8 BADA Galleries at AREA CODE Art Fair

The Boston Art Dealers Association (BADA) is thrilled to announce that 8 member galleries will be presenting 16 artists in the first edition of AREA CODE Art Fair opening on Saturday, August 1st. BADA has a long history of supporting Boston events, so the collaborative nature of AREA CODE is exactly in line with BADA’s mission of “fostering cooperation among the city's contemporary art galleries and to create a unified voice of advocacy for contemporary art in Boston.” While AREA CODE focuses on greater New England, art fair founder David Guerra has been a Boston-local for many years.

The big differences between AREA CODE and a normal art fair? The main section of the fair is online only, a swift and timely reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, while their “offline” section will feature public art projects around Boston. Another major difference: there was no fee to apply or participate. Additionally, in the spirit of collaboration, the sales breakdown is as follows: 50% to the artist, 35% to either their gallery/non-profit sponsor, and the remaining 15% will be redistributed equally among all section artists at the end of the fair. The art fair curators also boast some exciting names, Ellen Tani, Jen Mergel, Octavio Zaya, to name a few.

The Boston Art Dealers Association presents a strong roster of artists in the fair, read below for the full list:

Main section curated by Octavio Zaya:

1. Abigail Ogilvy Gallery: Pelle Cass and Coral Woodbury

2. Boston Sculptors Gallery: John Christian Anderson

3. Fountain Street Gallery: Denise Driscoll, Georgina Lewis, Rebecca Skinner

4. Galatea Fine Art: Joe Caruso and Vicki Kocher Paret

5. Gallery NAGA: Sophia Ainslie

6. Howard Yezerski Gallery: Karl Baden

7. Kingston Gallery: Susan Greer Emmerson and Erica Licea-Kane

8. Soprafina Gallery: Robin Reynolds
   
   

Performance section curated by Gabriela Sosa:

1. Howard Yezerski Gallery: Autumn Ahn
   
   

Video/Digital Art section curated by Leonie Bradbury:

1. Fountain Street Gallery: Allison Maria Rodriguez 

2. Gallery NAGA: Lana Z Caplan
   
   

Artist Biographies and Contact Information:

Autumn Ahn, Howard Yezerski Gallery, Contact: howard@howardyezerski.com
Autum Ahn (b.1986, Philadelphia, USA) is an American artist. She is currently a Visiting Fellow as an artist-in-residence at Harvard University’s Department of Philosophy. She studied oil painting and art history at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts and also at the Scuola Internazionale de Grafica in Venice, Italy. Her solo exhibitions include, Between pink & blue is Catharanthus Roseus at Galerie 0fr., Paris (2019), a tall action is not a height at The Chimney NYC (2017), Untitled (Chamber), AIDS ACTION COMMITTEE & Alter Projects, Art Basel-Miami (2014), Latent Lavender at Ryan Lee Gallery, NYC (2014), Voy(age)ur at STREAM Gallery, NYC (2014) and upcoming show with Howard Yezerski Gallery this December 2019. She has also participated in group exhibitions with her pieces, pavement over pavement at HUBWeek for Boston’s Government Center, CASTLEDRONE CORRAL (2017), “everyoneineverforgot, fig. 1-3” at Cinema Tonalá and Fería ARTBo for The Host, Bogotá (2016), “Anunnciate” at Montserrat College of Art & Design for SEVEN, Boston (2016), Sensational Stanzas at École du Magazine (Centre National d’Art Contemporain), for TakeYouThereRadio, Grenoble/r22.fr (2015). She was the recipient of a Boston Opportunity Grant, Createwell Artist Grant, and a Constantin Alajalov Scholarship. Her work has been reviewed on Whitehot Magazine, The Boston Globe, ARTE, Art New England. She lives and works in Massachusetts, USA.

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Sophia Ainslie, Gallery NAGA, Contact: mail@gallerynaga.com
Sophia Ainslie is a South African American contemporary artist working between drawing and painting.

Her work focuses on the connection between diagnostic imaging technologies and landscape, interior and exterior, and the microscopic and macroscopic. She melds observation with imagination resulting in a relationship of connections and disconnections between black mark making and flat color, stillness of shape and active mark, movement and space. Actively pushing the formal aspects present in the work, she is interested in making the negative shapes prominent – creating spaces/places that look like something was once there, but is no longer.

