14 January – 18 February 2023
FORMah is pleased to present “Emotional Landscapes”, a group show featuring works by Dana Nechmad, Adi Oren and Rives Wiley. The three artists’ works present contrasting perspectives on one’s emotional being, offering a spectrum of views and artistic approaches. The artists bring their own unique style to the gallery space, while exploring various aspects of the human experience. Distinct in their statements, all artworks share a deep message about the search for meaning, whether it comes from within human nature or a response to social interaction, and surrounding reality.
The show presents three artists that bring to the canvas the internal human experience as an Emotional Landscape. Exposing thought provoking visual moments while presenting the broad spectrum of life’s experience.
Dana Nechmad transforms bodily experiences, affecting states, and existential modes into visual manifestations. Nechmad’s work is deeply personal and informed by the ambiguity and drama at the raw core of human experiense. Her figures are strepped of any cultural identifiers and places in a colorful void, reflecting the un-natural environment of contemporary life and the emotional spectrum between demons and angels. For Nechmad, art is a way to connect to the world through active contemplation.
Adi Oren’s paintings showcase divers soaring through open spaces of color and texture as a metaphor for humanity’s ancient obsession with flying. These paintings invite the viewer to take a leap of faith into unknown and explore the concept of freedom through movement, gesture and dance. Oren’s work celebrates the exuberance of life and encourages the viewer to embrace risk and take a chance.
Rives Wiley is a photo surrealist painter who creates idealized interiors inspired by stock photos and social media. These interiors and the figures within them are trapped and confined to the scene and the edges of the canvas. Wiley’s work is fundamentally satirical and attempts to expose how we trap ourselves within the confines of a rectangular frame, influenced by social norms and the dissolution of original expression. Through her work, Wiley reflects the omnipresent influence and toll that such aesthetics have had on our individuality.
Bios:
Dana Nechmad is an interdisciplinary artist working with painting, drawing, embroidery and video. She is interested in moments of emotional threshold. Through figurative, abstract and textual gestures, Nechmad brings to the surface the internal marks experienced within. Nechmad holds an MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018), an MA in Philosophy from the Tel Aviv University (2014), and a BFA in Fine Art from the Libera Academia di belle Arti, Florence, Italy (2010). She is a recipient of the New Artist Society Merit Scholarship, The Earl and Brenda Shapiro Center for Research and Collaboration grant and New American Painting #131.
Adi Oren creates paintings that celebrate the exuberance of life. Through movement, gesture, and dance, she explores the concept of freedom. She was born in 1989 and raised in New York City, and completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Rhode Island School of Design. Oren was Co-Chair of the Ellenville Arts Collective, where she extended her passion for the arts and the importance of bringing art to the community at large. In the summer of 2021 she painted a large-scale outdoor mural in the center of the Hudson Valley town, where her divers have become an emblem of renewal and freedom.
Oren’s work is included in private and corporate collections, and continues to sell at art fairs and galleries around the US. In her early years she fabricated window displays at the legendary Henri Bendel in New York City.
Rives Wiley (b. 1990) is an artist working in New York City. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Wiley’s work has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, Vogue, The Washington Post, Vice: The Creator’s Project, The Huffington Post, and Harpers Bazaar. Her solo exhibitions were shown across US and featured in multiple international art fairs. Wiley is a 2016 Hamiltonian Fellow, a recipient of a 2017 DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities Grant, and has been a Trawick Semi- Finalist.