Slag

New York City
slaggallery.com

@slaggallery / irina@slaggallery.com / Future Fair Voices: Slag Gallery / Artsy

The work of Anthony Akinbola and Naomi Safran-Hon hold an unwavering investigation into the liminal spaces and dialogs of mixed materials. 

Using an array of found objects, common materials and familiar images drawn from everyday life, Akinbola and Safran-Hon both create highly tangible structures. Of different birth places, Anthony Akinbola and Naomi Safran-Hon create statements about the fragility of human experience, the complicated nature of one's home, and the vicissitudes of collective identities. Both artists create individually captivating aesthetic systems; their process lingering at the intersection of assemblage, photography, sculpture, and painting with a focus on the internal energy of the material, continuously emboldening the viewer to look beyond the surface. The paintings by the two artists will act as memorials-serving as their own architecture-claiming their own space, realized within, and as new construction.

ANTHONY O. AKINBOLA
Anthony O. Akinbola is a Nigerian-American interdisciplinary artist who employs the ready made motif in relation to the human experience and history. Working with sculpture, performative and text-based works Akinbola is attuned to the void between artistic intention and the viewer’s own comprehension, and he transforms this chasm into a discourse of sorts, using it as a source of creative energy. 

Akinbola uses Du rags and other found iconography to delve into themes of consumption, respectability and cultural identity. Akinbola attempts to use the Du Rag; an object used in the maintenance of black hair, as an abstracted proposition to question perceptions around cultural identity in a globalized world.

Anthony O. Akinbola graduated from SUNY Purchase College in 2016. In the summer of  2018, Akinbola installed an 8 x 40’ public artwork CAMOUFLAGE  with the Queens Museum and in 2019 he was awarded Van Lier Fellowship by New York Museum of Art and Design. In 2020, Akinbola will have a solo show at Museum of Art and Design, NY; his work will be part of a group exhibition at Zuckerman Museum of Art, GA and he will be an artist in residency at Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna.

NAOMI SAFRAN-HON
“Naomi Safran-Hon affixes one or more of her photographic prints to a canvas, then uses a razor to cut through the print and canvas along the details of architecture and light in the photograph. Behind the gaps and voids she opens, she then stitches a layer of porous textile, typically lace, and through which she uses a painter’s knife or trowel to push cement so that it seeps through the painterly plain from behind. This process literalizes the entropic decay of the concrete walls, halls, and doorways of the former living spaces in Safran-Hon’s photographs, but in so doing, plumbs the precarious line between fiction and truth, myth and reality: The representative objectivity of photography and impressionist nature of painting become suffused within one another. “ - Christian Holland

Naomi Safran-Hon received an MFA degree from Yale University (2010) and a BA degree from Brandeis University (2008).  She is also an alumna of Skowhegan Residency (2012) and of ART OMI Residency (2016) and a current Artist-in-Residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

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