February 2024: Meet the Artists
Nardeen Srouji, Reniel del Rosario, Zoe Walsh
Nardeen Srouji
Nardeen Srouji appropriates familiar objects, images and sounds from her surroundings and transforms them into an intervention, inviting the viewer to reconfigure their understanding and relationship to the world. These interventions seek to push the boundaries and challenge the status quo by departing from their familiar function or use, turning the critique inwards to question one’s own existence. Her work deals with the spaces or gaps between stability and instability, placement and displacement, familiarity and estrangement. Throughout her works, Srouji tends to occupy the exhibition space, either by scale or by using the boundaries of the space as part of her work. Srouji had recent solo exhibitions at Sommer Gallery in Tel-Aviv (2023), the Haifa Museum of Art (2022), and Beit-Hagefen Art Gallery (2019). Her works have been shown in various exhibitions and institutions including The Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2021), Ramat Gan Museum (2022), and The Museum of Islamic Art, Jerusalem (2020).
Reniel del Rosario
Reniel del Rosario primarily uses clay, quantity, and satire to discuss themes of commodification and value. His projects range from interactive mimicries of consumer establishments, reimaginings of artifacts, and imperfect copies of already-existing objects. He often creates ceramics that playfully recreate or re-imagine familiar objects. From cakes to cigarettes to burial jars, these hand-built objects are made in the tens to hundreds and are full of imprints, mistakes, and inconsistencies. These objects are then gathered and put into a huddled pile or in socially interactive installations in public, satirizing consumer establishments, highlighting the abundance of the objects along with the love of the mass-produced. The individual objects carry the histories of the goods they mimic, whether it’s making forgeries of luxury objects, selling art as if it was a consumer object, or recreating lost artifacts in a contemporary setting they never got to see. Within his works, there is consistently an inquisition of value: cultural, monetary, and historical. Reniel is a 2019 recipient of the Center for Craft’s Windgate-Lamar fellowship, a 2022 SFMOMA Artists Soapbox Derby racer, and has been featured in ARTFORUM and Bon Appetit magazine. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues like Meta Open Arts, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Catharine Clark Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Jane Lombard Gallery.
Zoe Walsh
Zoe Walsh makes intricate, vividly saturated paintings that refuse to settle for a singular position. This multiplicity is echoed through process: the paintings are constructed using screen printing and stenciling, borrowing and remixing techniques of printmaking. These methods produce indexes which, upon close looking, reveal the role of digital media in the development of their form. This visuality stems from the artist’s use of 3D modeling programs and photo editing software to layer elaborate mise-en-scène which serve as drawings for the paintings. Highly sensitive to light - a medium that traverses painting, photography, film, sculpture, and the digital - each painting’s color space is constructed by countless passages of translucent paint. Zoe’s work has been exhibited by M+B Los Angeles, Yossi Milo in New York, and Fondation des Etats-Unis in Paris, France.