Her journey overseas was instigated by a series of sponsored opportunities to attend workshops and residencies in the United Kingdom and the United States. The Hamlyn Foundation and the African Arts Trust sponsored her residency at the Gasworks in London, which led to an invitation to paint for a year in San Francisco at Yosemite Place. Having time to focus, and being in a new landscape, opened up new areas in her work. The need to have more of these circumstances brought her to Boston to finish her studies. Under the sponsorship of her patron Henny Kirshon, and the Art History Department at Tufts, she pursued her MFA, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts. After graduating she received the Anne and Graham Gund award to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Maine.

She is the recipient of the Inaugural Hendricks Art Fund for Tufts Graduates; the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for Painting, and the Artist’s Resource Trust. Ainslie maintains a studio in Somerville, MA, and currently lectures in the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University.

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John Christian Anderson, Boston Sculptors Gallery, Contact: johnchristiananderson.101@gmail.com
John Christian Anderson grew up in a working class neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. At an early age he visited Simon Rhodias's Watts Towers, which was not far from his home. It was an astonishing site as there was nothing like it anywhere else in the neighborhood. Overtime these towers represented symbols of pure artistic vision, independence, and the down-to-earth attitude of using whatever materials are available. Later as a young student he traveled and sought out other artists and craftsmen working outside the mainstream. Over the years his work has integrated Indian and Buddhist sand painting, Fluxus objects, Minimalism, Funk Art, Bricolage and Assemblage. For over forty years he has been incorporating found material and exploring traditional and non-traditional techniques for constructing his sculptures.

Anderson has exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States. These include the Robert Freidus Gallery in New York (solo), the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the ICA Boston, The DeCordova Museum, The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art (solo). Recently his work was included in an exhibition at the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana and the Boston Sculptors Gallery (solo). He has received numerous awards including three individual Artist Resource Trust Grants and a more recent Traveling Scholarship to study counterfeit objects in Paris. His work is included in both public and private collections. This past Fall he was commissioned by the Fuller Craft Museum to create a sculpture in response to the opioid epidemic that has ravaged communities throughout the Northeast. The exhibition, Human Impact:Stories From The Opioid Epidemic, runs from September 28 through May 3 traveling to Boston City Hall in June, 2020. Anderson is currently represented by the Boston Sculptors Gallery.

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Karl Baden, Howard Yezerski Gallery, Contact: howard@howardyezerski.com
Steeped in photographic history, Karl Baden explores how photographs are shaped, and how they shape our perceptions, in his witty works. His works abound with references to iconic photographers and their work while foregrounding the omnipresence of photographic images in popular culture. In his teasing, sophisticated images, he explores the mutability of his medium. Baden works in series and on sustained projects. He maintains a blog, called Every Day, on which he posts mug shot-like photographs he has taken of himself every day since 1987, creating an ongoing record of his aging. In In and Out of the Car (2009-12), an homage to Lee Friedlander, he presents lushly colored snapshots of the passing views outside of his car windows, capturing the uncanny fusion of his car’s interior with the outside world, itself filled with a riot of photographic images.

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Lana Z Caplan, Gallery NAGA, Contact: mail@gallerynaga.com
Lana Z Caplan earned her BA and BS from Boston University and MFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Caplan has an international exhibition record of showing in galleries, museums and film festivals and commissioned public art projects. She published a monograph of her photographic series Postcards from the Hanging as Sites of Public Executions in conjunction with Watch This – two solo exhibitions at Gallery NAGA (Boston) and the Danforth Museum (MA) in 2007. Her work has been recognized by grants, fellowships and awards including from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Puffin Foundation and the Wexner Center for the Arts and reviewed in publications such as ARTnews, The Boston Globe, and Hyperallergic.com. After many years of being based in Boston and teaching at MassArt, Caplan is now an Assistant Professor of Photography and Video at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, CA. She is represented by Gallery NAGA (Boston).

Shed on Passive Sands is a conceptual project rooted in environmentalism, the politics of landscape and an excavation/revisioning of history. The location is the Oceano Dunes near Santa Barbara, CA. What fascinates me about this landscape is how what appears to be a blank sandy expanse actually holds 12,000 years of history - from the expunged Native American inhabitants to the present-day ATV riders - with each subsequent inhabitant projecting an ownership onto the Dunes that satisfies their own needs or values. Today this site has become a political and environmental battleground between the multimillion-dollar ATV industry in the Dunes and residents in the adjacent communities whose health has been compromised from the dust the ATVs create. 

The photos and videos in this project are a constellation of the denizens of the Dunes over this vast expanse of time, focusing on the current ATV culture, the idealized version of landscape shown in Modernist photography and the museumification of the people and culture of some of the past inhabitants. 

