernardino County Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Nasher Museum of Art and the Neuberger Museum of Art's Biennial of Public Art. Shot and edited by Sushama Parmar.

Sarah Dineen (EFA Studio Program Member)

Sarah Dineen's ongoing project Certain Dark Things is a series of large-scale paintings born from Pablo Neruda's Sonnet XVII. The series addresses painting as a physical force, both in its materiality and in its capacity to echo the properties of sculpture and architecture. This is the second Inside the Artist’s Studio on Sarah Dineen’s series Certain Dark Things. Shot and edited by Sushama Parmar.

Tamiko Kawata (EFA Studio Program Member)

Through my artwork, I am searching for another vision and another way of thinking for my life in the expressive space between installation works, sculptures and wall works. I compose overlooked indigenous objects from our daily life as my media. Produced by EI Studio.

Jeanette May (EFA Studio Program Member)

Jeanette May is a photo-based artist using a critical, sometimes playful, approach to investigate representation itself. Although May now works exclusively in photography, her background in painting informs the subjects she explores and her approach to art production. Produced by EI Studio.

Michael Eade (EFA Studio Program Member)

Michael Eade was born in Portland, Oregon. Receiving a BA from Oregon State University he continued studies at the Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenen Kunste, Stuttgart (studying egg tempera painting techniques) and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. While attending NYU, he was an assistant to the American sculptor Louise Nevelson.

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multi-disciplinary artist who works in photography, video and performance. Her work has been exhibited internationally in group and solo exhibitions. In 2015 she was awarded a Fulbright grant and a Jerome Foundation Grant to produce "The Perilous Journey of Maria Palacios", a performance based film that will premier in the 2016 Cuenca Biennale curated by Dan Cameron. Shot and edited by Sushama Parmar.

Amy Myers (EFA Studio Program Member)

I grew up with a set of questions regarding how the universe works, and why things function as they do. I was exposed to ideas concerning experimentation and the notion that everything is a combination of something else. -Amy Myers

Shot and edited by Sushama Parmar.

Cecile Chong (EFA Studio Program Member)

Chong is a multimedia artist working in painting, sculpture and installation by layering materials, identities and histories. Her work addresses ideas of culture interaction and interpretation, as well as the commonalities humans share both in our relationship to nature and to each other. Shot and edited by Sushama Parmar.

Simonette Quamina (EFA Studio Program Member)

In my work I'm investigating the possibilities of drawing when it is combined with printmaking and collage on a larger scale. History, memory, and cultural signifiers are cut and glued together to form a new narrative, which often reference modes of nostalgia. Shot and edited by Sushama Parmar.

Sarah Dineen (EFA Studio Program Member)

Certain Dark Things is an ongoing series of large-scale paintings born from Pablo Neruda's Sonnet XVII. The series addresses painting as a physical force, both in its materiality and in its capacity to echo the properties of sculpture and architecture. It brings together poetry and abstraction as a platform and sanctuary for viewers to find space for interpretation. Produced by EI Studio.

Samira Abbassy (EFA Studio Program Member)

Samira Abbassy was born in Ahwaz, Iran and moved to London, UK as a child. After graduating from Canterbury College of Art, she began showing in London. Her work has been acquired for private and public collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, the British Government Art Collection, the Burger Collection, the Donald Rubin collection (Rubin Museum, NY), the Farjam Collection -Dubai, the Devi Foundation- India, the Omid foundation - Iran, and NYU’s Grey Art Gallery Collection.

Liselot van der Heijden (EFA Studio Program Member)

Born in the Netherlands, lives and works in New York City and Haarlem (NL). Her studio is located at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in midtown Manhattan. Liselot van der Heijden produces installations, videos, objects and photographs.

Rhona Bitner (EFA Studio Program Member)

Richard Jochum (EFA Studio Program Member)

My interest lies in the parallels between photography and theater. The duality of the performance experience parallels that of photography; in both one enters a black space and an image appears. In the CIRCUS and the CLOWN series I focused entirely on the performer in the spotlight.

Although trained as a sculptor I see myself as a media artist. That means that my work is not limited to a single material, it includes all sorts of media. In a recent exhibition for instance I was showing 25 new installations: photography, objects, drawings, and video.


