Ghosts
Group exhibition at PS122 Gallery
September 7 – 29, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 7, 6-8pm
Closing Reception and Artist Talk: Sunday September 29, 4pm
Artists: Elvira Clayton, Francisco Donoso, Kathleen Granados, Nazanin Noroozi, Chelsea Ramírez, and Corinne Spencer.
Curator: Francisco Donoso
Viewing Hours: Friday – Sunday, 1- 6 pm and by appointment
PS122 Gallery 150 1st Ave
New York, NY 10009
The multi-media exhibition, Ghosts, facilitates a passage whereby viewers are invited to move beyond the surface of everyday life and towards the intangible experiences, memories and histories that shape reality. Ghosts features works by Elvira Clayton, Francisco Donoso, Kathleen Granados, Nazanin Noroozi, Chelsea Ramírez and Corinne Spencer. Acting as intermediaries between the past and present, the artists draw upon their distinctive practices to suggest alternative ways of remembering what we cannot afford to lose: our humanity. Their insistence on accessing the hidden dimensions of our collective existence serves as a profound call to transcend the mundane and engage with uncomfortable truths, pleasure, and life itself.
Embedded with archival photographs, historical documents, slave-era textiles, and objects from the natural world, Elvira Clayton’s works serve as ritualistic vessels holding stories of lost and forgotten people. Her current project, 436 (2023-ongoing), is a large-scale installation informed by an 1859 slave auction catalog. Upon completion, the installation will include a series of 436 textile-based sculptures embodying each person listed in the catalog as numbers 1 through 436, the order in which they went onto the auction block. This was one of the largest recorded slave auctions in U.S. history. The sculptures featured in this exhibition amplify the story of George, his wife Sue, and their two sons, George Jr., and Henry- the first family of enslaved people sold through this traumatic historical event. Clayton is creating a universe that pays homage to her own enslaved ancestors and opens a portal for viewers to experience a dignified remembrance of these once dehumanized people and their stories.
Similar to Clayton’s use of textiles and objects as a way to summon past lives, Kathleen Granados investigates memory, and generational inheritances while reflecting on the tension between personal, public and political experiences of home. Often working with objects from her ancestral family’s home on Long Island, NY, and therefore the people that have inhabited that home, Granados creates installations, sculptures and sound works that thin the veil between present and past. In her work Distant as the Milky Way (2023), originally commissioned for the Uptown Triennial 2023 at the Wallach Art Gallery, Granados combines her late father’s cassette mix tape collection with recordings of her father and herself. This intergenerational recording transcends the edges of time and space via a stereo that is enveloped in a black crocheted textile whose shape recalls an otherworldly cosmic form.
The underlying spiritual evocations found in Granados’s work can also be seen in Francisco Donoso’s mixed-media paintings which seek to materialize the phenomenological. His work delves into the psychic spaces of migration beyond assumptions of borders, informed by his experiences as a DACA recipient. In Where does all the grief go? (2024), he works on both sides of digitally printed acrylic glass and semi-transparent mylar to create phantom images combining a self-portrait as a child before migrating from Ecuador, ocean waves, tracings from a Palestinian keffiyeh that mimics a chain-link fence, and text from his collective poem “where does all the grief go?”, which combines lines from found songs and poems on the topic of grief. The layers act as symbols for unseen forces that shape migration, and the lingering echoes of past and lost lives.
Corinne Spencer’s photographs, video installations and poetry are a sensorial exploration of the Black feminine body in nature, blurring the boundaries between inner experience and the exterior world to capture the multitudinous of her identity, desire and sense of futurity. Spencer traverses both external landscapes—the cascading waters and verdant forests—and internal ones, reflecting on the profound depths of emotion, memory, and identity that reside within her. Her video work Splendor (2022), situates Blackness within the beauty, tenderness and sensual magnitude of a liberated interiority, not only in critical opposition to the cascade of images of death and violence against Black people that flood the cultural psyche, but as a way to reunite with life’s-source. She writes, “I want to taste everything. I am hungry not just for freedom, but for all unseen things which are born in the pitch black space of dream. Joy rises from this place and so does Splendor.” Spencer’s work reminds us that divinity is an embodied state, and not just an aspirational concept; it resides within the lush textures of the Black feminine body as a vessel of resilience, sensuality, and sacred power.
