Press Release: Coming Home

Coming Home

November 2, 2022 – December 18, 2022
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, 460C Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA

Featuring: Hillary Babick, Brendan John Carroll, Sunny Moxin Chen, Alexandra Chiou, Hilary Doyle, Ana Maria Farina, Andrew Fish, Max Heiges, David Heo, Lavaughan Jenkins, James Johnson, Abbi Kenny, DaNice D. Marshall, Meghan Murray, Aliyah Salmon, Elspeth Schulze, Ezara Spangl, Leigh Suggs, Gus Williams, and Helena Wurzel.

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to present Coming Home, a group exhibition curated to showcase a wide range of interpretations of home: home as space with close friends; a sacred place alone outdoors; holidays with a house filled with family shouting; a simple evening dinner with a partner; an unhappy sentiment; returning to a home country that is an ocean away; a familiar smell; anger & frustration; new beginnings, and so much more. The artists featured represent many different media, disciplines, and ideas, and come together to form a full picture of the rich variety in contemporary art today.

Hillary Babick (b.1989, Dallas, Texas) is a Boston based painter. She received her BFA from Boston University in 2011 and the Arts and Business Council of Greater Boston recognized her as a 2021 finalist for the Walter Feldman Emerging Artist Fellowship. Her oil and gouache paintings of friends, family, and strangers from instagram explore private vs. public personas and daily life. She is interested in how we behave when no one is watching and when we know we are being watched. Taking inspiration from genre painting and social media, she explores moments that deserve closer consideration and presses pause on rapid media consumption to examine our motivations and beauty in the everyday. Her work is held in private collections across the country.

Brendan John Carroll earned a Bachelor’s degree at Providence College, where he studied psychology and art. After graduation, he moved to New York City to develop as a painter while also working at Columbia University’s Division of Neuroscience. He received an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Arts in 2011. Carroll’s paintings have been shown in galleries in Baltimore, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Milwaukee, and Sweden. His art is included in the permanent collection of the High Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Carroll lives and works in Guilford, Connecticut and Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Sunny Moxin Chen (b.1996, Moscow) is a multi-disciplinary artist who currently lives and works in Boston, MA. She received her MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2022 and a BFA in Painting & Studio for Interrelated Media from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. She has shown her work recently at the Distillery Gallery in Boston and the Erie Museum in PA, among other galleries in the US. She was selected for the national curated show at Main Street Arts (Clifton Springs, NY, 2022) and won the Best in Show Award.

Alexandra Chiou (b. Richmond, VA) is a Visual Artist based in Cambridge, MA who draws on nature and memory to create layered works on paper that celebrate the life of her late father. After his recent passing, she looked to positivity and gratitude to cope and find healing. Her latest works give physical form to abstract feelings such as hope, love, joy, resilience, and wonder, all of which defined his amazing life. She hopes that viewers may find peace, calm, and beauty in her work no matter the challenging times or life transitions they may be going through. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Hillyer Art Space (Washington, DC), Launch LA (Los Angeles, CA), Newport Art Museum (Newport, RI), Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC), and the US Embassy in Ethiopia (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia).

Hilary Doyle (b. 1985, Worcester, MA)received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she has since joined the faculty after holding teaching positions at both Brown University and Purchase College. Her paintings begin with simple observations of day-to-day life. The scenes she portrays may seem mundane—a woman walking in the rain, holding a newborn baby, or commuting home on the subway—yet Doyle offers glimpses into the inner lives of her subjects through her deft use of color and the subtle nuances of body language. She has exhibited her work internationally, including at galleries in London and New York, and was an artist in residence at MASS MoCA in 2017.

Ana Maria Farina (b. 1989, Sao Paulo, Brazil) is currently based in the Hudson Valley, NY and paints using a tufting gun along with needles, hooks, and knots. Repurposing a phallic signifier of violence, she conjures vibrant objects of comfort that inhabit a mystical pictorial space between abstraction and representation. She attended Columbia University and SUNY New Paltz for her graduate studies, and in 2018 she was awarded a fellowship to the NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. Her work has been featured in many spaces throughout New York such as the SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, the Wassaic Project, the Garrison Art Center, the Dorsky Museum, Paradice Palase, Susan Eley Fine Art, among others.

Andrew Fish is a painter and printmaker based in Boston, MA. He grew up in Bristol, VT and studied at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. His work explores the intersection of abstraction and representation, using the figure to investigate contemporary society and personal experience. He has attended several artist residencies including the VT Studio Center, Manship Artists Residency + Studio (Gloucester, MA), Red Gate Gallery (Beijing, China), and Mass MoCA’s Assets for Artists Residency. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows nationally and internationally including The Painting Center (NYC), Childs Gallery (Boston), Artzu Gallery (Manchester, UK) and Addison Ripley Fine Art (Washington, DC.)

