HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

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EXHIBITION IMAGES | ARTIST PAGE: HOVSEPIAN | ZHANG

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Halsey McKay is proud to present new works by gallery artists Sheree Hovsepian and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang at the Armory Show. The gallery located at Booth F23 in  the Focus section of the fair curated by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Chief Curator, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, dedicated to solo and dual-artist presentations of today’s most relevant and compelling artworks. For further information please contact info@halseymckay.com

Through additive and subtractive layering, Sheree Hovsepian’s inventive approach to drawing, photography, and collage emphasize the performative and bodily implications of line and shape. In her newest assemblages, Hovsepian combines silver gelatin photographs and photograms married with frag-ments of ceramic, string, textiles and wood. The prominent inclusion of clay makes a connection between pho-tography and ceramics, both made by impressions (of light or of the hand) and with the use of chemistry and machine. The string drawings above and below the images evoke new-age craft, as lengths of string resemble rays of celestial light, beaming down on a composition of earthly bodies.

Continuing a trans-generational practice Miranda Fengyuan Zhang draws influence from memories of watching her grandmother unravel and recycle old sweaters to fabricate new functional clothing. Zhang’s own language began as a child identifying recognizable imagery in the endlessly improvised arrangements of abstract shapes and colors in her grandmother’s up-cycled garments. Working formally and freely in weaving and knitting, Zhang uses leftover industrial threads from remote Chinese factories to juxtapose contemporary experience with tradition that harkens back to the origins of object making. Vibrating at the borders of abstraction and representation Zhang’s subjects are mysterious but feel familiar: semi-abstract gardens, animal silhouettes, layers of colorful mountains, volcanoes, rivers and icebergs. The tactile surface presents a structure for material to clash, and she is able to manipulate the specific properties of each yarn to create wildly varied textures.

Sheree Hovsepian (b. 1974 Isfahan, Iran) earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions have been organized by Halsey McKay Gallery, Team Bungalow, Los Ange-les (with Paul Mpagi Sepuya, 2019), Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago (2018), and Higher Pictures (2017). Recent group exhibitions include Affinities for Abstraction: Women Artists on Eastern Long Island, 1950-2020, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; There’s There There, Hauser & Wirth, Southampton, NY; Arches & Ink, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond, Tang Museum Saratoga Springs, NY; Seductive Reduction, CHART Gallery, New York; Material Gestures, Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago; and Where Do We Stand?, The Drawing Center, New York . Hovsepian’s work is in the perma-nent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bronx Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Everson Museum, amongst others. She lives and works in New York City. Sheree Hovsepian is represented by Halsey Mckay Gallery.

Miranda Fengyuan Zhang (b. 1993 Shanghai, China) earned her BFA in studio art from NYU in 2016. Solo exhibitions include Candice Madey with Chambers Gallery, New York; Capsule Gallery, Shanghai; Halsey McKay Gallery, and Farifax Dorn Projects in East Hampton. She has been the recipient of the La Maison de l’Art Contemporain residency in Asilah, Morocco and will be an upcoming resident at the Arquetopia Foundation in Oaxaca, Mexico. Miranda Fengyuan Zhang is represented by Halsey McKay Gallery