Asya Geisberg Gallery is pleased to announce its late summer exhibition Counter Narratives: Geographies of the Unfamiliar featuring ten recent graduates of Rhode Island School of Design’s MFA Program in Painting. With a diversity of aesthetics and approaches to painting as a practice, the artists in the exhibition represent a unique range of possibilities afforded by painting. A number of artists in the exhibition use photography as a starting point – referencing family photos, images of quotidian objects and interiors – in order to document origin stories, political struggle, and personal journeys that have led to unexpected places and experiences. Some of the artworks in the exhibition exploit photography to surrealistic ends, rendering unknown landscapes to make sense of the broader world. Hailing from Pakistan, Israel, Iran, Palestine, Mexico, and the United States, the artists whose works are featured in Counter Narratives weave together contrasting stories, reflecting on the potentials of mark making as a form of communication and connectivity.
Incorporating realism and fantastic visuals, Arghavan Khosravi, Sanié Shoaib Bokhari, and Marisa Adesman represent feminine perspectives that collectively offer worldly and domestic vantage points, from interior spaces – from under the dining room table, to postmodern architectural compositions that reinterpret the conventional structure of the canvas. Christian Berman and Rebecca Levitan work with familiar objects and aesthetics – a telephone, costume jewelry, textiles, pixelation – to render them unfamiliar yet dreamlike, creating a sense of deja vu.