Similar to the ways Spencer delves into the spiritual undercurrents of her subjects, Nazanin Noroozi accesses the emotional and unseen dimensions of her images. She repeats imagery, like slow moving film stills, in order to iterate versions of history, memory, people and place. Her practice is rooted in a search for universal evocations of loss and longing. Using imperfect materials like overexposed family photos, blurred amateur clips, or pixelated video recordings, Noroozi explores fragile states of being and the idea of home that never materializes, offering viewers an exploration of a universal sense of loss and displacement . Her recent work in progress series False Dawn (2024) makes reference to stranded migrant boats and the refugee crisis at the Mediterranean shores, exploring imagery of oceans and clouds in ominous blue-tone color palettes, capturing the essence of coastal storms rolling onto land, heavy with anticipation. As Noroozi states: “The False Dawn is centered around the idea of migration and displacement and aims to allow viewers to insert themselves and their own stories into the found pictures and will reanimate the historical narratives from the perspective of contemporary concerns about diasporic experiences and migratory minds.”
Chelsea Ramírez’s mixed-media figurative drawings emerge and disappear like apparitions or memories, ebbing in and out of focus as they fade into moments of pure materiality, like iron oxide, charcoal dust, and salt crystals. The figures are drawn and imagined from family portraits, memories, and self portraits that melt into each other. The ethereality achieved through painterly layering is contrasted by the resilient intensity of the gaze her figures cast upon the viewer. Making references to the complex sensations associated with water, be they rivers or tears, the works unveil the emotional nuances connected to a displaced psyche as seen in River Glint, Crystal Blues (2024). Ramírez’s spectral compositions linger in the liminal space of diasporic existence rich with nostalgia.
The works in Ghosts conjure the unseen forces that shape our identities and influence our perceptions of reality. Each artist contributes to a collective exploration of the intangible aspects of our shared humanity by tapping into personal and historical archives, reappropriating found objects, materials and symbols, and exploring the rich interiority of the self. Living amid a historical epoch saturated with catastrophic human loss at an unprecedented scale, these artists confront the slippery nature of life, narrated by lingering ghosts of persistent pasts.
Artist: Kathleen Granados
Kathleen Granados (b. 1986) is an artist and educator based in New York City. She uses her family archives and everyday materials to create works that span sculpture, installation, sound, and public projects. She holds an MFA from Hunter College, and a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she has been a part-time instructor. She also serves as a visiting artist for the BFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts.
https://www.kathleengranados.com/
Artist: Nazanin Noroozi
Nazanin Noroozi’s practice is deeply rooted in a quest for universal expressions of loss and longing, often characterized as melancholia, drawing inspiration from concepts like the Portuguese saudade or the Turkish huzun. Noroozi has exhibited at galleries and museums across the world including SPACES, Cleveland, OH; Athopos, Athens, Greece; Golestani Gallery, Dusseldorf, Germany; Immigrant Artist Biennial, NARS, Brooklyn; Noyes Museum of Art, New Jersey; as well as NY Live Arts, School of Visual Arts, and Postcrypt Art Gallery at Columbia University. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from NYFA Fellowship (film and video), Marabeth Cohen-Tyler Print/Paper Fellowship at Dieu Donne, Artistic Freedom Initiative, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and Mass MoCA residency. She is an editor at large of Kaarnamaa; A Journal of Art History and Criticism. Noroozi completed her MFA in painting and drawing from Pratt Institute. She lives and works in New York City, NY.
