Exhibition Description
NADA Miami 2021
BOOTH 10.05
Presenting works by Carole Harris, Jova Lynne, and Neha Vedpathak
Dec. 1 – Dec. 4, 2021
At the Ice Palace Studios, 1400 North Miami Avenue, Miami, FL 33136
For NADA Miami 2021 we are excited to bring together the works of three Detroit-based artists: Carole Harris, Jova Lynne, and Neha Vedpathak.
The three artists, working in completely different media, all incorporate personal references in their works to reflect on and understand identity.
CAROLE HARRIS
Carole Harris is a fiber artist who has redefined and subverted the basic concepts of quilting to suit her own purposes. She extends the boundaries of traditional quilting by exploring other forms of stitchery, irregular shapes, textures, materials and objects. Carole is captivated by the interplay of hue and pattern, often drawing inspiration from the color, energy, movement, and rhythms of ethnographic textiles she collects, as well as the music of, and changing rhythms and history of the city of Detroit where she lives.
Carole Harris’ work was included in The Sum of Many Parts: 25 Quiltmakers in 21st Century America, which toured China in 2012, where she was a guest lecturer. In 2017 her work was included in Footworks at the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne in France. Her work has received numerous awards and has been exhibited and published extensively, including a two-person exhibition Repetition, Rhythm, and Vocab with artist Allie McGhee at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) in 2018, a solo exhibition at the NCRC Rotunda Gallery at the University of Michigan in 2017, and a solo exhibition at The Dennos Museum Center in 2019. Her work was included in the exhibition Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, and Materiality at the Cranbrook Art Museum in 2019. In 2015 Carole Harris was awarded a Kresge Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship.
Image: Carole Harris, Reset America (2021) Various recycled cottons, linen, commercially printed cotton, denim and thread, rust dyed, burned, hand and machine stitched, 23 1/2 x 18 1/4 x 1 3/4 inches
JOVA LYNNE
Jova Lynne is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist and curator of Jamaican and Colombian heritage, born and raised in New York City, and currently based in Detroit, MI. Lynne is a grantee of the Astraea Foundation’s Global Arts Fund, which has supported her work in media and social practice based projects in Kingston, Jamaica and Berlin, Germany, in addition to her work in Detroit.
The works included in our NADA presentation are part of the artist’s “Soft Thrones” body of work. In January 2018, Lynne traveled to her familial home of Kingston, Jamaica to collaborate on a series of workshops with queer identified-female spectrum Jamaicans. Workshop participants reflected on the ways in which one cultivates relationship to power and what it means to distill power through body and tool. These conversations as well as the artists own reflections on identity and family have informed the portraits and objects presented in Soft Thrones. Ronnessia, Afifia, Isabel, Kerri, Tina’s soft unexplainable power. Upon their Soft Thrones.
Image: Jova Lynne, The Empress (Sits) (2018) archival digital print, 20 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches.
NEHA VEDPATHAK
Neha Vedpathak (b. Pune, India) is an interdisciplinary artist known for her rigorous and inventive process-based practice. Vedpathak has been an invited artist-in-residence at Skopelos Foundation for the Arts, Greece, Bharat Bhavan Graphic Studio, India, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Colorado, CAMAC, France and Fountainhead Residency, Miami. Vedpathak’s works have been shown at ASU Art Museum, The Weatherspoon Museum, The Poetry Foundation, and the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) among other local and national institutions and galleries. Her work has been recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Vedpathak’s upbringing in India has played a vital role in shaping her understanding and approach as an artist. Growing up, rituals and meditation were a prevalent part of her life. In 2009, Vedpathak invented a technique she calls plucking, where she separates the fibers of Japanese handmade paper using a tiny pushpin. The resultant paper resembles lace fabric, which she then uses to create individual works. The plucked paper is also saturated with paint, sewn, and collaged to create a single complete work. Plucking is a slow and repetitive process that Vedpathak embraces as a form of meditation. Neha Vedpathak currently lives and maintains a studio in Detroit.
Image: Neha Vedpathak, The woods within me (2021) Hand plucked Japanese handmade paper, acrylic paint, 35 x 30 inches
Simone DeSousa Gallery is a contemporary art gallery and project located in Cass Corridor, Midtown Detroit, since 2008. The gallery, which also includes an EDITION space, has presented more than 100 exhibitions in the past years, including works by local and international emerging and mid-career artists, and has played a pivotal role in supporting contemporary art and design in Detroit.