JANUARY 28 – MAY 6, 2023
JANUARY 28 – MAY 6, 2023
"Picture yourself in a boat on a river | With tangerine trees and marmalade skies | Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly | A girl with kaleidoscope eyes"
- The Beatles, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds
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.
Mara Held’s work serves as a portal to those eras she’s come to understand as foundational in civilization, through the thread of symbols, objects, and crafts from ancient to modern times. For the construction of her paintings and drawings, Held draws from the abstract qualities of natural forms: seashells, coral fans, plants, but also cave drawings, repetition of cellular structures, macro images of the earth. Mara’s drawings can seem cartographic, orienting the body and mind in spatial and architectural ways.
Julia Kunin’s ceramics become a conduit allowing her to visit past epochs freely: European futurist shapes share space with costume design of the Bauhaus; references to geology mingle with the weight of a collected rock in one’s pocket. She references socialist labor and craft practices, commutes to the work a plethora of queer and feminist subtext and uses stones as a reference back to prehistoric drawings – the most primitive way of mark making in petroglyphs and cave painting. Kunin wields the universality of symbols as they are translatable through time.
Both artists’ practices are physically and formally loaded with mystery, reaching into esoteric research topics while accessing a common human experience. There is more to learn just beyond the veil, an avenue of thought the artist has traveled down and left a trail for us to follow.
"Newspaper taxis appear on the shore | Waiting to take you away | Climb in the back with your head in the clouds | And you're gone"
- The Beatles, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds
"Kunin has managed to create works of visionary jouissance. She draws equal inspiration from utopian feminist fiction—Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) and Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1969)—and from Zsolnay’s Art Nouveau period, a heyday for allegorical figures of nymphs and femmes fatales."
- Glenn Adamson, "Sculpture: An Art of Craft and Storytelling." Art in America, 2022
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.
Born in 1954 in New York, Mara Held moved to the highlands of Guatemala in her early 20s to study the art and ancient language of the Quiché people. She received her undergraduate degree from CUNY - City University of New York and an MA from Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles, California before moving back to New York in the 1980s. She taught essay writing at the college level and became a full-time artist at the age of 35. Her studio is located on an old dairy farm in the picturesque Hudson Valley that has been in her family since the 1960s. Her work has been the subject of many solo exhibitions in New York City and abroad and included in group shows nation- and world-wide. Institutions that have collected her work include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The New York Public Library; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; The International Artists' Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel; and Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. Mara Held’s work has been profiled by The New York Times, Elle Décor, and The Brooklyn Rail. Held has had three solo exhibitions at McClain Gallery in 2015, 2017, and 2021.
"I first fell in love with egg tempera looking at early Renaissance painting in Italy and decided to pursue work in the material. The tempered slowness of the process, both in preparing a canvas to receive paint and in the development of an image, appealed to me. It allowed me to develop a relationship with the work from its inception. And of course…there is no light like the light that exists in an egg - Life itself."
- Mara Held in her interview with Later Editions, 2021.
WORKS IN EXHIBITION
INSTALLATION IMAGES