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Joe Caruso, Galatea Fine Art, Contact: joecaruso100@gmail.com
Joe Caruso lives in Charlestown, MA and works in his studio in South Boston.  His current practice includes painting, sculpture and ceramics. Joe shows his work regularly at Galatea Fine Art in Boston.  His work has also been  exhibited at other galleries and venues throughout Massachusetts, including the Boston International Fine Art Show, Western New England University, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, FPAC Gallery, 555 Gallery, Laconia Gallery, the Boston Convention and Exhibit Center, the WGBH Auction and Boston City Hall.

With references to ancient cultures as well as to contemporary life, Joe Caruso’s sculptural assemblages and collage paintings reflectman’s enduring belief in the sacred, in spiritual forces more powerful than himself and his strong connection to the natural world. The sculpture, somewhat crude and primitive, is made mostly from objects reclaimed from the street, from bins on trash day and from thrift shops, which are often weathered, rusted, decayed and deteriorated, suggesting age and a time gone by. Materials used in the collage paintings consist primarily of paper, cardboard and plastic used to package products delivered to our homes on a daily basis and then discarded. These materials which are no longer needed and sometimes forgotten, became a starting point for something new and re-emerge into fresh compositions, given new life and meaning. This process of transformation and change is a metaphor for the human condition, something we can relate to as we pass through our own life stages. The assemblages and collages are inspired by past civilizations, myths and folklore, as well as contemporary spiritual practices. The peace and refuge offered by a spirituality embodied in various representations and symbols is particularly relevant in the chaotic, fast paced, uncertain world that we live in today.

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Pelle Cass, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Contact: abigail@abigailogilvy.com
From Pelle Cass: "In the reshuffled time of this series of composite photographs called Crowded Fields, play prevails over competition, the stands are empty and the fields are full, and whole games are shown out of sequence. Most of the pictures were taken at lightly attended events at pools, fields, stadiums, and arenas around Boston, where I live. To make the compositions, I put my camera on a tripod, take up to a thousand pictures, and compile selected figures into a final photograph that is kind of a still time-lapse. I change nothing—not a pixel. I simply select what to keep and what to omit. It all happened precisely as you see it, just not at the same time. Beyond matters of technique and subject matter, I hope to convey the eeriness of time, a feeling of Dionysian chaos, and a sense of play." - Pelle Cass

Pelle Cass is a photographer from Brookline, Massachusetts. He’s exhibited at the George Eastman House, the Albright Knox Gallery, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Metamorf Biennial for Art and Technology in Norway and has presented shows at Stux Gallery (Boston), Gallery Kayafas (Boston), and the Houston Center for Photography. His work is owned by the Fogg Art Museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Polaroid Collection, the DeCordova Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the MFA, Houston. Cass’s photos have appeared in books such as Photoviz (Gestalten), Deleueze and the City (Edinburgh University Press), Langord’s Basic Photography (Focal Press), The Beautiful Sparkle: Optical Illusions in Art (Prestel, forthcoming), and in magazines such as Beaux Arts (France), McSweeney’s, FOAM, Amica (Italy), MAPS (Korea), Boston Art Review, and Victory Journal. He’s received fellowships from Yaddo, Artists Resource Trust, and the Polaroid Collection.

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Denise Driscoll, Fountain Street Gallery, Contact: marie@fsfaboston.com
Denise Driscoll's “Shimmer” paintings begin with the notion that all living things—plants, animals and humans—are connected in an intricate mesh of being, yet each exists at the center of their own particular world. These simultaneous centers of lived experience swirl within and around us, piercing, enveloping, and permeating with or without our notice. When processing complexity, she draws diagrams, color-codes and uses the dot as a device to think on multiple scales simultaneously. Holding questions about symbiosis, coexistence, and sentience while she paints, she grasps at the slippery awareness that we live in a clash of porous and conflicting worlds. With this in mind, Driscoll's paintings have no focal point. Instead lines, loops, chains, and perforated shapes entwine and melt into each other with boundaries that are sometimes clear but often ambiguous. Swathes of iridescent dots sparkle and gleam with energy. Each canvas becomes an imaginary map of exchange, a playful, hopeful record of our entanglement with other beings and each other.

Denise Driscoll is an abstract painter who pursues the invisible and the unseen. She draws inspiration from magical realism, speculative fiction, and philosophy. She is a SOLO2017 winner at Bromfield Gallery, a Curatorial Opportunity Grant awardee at the New Art Center in 2009, and her work has been shown throughout New England. Driscoll earned her MFA in Visual Art at Lesley Art + Design, where she currently teaches. She maintains a studio at Norwood Space Center, lives in Framingham, and is a Core Member at Fountain Street Gallery.