Max Heiges (b. 1988, San Francisco, California) is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. After graduating from Dartmouth College in 2010, the artist worked as a studio assistant to the painters Chris Martin and Joe Bradley, eventually transitioning to the metal shop-oriented studio of sculptor Carol Bove. The artist currently operates a metal shop fabricating metal works for other artists as well as focusing on his own practice.

David Heo (b. 1992, Acworth, Georgia) received his MFA in 2018 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He creates artwork that flirts with a variety of genres, including large-scale paintings, works on paper, mural paintings, and brand collaborations. Heo employs elemental materials – acrylic, paper collage, and crayon – to create an intricate interlacing of layers. Through his many influences, such as short stories, Cy Twombly, and anime, Heo intimately improvises between abstraction and biography which synthesizes his lived experiences.

Lavaughan Jenkins (b. 1976 Pensacola, FL) is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor currently working in Boston, MA. He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2005. In 2019 Jenkins was awarded the James and Audrey Foster Prize by the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston. In 2016, he was named Emerging Artist of the year at Kingston Gallery in Boston, MA, Jenkins is a recipient of the 2015 Blanche E. Colman Award and in 2002 received the Rob Moore Grant in Painting. He has exhibited his work most recently at venues such as Vielmetter Los Angeles, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston), The Painting Center (NY), Suffolk University Gallery (Boston), and Oasis Gallery (Beijing). His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

James Ming Johnson was born in Bangkok, Thailand and raised in Southern California. His work focuses on historical events and eras, and how we tell stories about our own history. He holds a BA in Film and Media Studies from Stanford University and is currently attending the MFA painting program at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Abbi Kenny (b. Boston, MA) is an emerging artist and painter living and working in Boston, MA. She is an MFA candidate in painting at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts. She received her BFA with honors in painting and a concentration in the Theory and History of Art and Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020. After completing her undergraduate degree, she worked in the Nicholson File Artist Studios in Providence, RI, until moving to Toronto, Canada, in August 2021, then to Boston. Abbi has received the Royal Drawing School’s Dumfries House Estate drawing residency and grant near Cumnock, Scotland, and participated in RISD's European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. In 2022, she was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in painting. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions across New England and New York.

DaNice D. Marshall (b. Boston, MA) paints Black Portraiture art, as much to record ordinary activities of African American life, as to show the viewer that we all can laugh and have moments of joy. Six years ago, a rare illness left her unable to write and so she began painting the stories that she wanted to tell. She uses paint to mix metaphors and dabble in the richness of color to add syntax to the incomplete sentences and dangling modifiers, also known as the elements of style. To that end, she is a writer who paints.

Meghan Murray is an emerging artist based in New England. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Murray has been passionate about artmaking since childhood. After graduating cum laude from Skidmore College, she completed a year-long Emerson Umbrella residency in Concord, MA. Murray then began work as an art educator while maintaining a rigorous independent studio practice. In 2022, she received her MFA in Painting from Boston University. Her most recent work is a continued investigation into intergenerational American ideals and clichés as viewed in the mid-century family photo album. Murray’s fascination with nostalgia and sentimentality continues to be integral to the work.

Aliyah Salmon is a multidisciplinary textile artist, currently residing in Brooklyn. She attended Savannah College of Art and Design and received her Textile Design BFA in 2018. Her studio practice explores the playful relationships between color, form, and black identity through a variety of tactile mediums.

Elspeth Schulze (b. 1985 Grand Coteau, Louisiana) is a Visual Artist from Southern Louisiana, a place where land and water meet. She sews, casts and cuts forms, combining digital fabrication with ceramic and textile processes. Recent work explores the idea of a porous place, a passage between one thing and another. Schulze holds an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Colorado Boulder, a BA in Literature from Loyola University New Orleans, and an AAS in Fashion Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She is currently an artist in residence at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Ezara Spangl is a painter living in Vienna, Austria. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Oberlin College. She co-curates the Artist Lecture Series Vienna program and its publications. Solo exhibitions of her work have also been held at Song Song, Vienna; Skestos Gabriele Gallery, Chicago; and Devening Projects, Chicago. She has been included in group exhibitions at Essex Flowers, New York; Ve.sch, Vienna; and Mauve, Vienna. Publications of her work include Black Pages and Moby Dick Filet.

Leigh Suggs (b. in Boone, NC) is currently based in Richmond, VA. She received her BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2003 and her MFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015. Her recent shows include a three person show at The Visual Arts Center in Richmond “I >< YOU >< WE” (2018-2019), a two person show at Penland Gallery Conversation | Unspoken Language (2016), and several solo shows this year including Hurry Slowly at Second Street Gallery (VA), TOAST at Massey Klein Gallery (NYC), Keep Coming Round at Reynolds Gallery (VA), and Pushing Edges Rounding Corners at Cole Pratt Gallery (LA). Suggs has been awarded several grants and honors, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship Award and the North Carolina Fellowship Award. Her work is a part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Weatherspoon Museum collections and numerous corporate collections.