Bits and Little Pieces
Guest-curated by Conrad Guevara
July 8–September 10, 2022
Opening Reception Friday, July 8, 7–10 PM
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Bits and Little Pieces, an exhibition curated by Conrad Guevara opening Friday, July 8th, 2022. Bits and Little Pieces is a continuation of BICA’s curatorial exchange program initiated in 2020 with Wedding of the Waters, curated by A. Will Brown, connects curators from outside of the region with artists in Western New York and puts their work into dialogue with an international art world. This exhibition includes works by Becky Brown (Buffalo), Phung-Tien Phan (Essen, Germany), Larell Potter (Buffalo), Joseph Rayo (Brooklyn), Kathryn Shriver (Savannah), and Charlene Tan (San Francisco).
Bits and Little Pieces is inspired by inspiration itself or, perhaps, by boredom itself. It takes as its starting point those things which catch our eyes in the static, that make us gasp in the middle of an infinite scroll. Whether it’s the devotional handicraft of a small sculptural detail, an awkward moment of shared humanity, or a curiously indecipherable composition, the works in Bits and Little Pieces are “Saved to Collection,” they are the ones that make you think twice before you remove them forever from the prosthetic memory of your camera roll.
“It’s probably that my mind’s eye has melted over the last 10 years of sleeping too close to my camera roll,” says Guevara of the process of organizing Bits and Little Pieces. “Market forces and my own fractured sense of time has whittled away at my attentive spirit. As the thumbnails whizz, whizz, whizz it’s a wonder how anything can break its way into someone’s attention field. There are some little parts that work, bits that clack against one’s desires and pull themselves and their bigger bodies through the quickly closing door of our focus. The dog is famously in the details.”
Conrad Guevara is an artist based in Los Angeles and is one-third of the artist collective Bonanza who exhibited at BICA in 2019. Beyond the exhibition, Guevara will visit Buffalo for a series of studio visits and critiques connected to BICA School. He’ll also give a curator tour of the exhibition.
This exhibition will open Friday, July 8th with a reception from 7-10 pm and will run through September 10, 2022.
About the artists
Becky Brown was born in Manhattan and lived in Brooklyn and the Bronx before relocating to Buffalo in 2019. She received her BA from Brown University (Providence, RI) with a double major in Visual Arts and English, and her MFA in Painting from Hunter College (NYC). She works between painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation using found images, objects, and texts. Diverse materials inform her practice, including pre-modern poetic forms, current headlines, photo-journalism, and discarded appliances. Recent solo exhibitions include Arts+Leisure Gallery (NYC) and Fort Gondo Complex for the Arts (St. Louis). Group exhibitions include The Drawing Center (NYC), Queens Museum (NYC), Freight+Volume Gallery (NYC), Flux Factory (NYC), NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), YoungArts Foundation (Miami, FL), and Religare Arts Initiative (Delhi, India). Brown has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Jentel, and the Edward Albee and Saltonstall Foundations, among others.
In her sculptures and videos, Phung-Tien Phan explores the social implications of everyday objects. Her assemblages reflect a generic Millennial sensibility, exposing how roles play out in public and private, as we carefully curate the cultural references that we surround ourselves with.
“Life is art, art is life.” This is Larell Potter’s philosophy. Gifted with the ability to refresh the overlooked tidbits of everyday life, Larell reclaims the discarded. Adding images influenced by TV or embossing these castoffs into glistening treasures, he revitalizes the world into a distinct narrative that is completely his own. “Everything has the possibility to be turned into art”.
Joseph Rayo is a photographer and mixed media artist. Rayo is interested in hierarchies built around image content. Taking from discarded tools, he repurposes the once displaced and viciously recycled photograph into one that testifies against its own uncertainty. He currently lives and works in New York City.
Kathryn Shriver is a visual artist from Western New York, now currently living and working in Savannah, Georgia. Her work spans painting, sculpture, drawing, video, and writing, but is founded on the methods and legacies of the fiber arts. Kathryn holds a BA in Studio Arts from Wells College (Aurora, NY) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University (Montreal), and has also received training from the Art Students League in New York and as a copyist in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. She has attended residencies with the Vermont Studio Center, MOMUS, and Sager Reeves Gallery (Columbia, MO). Her work has been shown across the United States and Canada, including with Studio Sixty Six (Ottawa, ON), Tempus Projects / CUNSTHAUS (Tampa, FL), Gallery 621 (Tallahassee, FL), and Sager Reeves Gallery. Alongside her art practice, Kathryn has an invested interest in arts-based research, and has previously worked on funded research-creation projects for artist Nadia Myre (Concordia University, Montreal) and is currently working with the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork research team. Presently, she is working as an Artist Fellow with Contemporary Geometric Beadwork.
Charlene Tan is an artist who lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Born in Houston, Texas she spent most of her childhood in the Philippines only to return to San Francisco to begin her education. Her work has been shown at Intersection for the Arts, Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, [2nd floor projects ], ampersand international arts, and Southern Exposure among other spaces. Her practice is diverse ranging from sculpture to performance, investigating topics on assimilation, consumer culture, digital loss of imagery via facsimile, and post-colonial immigrant diaspora.
This program is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Services Inc.