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Susan Greer Emmerson, Kingston Gallery, Contact: sg.emmerson@gmail.com
“All art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion”-James Baldwin 

From Susan Greer Emmerson: “I make art about natural disasters: meditations on the loss of home and community and our changing climate. Experimenting with materials is central to my practice as I use Tyvek (a plastic paper) to create sculptural wall collages, drawings and paintings. 

My wall sculptures depict disheveled, broken surfaces where Tyvek painfully peels away like paint or skin, exposing a raw inner core.  Everyday objects become precious; their bits and pieces become icons of the lost reassurance of a safe and intact home.  For other work I cut and mold Tyvek and create installations recalling rising seas or raging fires, and I also make fantastical drawings of collapsing debris and destroyed homes; bad dreams of what will be in store for us as the earth warms.

For my recent body of work “Bundles” I am focusing on wrapping as a way of containing or repairing whatever has gone wrong, or perhaps covering something better left hidden. With this series I am interested in exploring contrasting textures and inspiring possible narratives about their juxtaposition. 

As a seamstress and former surgeon, I enjoy the chance to cut and manipulate materials in making of my work. My art brings the human narrative and a subtle bit of humor to some serious subject matter.”

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Georgina Lewis, Fountain Street Gallery, Contact: marie@fsfaboston.com
Georgina Lewis is an interdisciplinary artist with a practice that includes drawing, sound, writing, photography, sculpture, and installation. Raised in Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia, she received her MFA in Sound from Bard College and holds undergraduate degrees from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts and Franklin and Marshall College. She has been a resident at the Millay Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and VCCA France, and a fellow at Harvard University’s metaLAB. She is a member of Fountain Street Gallery, Boston, one of the studio artists at the Boston Center for the Arts, and a former member of the Boston based new technologies group Collision Collective. Her work has been presented at numerous venues including the Visual Studies Workshop, National University of Ireland, REDCAT Los Angeles, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, the Mills Gallery, Boston University’s 808 gallery, and Grapefruits Art Space in Portland OR.

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Erica Licea-Kane, Kingston Gallery, Contact: erica.licea.kane@verizon.net
From Erica Licea-Kane: “My works are completely rooted in my textile training.  The grids, both visible and structural and the repetition within each piece comes from, and are inherent to the most basic levels of textile creation.  In place of textiles I create lines and texture with a pastry bag as I extrude acrylic medium to make surfaces that invoke fabric or enlarged weaves.  I work hard at pushing the surfaces of my work so that they are obscure, prompting questions about process, materials and time.

As a child I spent many hours in fabric stores with my Mother.  It was then that I learned about the nuances of cloth, the subtleties of woven color and the “hand” of fabric. I still love the smell of fabric stores and find great comfort in being surrounded by bolts of cloth.  Our shared, once a year journey through my Grandmother’s linen chest was pure magic to me because I got to touch the handmade bobbin lace and embroidered cloth, smell the cedar and hear stories connected to part of my heritage.  My teenaged years were spent engaged in hand embroidery marking the beginning of my love for repetitive and additive art making.  That predilection carried me through my years as a textile student and lives with me today as I engage in creating layered and compulsive surfaces that refer to my heightened sensitivity to time and balance.

My work invites viewers to closely explore the physicality of the surfaces, the color interactions and the importance of the edges.  I find great joy from hearing narratives about my work from viewers who often reference aerial views or topographical views of cities and almost always want to touch the surfaces.  The act of making my work is as important to me as the meaning of the work. 

The formal issues attached to abstract painting along with the historical significance of textiles to women are never far from my thoughts and significantly inform my work. I create abstract paintings from a weavers point of view.”

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Vicki Kocher Paret, Galatea Fine Art, Contact: vickiparet@gmail.com
From Vicki Kocher Paret: “As I wander, I see my surroundings through the medium of paint. I notice formal elements, and imagine a painting composed of the patterns, textures, shapes, color, and values I see. The imagery provides a structure for the process of painting. As I proceed from one painting to the next in a series, I explore color and spatial relationships, different marks and methods for rendering the image, and their effect on the tenor of the piece.