Patricia Leighton (EFA Studio Program Member)

Dannielle Tegeder (EFA Studio Program Member)

Dannielle Tegeder earned her BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She will have her first solo museum exhibition, titled Dannielle Tegeder: Painting in the Extended Field, which opens at the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College this May.
"Having grown up surrounded by Scottish hills and mountains of ever-changing color, texture and light; having traveled Britain and Europe viewing ancient sacred sites like the Ring of Brogar in Orkney or Hagar Qim in Malta, I have experienced first-hand a sense of timelessness and hidden mysteries.

Edgar Jerins (EFA Studio Program Member)

Mahmoud Hamadani (EFA Studio Program Member)

Edgar Jerins was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1958, and his formal artistic training began at the age of fourteen. By the age of 18, Edgar had received a full scholarship from the Scholastic Art Awards to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the oldest school in America that teaches a classical study of the figure.

Endless Roads is a visual narration of a perpetual search. It is a mapping of the unending and abstract nature of pursuit of beauty and meaning - What Borges intimates as "the human game of nights and days," and Rumi refers to as the "search for that which cannot be found."


David Greg Harth (EFA Studio Program Alumni)

Catherine Howe (EFA Studio Program Alumni)

David Greg Harth is a visual artist based in New York City. He works across a diverse spectrum of media including performance, video, installation, drawing, photography, and poetry. His work is often time-based and frequently requires public participation. Harth creates unexpected juxtapositions, often employing elements of tension and ambiguous social situations to provoke dialogues on contemporary issues.

I start finding images after I make them. The paintings might resemble what a woman becomes if she breaks free from the confines of her body, leaving that burdensome object of the male gaze, etc., behind. The gestures become the traces of a painter’s desperate attempt to give birth to imagery without the responsibilities of parenthood. I could pretend they are made by magic, but in truth they come only from me.


Beth Ganz (EFA Studio Program Alumni)

Angela Fraleigh (EFA Studio Program Alumni)

In my current body of work each image serves as a character for a larger narrative; scraps of a past that I personally have little knowledge of. As a small child we lived in a trailer, we had a pet raccoon, my biological father had long blond hair, my parents grew up in the swamps of South Carolina, and smoked a lot of pot.

It is possible to characterize my work as an investigation of the relationship between abstraction and landscape. My practice seeks to reveal a profound interconnection within the types of beauty, orderliness and harmony that emerge in each form, as I see both visual traditions as reflections of a single aesthetic principle. This intuition of unity affects my approach to materials as well as genre, leading me to abandon the conventional categorizations of media in favor of an approach that moves fluidly between painting, photography and drawing.


David Collins (EFA Studio Program Alumni)

JC Lenochan (EFA Studio Program Alumni)

The work is a critique of epistemology through the process of deconstructing objects and de-circulating institutional relics, reconfiguring these commodities the way I think they should look as an initiative to arts transformative function.  In constant reflection, my interests engulf images and forms that already exist, embodying personal/historical text, humor and socratic methods of questioning as a post-colonial pedagogical dialogue on manipulating perspective of the dominant ideology, confronting cultural bias, perceptions of otherness and racial fabrications. 

By layering geometric planes of vivid color, I render scenes inspired by architecture and the unreliability of memory. As the paintings develop, structures begin to assemble into familiar forms suggesting domestic dwellings or industrial buildings. Planes of color crop up to create floors, wall-like surfaces, eaves and overhangs.  However, these architectural notions are never allowed to remain whole. They fracture, split apart, and fall away to reveal other chambers or the outside world. I am fascinated by these liminal spaces as a metaphor for the fluidness of memory.

 Houben Tcherkelov (RT) (Short-Term Member)


Houben Tcherkelov is a painter and experimental artist who lives and works in New York. In his early photographs, film, and installations post-communist Bulgaria and Bulgarian art is a recurrent theme. In his more recent work, Tcherkelov paints images from American and other national currencies using impasto, glaze, foil, acrylic and watercolor techniques. In all of his work the artist seeks to suggest the way in which symbolic images legitimize national power.