Allusions

About

“We are so excited to open with Allusions because it highlights the incredible diversity of creative works happening in Harlem,” said Meg Sullivan, Director of Programs & Community Engagement at JCC Harlem. “It has been a pleasure and an honor to partner with Art in Flux in our first months, to help us say hello to the Harlem community.”

The exhibition includes two-dimensional and multi-dimensional (some interactive) installations presented by uptown artists hailing from vastly different backgrounds and upbringings who share a message of multiculturalism and inclusiveness.  The works explore immigration, cross-cultural existence, intersectionality, religion, politics, and current world events with an artistic vision to encourage empathy, understanding and tolerance.

Suprina’s twenty foot wall of trash, This Too Shall Pass, intimating a landscape alongside Noreen Dean Dresser’s storm paintings of Hurricane Katrina skies, for example, are austere reminders of the imbalances of our ecosystem and more importantly social systems.  This Too Shall Pass is made of layers and layers of that which we cast away. Although devoid of life, the implication is apparent that better care should be taken of the earth and the people upon it.   Alice Mizrachi’s two works, Mazal and Our Unborn Daughter Desires Peace, are influenced by her identity as an American Israeli. The works are focused on ideas that empower change and encourage community and unity amongst women.  Uday K. Dhar has been engaged in an ongoing process over more than a decade of depicting in visual terms the experience of immigration. His new work Professor E. Explains it all to you -THE THREE R's, the first in a series titled Continental Drift depicts a world that is about the free migration of people, flora, fauna and ideas. Aya Rodriguez-Izumi’s meditation room up a set of spiral stairs and hovering above the other artworks further engages visitors offering a moment of self-reflection and perhaps an opportunity to re-enter the main room with an open mind and a willingness to engage anew.  These along with all of the works in the exhibition examine disparate thoughts, challenge our current existence and suggest a world that embraces dissimilarities.  The abstract installations and two-dimensional works invite visitors to contemplate and understand them on their own time and terms.

Featuring:

Alice Mizrachi, Aya Rodriguez-Izumi, FEEGZ - Carlos Jesus Martinez Dominguez, Jenevieve Reid, Michael Pribich, MOOSH, Noreen Dean Dresser, Suprina, Tammy Nguyen, Uday K. Dhar and Xavier Roux.