Elements in forests and urban neighborhoods are woven together to create a sense of place, recreating the feeling of being in these environments, where trees  figure prominently.  The woods are dense, yet there are pathways through – created by light getting through to the ground or openings in the tangle of things growing. I like finding the passage through the visual chaos.  In the neighborhood paintings, trees provide a powerful visual counterpoint to the close space, patterns and colors of the buildings. Trees are an amazing element in the city – uplifting visually, spiritually, and environmentally. Paintings of still life are the result of careful observation of the nuances of shape, color and relationships. Random interactions occur among the objects, forcing play, tension, or cozy interludes, and making beautiful spaces between.In the end the paintings are the product of my desire to spend time with paint, and to portray the beauty I see in my encounters. Sometimes my subjects are beautiful in odd, quirky ways, and sometimes as expressions of the power of nature, and I am compelled to paint them in detail.

Vicki Kocher Paret currently lives and paints in Cambridge. She is a representational painter, exploring beauty in objects and place.

Her formal training began with a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University, and later she completed her Master of Arts in Teaching in Art Education at Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She is currently represented by Galatea Fine Arts in SoWA Boston. Her paintings are in numerous corporate and private collections, including Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Fidelity Investments Corporation, and Wellington Management Company, LLP.  

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Allison Maria Rodriguez, Fountain Street Gallery, Contact: marie@fsfaboston.com
Allison Maria Rodriguez is a first-generation Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist working predominately in video installation and new media. She creates immersive experiential spaces that challenge conventional ways of knowing and understanding the world. Her work focuses extensively on climate change, species extinction and the interconnectivity of existence. Through video, performance, digital animation, photography, drawing, collage and installation, Rodriguez merges and blends mediums to create new pictorial spaces for aesthetic, emotional and conceptual exploration. She uses art to communicate beyond language – to open up a space of possibility for the viewer to encounter alternative ways of connecting to the emotional realities of others.

Rodriguez received her BA Antioch College, OH and earned her MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work has been supported by grants from The CreateWell Fund, the Boston Cultural Council, the Arlington Cultural Council, The Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation and Assets for Artists.  She was awarded the grand prize at the 2017 Creative Climate Awards and a 2018 Earthwatch Fellowship to work on the Churchill Northern Studies Centre’s “Climate Change at the Arctic’s Edge” project. In 2019 she was honored by WBUR’s The ARTery as one of “The ARTery 25”, a celebration of 25 millennials of color impacting Boston’s arts and culture scene. Some noteworthy local showings include solo shows at The Boston Children’s Museum and The Dorchester Art Project, multiple Art on the Marquee projects at the Boston Convention Center, and a solo installation entitled In the Presence of Absence with 13FOREST Gallery. In addition to her artistic practice, she is also a curator and an educator.  She has her studio at the Boston Center for the Arts.

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Rebecca Skinner, Fountain Street Gallery, Contact: marie@fsfaboston.com
Rebecca Skinner photographs abandoned spaces throughout the United States. She is a modern-day urban explorer seeking unique neglected structures and desolate places. Her subject matter ranges from large, cavernous spaces to minute details such as peeling paint and rust. Her locations are often dangerous to photograph in, whether because of rotten floors, falling plaster or asbestos (requiring a respirator), so she never goes alone. Skinner brings to her work a strong ethic of leaving a location exactly as found. She does not stage her photographs—there is a story there to be told and she does not alter it. She uses natural light and a tripod for the images. Texture, color and light all play important parts in her image making.

Skinner is a core artist member of Fountain Street Gallery in Boston and a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design. Artscope and Upworthy are among the publications that have featured her work. Skinner’s photographs have recently been displayed at First Street Gallery, NY and BSA Space, MA. Her studio is located in Natick, MA.

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Coral Woodbury, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Contact: abigail@abigailogilvy.com
Coral Woodbury’s art is a vehicle for human empathy and a way of addressing social ills. It gives voice to the voiceless and makes visible those unseen. This lifelong commitment to the catalytic force of art has informed her work even beyond the studio — in museums, education, and the addiction recovery and homeless populations. 

Her recent portraits and multi-figure paintings critically reinterpret Western artistic masterpieces from a feminist perspective. Barely a generation ago, art history texts routinely omitted women artists entirely. Using the pages of one such preeminent textbook as a ground, Coral inks portraits of women artists over images from the well known canon. Of this series, titled REVISED EDITION, Coral writes, “It is a research study as much as it is an art project, and an honoring of the women denied a place in art history. I will not have run out of them when I have filled every page.”

In parallel with this series, Coral repaints masterpieces from this canon, but with the figures recast. Instead of a Madonna or paterfamilias portrait, Coral inserts images of women artists drawn from photographs and their own work. As a historian, gazing backward, and as an artist, creating anew, her paintings are a way to heal the injustices and omissions of art history.