Vox Member Pop-Up Exhibition
Featuring Chelsey Luster, Makeba Rainey, Natalie Hijinx, Natalie Kuenzi, and Roopa Vasudevan
Friday, November 4, 2022 – Sunday, December 18, 2022
Presented in Collective Studio/Gallery Three
About the Exhibition
Vox Populi is run by a collective of artist members who also actively sustain their own creative practices. In addition to taking part in solo show opportunities, these artists also collaborate on projects and exhibit work together. This “pop-up” exhibition showcases new and recent work from five members of the Vox collective.
About the Artists
Chelsey Luster is a Philadelphia-based curator, visual artist and art educator from Baltimore, Maryland. Luster received their BFA from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture and attended a residency at Chautauqua School of Art. As a curator, Luster has organized multiple group exhibitions, was a Katheryn Pannepacker Curatorial Fellow at the Da Vinci Art Alliance, and is currently developing their curatorial practices as a Vox Populi member.Luster’s work centers itself around intimacy, vulnerability, and privacy through depictions of domestic spaces with a focus on the bathroom. The bathroom serves as a setting to explore queer black womanhood with regards to lack of privacy, invasion of the black queer body, power structures, and isolation.
More info: chelseyluster.com / @ChelseyLusterArt
Makeba Rainey’s creative practice focuses on building community and what that looks like. For her, community is an extension of family. By centering her work around social justice, specifically in regard to Black Americans, community becomes the key to liberation. Her artwork taps into aspects of the Black community, merging the old with the new by re-envisioning the ancestors through new media and creating space for young creatives to build and sustain themselves. Although a lot of her work is local to Harlem, she creates bonds with the larger Black community through her web-based artist collective incorporating the themes of social justice movements like Black Lives Matter.Originally from Harlem, New York, Makeba is a self-taught artist best known for her digital collage portraits of contemporary and historical Black icons. Makeba an internationally-exhibited artist, a 2017 Create Change Fellow with the Laundromat Project, a 2018 member of Vox Populi gallery in Philadelphia, a 2018 CFEVA Fellow, a 2018 Season III NARS resident Artist, and an Absolut Art artist.
More info: http://www.justcallmekeebs.com/
Natalie Hijinx (aka Natalie Hutchings) is a Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary artist, futurist, and polymath. Her practice humps the lines between traditional and parodic sculpture, immersive installation, video, performance, interactive human-engagement debacles, and public acts of disobedience. Her current works are the poorly-mannered love children spawned from an orgy of speculative futurism, A Very Dystopian Anthropocene Epoch, space!, fake food, retro-futurism, confidence tricks, scientific experimentation, subversion, activist pranks, the absurd, and the awkward.Natalie has an MFA from the University of Delaware in Studio Art and a BFA from Towson University in Interdisciplinary Object Design: a hybrid of digital fabrication, craft, and sculpture. As a graduate student, she was a winner of the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Awards from The International Sculpture Center, published in Sculpture Magazine, and was a 2018 Fellow of the Delaware Public Humanities Institute (DelPHI) for her research in Material Culture Studies. She has shown work in Berlin Germany, Dallas TX, Portland OR, Baltimore MD, Wilmington DE, and Philadelphia PA.
More info: https://www.nataliehijinx.com/
Natalie Kuenzi is an artist and educator living and working in Philadelphia, PA. She holds a BFA in Ceramics and a BA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from Western Colorado University and a MFA in Ceramics from Tyler School of Art of Temple University. Natalie is an adjunct professor and studio technician at Tyler School of Art as well as an instructor for The Clay Studio, The Claymobile, and the Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia. Additionally, Natalie is a member of Vox Populi, an artist run space in Philadelphia, and her work has been exhibited in art spaces regionally and nationally, including the The Clay Studio, The Crane Arts, Little Berlin, and Temple Contemporary in Philadelphia, PA; The District Clay Gallery and Katzen Art Center in Washington, D.C.; Pewabic in Detroit, MI; NCECA 2018 in Pittsburgh, PA; and The College of New Jersey in Trenton, NJ, among others.
More info: https://nataliekuenzi.com/
Roopa Vasudevan is a media artist, computer programmer and researcher, currently based in the part of Lenapehoking now known as Philadelphia. Her practice examines social and technological defaults; interrogates rules, conventions and protocols that we often ignore or take for granted; and centers humanity and community in explorations of technology’s impacts on society. Through a varied creative toolkit that includes data collection practices, systems design, web development, and remix, she seeks to emphasize personal and human experiences, often on an individual or local level, in a time of Big Data and surveillance capitalism.
More info: roopavasudevan.com