DISSILIENCE ARTISTS


  STEFANIE CALVERT  



















Stephanie Calvert is a mixed media artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 2008, with a BA in studio art, focusing on oil painting. Calvert has shown in numerous group and solo shows throughout NYC. Her current project, Shame to Pride, is a return to her childhood home, an abandoned schoolhouse, where she creates work from things her parents have hoarded. This project is a way to transform her shame into self-acceptance while she explores themes of family, memory, life/death, and order/chaos

The New York Times Article on Stefanie Calvert

  SHARELA MAY BONFIELD  




Sharela May Bonfield (born 1988, Kingston, Jamaica) is a Brooklyn based artist using fiber art as a catalyst to explore ethnicity. Fiber art was rooted in Ms. Bonfield from the early age of five when she began constructing dolls and garments using hand and machine stitching. A major contributor in Sharela’s learning and growth was her grandmother, Muriel Louise Bonfield who owned a dress shop in Jamaica, with Muriel’s encouragement and training Ms. Bonfield was able to develop the technical skills needed to work with textiles. 

As Sharela grew older she continued to hold a preoccupation for sewing and by attending the  the Maryland Institute College of Art and receiving a B.F.A. in Fibers  Ms. Bonfield attained the skills needed to develop her skills conceptually.  Sharela uses language and popular culture as major themes in her work as a way to combat stereotypes that are often associated with African American aesthetics. Whether it’s embroidering vernacular for “bad hair” or rearranging hip-hop lyrics to combat messages of violence and chauvinism, Ms. Bonfield’s work always strives to engage the audience and encourages viewers to question stereotypes through common themes of money, power and gender identity.

  EMILY STRANGE  

Emily a recent graduate of Parsons the New School, is a mixed media artist based out of New York City. Her works are contemporary as well as conceptual. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Emily was tested a tactile learner at an early age. She found herself fixated on creating from anything she could get her hands on, including throwing clay and designing stained glass art at age twelve. 

Emily has had many struggles in her life, including one major one, addiction. She uses these hard times of recovery in her work by creating art that stands in place of her voice to speak out against certain things "political" in the world and prove to others that giving up is not an option." Emily continues to experiment with the juxtaposition of various media and presentation styles in order to further her art practice and experience life.

  ANNE SPURGEON  


Anne Spurgeon is an interdisciplinary artist who is interested in questions about transformation. Her involvement began through performance, from playing guitar on stage, to creating private video performances about identity. Recently her focus has moved away from the personal consciousness of the body, to the transformation of sculptural material.

Spurgeon has exhibited throughout New York, the United States and internationally. She is a recipient of a collective artists grant from The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and her work has been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times. She holds a BFA from The Ohio State University and a MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Originally from Ohio, Spurgeon now resides and maintains a studio in Brooklyn, NY. Currently, she teaches in the education departments at The Museum of Modern Art and The Noguchi Museum.

  ELAINE HARGROVE  


Something interesting about the way I shoot. I photograph people in the sun, under clouds with other people. the ones they interact with. In places with greenery, with water. With the things they keep around them. People ready, people acting. Flux. That’s my goal anyway. People feeling the way they feel when they’re not on the spot. I’m talking about people with money and people without. Without being a jerk, without vilifying. I try. Angling joy into what’s questionable to the masses.

  ROSE DESIANO  


Rose is a photographer who uses alternative processes and the visual allure of the digitally reconstructed photograph as tools to examine cultural symbolism. Her work is largely concerned with the photographic collective consciousness, the sociological ramifications of image manipulation, and the long, tangled history of the photograph as both a record keeper and myth maker.DeSiano is a resident and native of Brooklyn; she received her MFA from the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, and her BFA from NYU-Tisch School of the Arts. When not in her car on epic photo road trips, or crawling in the mud and photographing the “staged trenches” of war re-enactments, DeSiano is an Associate Professor of Photography at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania.

  FINA YEUNG  


KY Fina Yeung is a New York based artist who works with mixed media painting, photography, film and installation. She was born and raised in Hong Kong and has lived in different places in United States for 25 years. Her work expresses emotional relationship with urban living by constructing architectural forms with different materials, such as cardboard. Fina’s artworks have been exhibited in New Jersey, New York and Washington DC, including Hillyer Art Space, Rutgers University, Paul Robson Galleries, Brooklyn Arts Council, BRIC Arts Media 

  KATHERINE KISA  



Katherine has always been fascinated by music and the wide variety of machines and instruments involved in its production. This series of paintings illustrates the complexity and close association between the mechanical, instrumental, and artistic components of music. Color is added with oil or acrylic paint to lend a visual interpretation of the music and to evoke an emotional response. The nostalgic feel of the pieces arises not only from the choice of vinyl as my medium ,but also from the musical selections.

On any given piece one may find a single genre of music or a combination of jazz, blues, soul, rock, or classical music. Although we are firmly entrenched in the digital age, I create my pieces with the first item which started my intense love of music, the vinyl record. In addition to recycling the records, I incorporate found objects such as old record player components and computer parts to create the assemblages. These are subsequently painted to reflect a range of musical styles from the simplest ballads to the most complex symphonies.


  IVIVA OLENICK  
























Iviva first learned how to sew in kindergarden. The teacher’s assistant gave us needles, thread, buttons and socks. She guessed they were making sock puppets. All she remember is that sewing stuck with her, embedded her my hands. She didn’t start incorporating embroidery and stitching into artwork until 2002. This was a transitional time in the art world, and in New York City in particular. 

The Whitney Museum mounted an exhibit of “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” large, abstract quilts made by women in Gee’s Bend, a small rural community nestled into a curve in the Alabama River southwest of Selma, Alabama. All of a sudden, quilts had the same presence as abstract paintings, and craft was in again. Iviva was born and grew up in Brooklyn, where she still lives and work. In addition to making art, she design textiles and teach embroidery to adults, and weaving, knitting, drawing, embroidery, soft sculpture, collage, selfie reinterpreting and life skills to children and teens.

  LIA ZUVILIVIA  





















Lia Zuvilivia was born in Salto, Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1968. She has exhibited several times in Buenos Aires, Paris, and New York, and has taken part in group shows in Kassel and Stockholm, among other cities. She has had solo shows at the San Martin Cultural Center and Artere.

One of the main themes of my work has been to explore the relationships between material, light, time and space. A simple brush stroke of black ink on a white canvas already initiates the creation of such relations, as does every painting and sculpture. But what I am after is a naked exploration of these elements, not mediated by the representational. What then comes to the fore is a disclosure: a direct revelation of the material itself in interaction with light (and its intimate partner, shadow), in time and space. 


The medium of glass offers a very special opportunity for such disclosure. It is a transparent way to proceed, bares its play with light, time and space. Interacting with different qualities of light, from different sources and with different environmentally -produced reflections of light (emanating from surrounding materials). I like the relation between surface and line, and the projections and reflections they produce when traversed by the light creating an ephemerally drawing of a three dimensional work.