Shifter Sifter Sisters
Featuring Michelle Cho, Linda Frank, Nima Jeizan and Thomas Lauria
Curated by Zach Hill
Friday, April 1, 2022 – Sunday, May 8, 2022
Presented in Commons Space A & B
UPDATE: Join curator Zach Hill and other exhibiting artists for an Artist Talk on Sunday, May 1st, from 4-6pm
PLAN YOUR VISIT
Vox Populi is open Noon-6pm, Fridays-Sundays, or by appointment (email: vox@voxpopuligallery.org). Masks encouraged while on site. You are welcome to drop-in or schedule your visit via the link below!
About the Exhibition
Shifter Sifter Sisters features new works from Michelle Cho, Linda Frank, Nima Jeizan, and Thomas Lauria. This exhibition moves between sculpture and performance to explore various approaches to working with the found and referential. A material transmutation is employed by each of these artists. Many of the works have been made with salvaged or thrifted objects and other items from the everyday. Everything from late 90’s porn imagery to tires pulled from the highway is shifted and sifted through the processes used in Shifter Sifter Sisters.
Michelle Cho explores the American landscape through the perspective of cars. Cho works with foraged tires that have been nailed, reformed, and molded to be cast in Pewter. A metal that is deeply ingrained with the spirit of experiment, Pewter can be casted and re-liquefied making the process infinite, resilient, resourceful, and returning. The sculptures begin to resemble precious metals such as gold, silver, and bronze from the chemical stains from the searing of the rubber from the molten metal. The foraging of the tires at the height of the pandemic has always been, at the root, about presenting a landscape of income disparities.
More Info: michellesoocho.com / @chellecho
Linda Frank’s project, Good Head, is an excuse to stay in a relationship past its expiration date. Good Head is an archive of every current fixture in the artist’s possession. It is an acknowledgement that pleasure, love and sentimentality aren’t sufficient in establishing a sense of permanence toward a person, object or space (or in establishing fixation at all.) Good Head extracts sentimentality from ownership, empowering the audience to purchase what might be otherwise overlooked among the personal objects in Frank’s life.
More Info: @sirenoftheschuylkill
Nima Jeizan creates sculptures, ceremonial costumes, and fictional performances that are inspired by ancient Iranian artifacts, eccentric fashion accessories, and mythological monsters. In his object oriented practice, Jeizan uses hair, chains, leather, salvaged brass, vintage finials, and marble globes that are evocative of phallic shapes and Islamic weaponry. The sculptures and the costumes transcend any specific era and culture, resulting in a simultaneously prehistoric, present, and future form; combining familiar and alien, utilitarian and ornate, profane and inviolable.
More Info: nimajeizan.com / @nimajeizan
Thomas Lauria explores the transformative nature of latex clothing. Lauria’s new work, Scene Study is just that – a live performance informed by a scene housed within the feature length pornographic film “Hard Heroes – The Movie” (1999). A handmade latex replica of one of the film’s costumes decorated with screen printed stills is featured.
More Info: @thermos_lauria
About the Curator
Zach Hill is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working between sculpture, moving image, and performance. He has been awarded the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship and Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship along with residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Bunker Projects, and RAIR. His work has been exhibited and screened at Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI; Frontera Garibaldi, Mexico City, MX; High Tide, Philadelphia, PA; Skylab Gallery, Columbus, Ohio; Studio 10, Brooklyn, NY; Comfort Station, Chicago, IL; James Black, Vancouver, CAN; and VisArts, Rockville, MD. Hill holds a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Haverford College.
More Info: zach-hill.com / @bottomaspirations