https://www.nazaninnoroozi.net/
Artist: Corinne Spencer
Corinne Spencer is a Brooklyn based artist working at the intersection of video, photography, and installation. She received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2010 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2014. Her work has been performed and exhibited throughout the US, including a 2015 city-commissioned installation of her ongoing video work, HUNGER in Boston, MA, an exhibition with Samson Projects at NADA NY (New York, NY, 2016), Root Shock, a three person exhibition at Brandeis University (Waltham, MA, 2019), a two person show, Shanna Maurizi & Corinne Spencer, at La MaMa, La Galleria (New York, NY, 2019), and a solo exhibition, Splendor, at the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY, 2022) among others. Corinne is the recipient of several grants, awards, and fellowships including the Franklin Furnace Fund Award, two Foundation for Contemporary Arts grants, the MacDowell Fellowship, The Constance Saltonstall Fellowship, and an ongoing art residency with the Meerkat Media Collective, a renowned filmmaking group based in Brooklyn, NY.
https://www.corinnespencer.com/about
Artist: Elvira Clayton
Elvira Clayton (b. 1971, Lafayette, LA) is a visual artist and performance artist. Anchored in historical research, much of Clayton’s practice responds to the lives of people who lived under American slavery. Elvira Clayton has had solo shows at The AEGON Gallery, Centre College, Danville, KY, Fine Arts Gallery, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY, and Riverfront Art Gallery, Yonkers, NY. As a member of The Black Women Artists For Black Lives Matter Performance Group, she has presented performances at The New Museum, NY, Project Row Houses, Houston, TX, and The Brooklyn Museum, NY. Clayton is a 2022–2023 A.I.R. Gallery Fellow and a 2022 Robert Blackburn Studio Immersion Fellow. She has been awarded residencies with The Women’s Studio Workshop, Residency Unlimited, The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and Blue Mountain Center. She has been both a Laundromat Project Create Change Fellow and Commissioned Artist. She is a 2022 Barbara Deming Fund, Money For Women Grant recipient, and a four-time recipient of The Manhattan Community Arts Fund Grant. Her work has been featured in The Killens Review, Glasstire, Callaloo Journal, and Artsy.net. She lives in Harlem, NY, and works from her studio at The Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY.
Artist: Chelsea Ramírez
Chelsea Ramírez is a first generation Colombian-American artist best known for her mixed media, charcoal drawings. Ramírez received her B.F.A from the University of Central Florida in Orlando and continued her studio practice at the Edinburgh College of Art and Design in Scotland and New York Studio School in NYC. She completed her MFA from Louisiana State University. Her work has been shown at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, Alabama; Prospect 3+: BR Invitational in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Denise Bibro Fine Art in Chelsea, NYC; the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, NYC; BAM Rudin Family Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; and Established Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; amongst others. She has been published in The Artist’s Working journal (2016), Flyway Journal (2017), and Soy Mujerista (2019) and was the recipient of the 2021 US Latinx Art Forum CHISPA grant.
Artist & Curator: Francisco Donoso
Francisco Donoso is a transnational artist and curator based in NYC. He recently completed the LMCC Workspace Residency 2023-24. Originally from Ecuador, but raised in Miami, FL, he’s been a recipient of DACA since 2013. He received his BFA from Purchase College and has participated in fellowships and residencies at Wave Hill as a Van Lier Fellow, Stony Brook University, and The Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace, among others. Francisco has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout the US notably at El Museo del Barrio, The Bronx Museum of Arts, Children’s Museum of Manhattan, Wave Hill, Kates-Ferri Projects, NADA House, Field Projects, Second Street Gallery, Baik+Khnessyer, and SPRING/BREAK LA. He is a recipient of an Artist Corp Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Cultural Solidarity Fund Grant. His work is in corporate and many private collections like Capital One Collection and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Collection. Donoso’s work has been written about in Art & Object, Hyperallergic, The Latinx Project Intervenxions, and The Financial Times among others.
https://www.franciscodonoso.com/