McClain Gallery presents Kaleidoscope Eyes: a two-person exhibition featuring Julia Kunin’s ceramic sculptures together with paintings and works on paper by Mara Held. The two artists, shown together here for the first time, share a visual language and a kindred approach to process and referencing. Their inspirations draw from symbolic and cultural sources, creating evocative abstract forms with a reliance on geometry and nature.

The psychedelic aesthetic of this visually enticing song became the exhibition title after a conversation between the artists about their divergent yet keenly kindred practices. Kaleidoscope eyes see the world in multiples, in fractals, and in shimmering color. The exhibition revels in the active meditation of looking.

Both artists find their paths converging through a shared sense of symbols and optical effects. Materiality is paramount in both the artists’ representative media – egg tempera for Held, ceramic for Kunin. These media afford both artists their own way of marking time and metamorphosis. Kunin’s sculptures, heavy with glaze, stand in contrast with Mara’s lithe, feather-like mark making, but find resonance in their active surfaces and radiating line work.  

Julia Kunin (b. 1961, Vermont, US) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Pecs, Hungary where she conducts research and develops new work. She received her BA from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She has exhibited extensively in Europe as well as the United States. Kunin was a Fulbright Scholar to Hungary in 2013. She is the recipient of a 2010 Trust for Mutual Understanding Grant to Hungary. In 2008 she received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and had a residency at Art Omi. In 2007 she received the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Artist Residency. Fellowships have included: MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire; Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York; Vermont Studio Center, Vermont; Core Program at the Glassell School of Art, Houston, Texas; and Skowhegan Residency, Maine. Her work has been featured in ARTnews, House and Garden, the Brooklyn Rail, and in Harmony Hammond’s book Lesbian Art in America (Rizzoli, 2000). Kunin’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museum of Applied Art and Design, Frankfurt, Germany; Sculpture Center, New York; Brattleboro Museum, Vermont; and in McClain Gallery’s 2018 exhibition re:construction. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; German Leather Museum, Offenbach, Germany; the Margulies Collection, Miami, Florida; and the Museum of Art and Design, New York. Kunin had her first solo exhibition, Rainbow Dream Machine, at McClain Gallery in 2020.