About the Artist

Amarilis Singh (b. Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, 1984) based in New York is an emerging interdisciplinary artist exploring art-making with a sewing machine, repurposing textiles, found objects, photographs, ceramics, and installation.

She began her formal art studies at La Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico, then moved to NY where she completed a BFA in Art Education at Long Island University. She is currently pursuing graduate studies at Boston University. Amarilis is also an art teacher at Long Island Public Schools and former owner of Artelier, a teaching art studio where she was well known for her sewing classes for children and open studios for families to create alongside their children.

She lives in Long Island, NY with her husband and three children.

About Artist’s Work:

Years back, I taught myself to use a sewing machine to satisfy a curiosity I had as a child. I began experimenting with repurposing fabrics to make functional pieces that one could wear. When I began the practice of the visual arts, I was already engaged with the mechanical use of the sewing machine. I soon became intrigued by exploring a new function of the textile materials to express thoughts and mending of past and present personal experiences. As the machine creates marks with stitches to the fabric, I feel as I am in a search for possibilities of this new language of expression, removing myself from the layers of self-conformity and social expectations, exposing that vulnerability that is kept inside. Some of my work consists of stitch drawings of the female figure utilizing thread on found textiles with a sewing machine.

In recent works, I utilize hand sewing needles, found objects, photographs, and textiles to create three-dimensional pieces and collages.

About the Artist

Tina Tully grew up in both Westchester, NY and London, UK. She studied Fine Art and Mathematics at Union college. She specialized in sculpture, and she uses her art to find her voice and discover her own identity. She loves to create conversations, and her work serves as a catalyst for change and authentic discussion.

Artist Statement

This collection of wall sculptures celebrates the features of and amplifies the voices of Asian American women. As a woman, and as an Asian-American, I grew up picking apart what I saw in the mirror. This is an attempt to celebrate what I see, and what so many other women and Asian American women see, in our reflections. These works serve as an opportunity to connect everyone to the woman’s experience and story.

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About the Artist

Laurey Bennett-Levy earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts at S.U.N.Y Albany where she studied painting. Recently she has exhibited in Saatchi’s “TOAF” and “Superfine” and has shown in a vast number of group juried shows as a featured artist. Active in both the LA and NY artist community she also focuses on community building. Her travels influence her practice as she aggregates repetitive grids in nature and urban landscapes as catalysts for her content. Current event tensions and life struggles have also impacted her work. In addition to painting, Laurey is an advocate supporting public schools and has directed curriculum based school-wide art shows and in-class education for the underserved. She has been selected into fellowships by Arts4LA and The LA County Arts Education Collective in the pursuit of quality and equality arts education and is currently nurturing students who aspire to take a career in visual arts.

About Artist’s Work:

We all carry polarizing emotions of deep grief and rapture. With this series, I deconstruct my personal moments of divergent emotions, to either repair or relive these dichotomous experiences, with the hope that you too, can recall yours. A “MITER” is a union formed between two edges that meet at an intersection. This notion resonates for me literally and figuratively as I look back at my life’s progression. To execute, I rely on assemblages of lattice work and collect those impressions of repetitive geometric beauty underfoot. Eventually they take on organic form as I constantly reduce and redefine ordinary markers of existence, provoking one to rediscover the unnoticed splendor of what is unobserved. This series merges my competence as a graphic designer and fine artist using a combined process of photography, cyanotype, digital manipulation, painting and collage.

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About the Artist

Jessica Rubin is a Puerto Rican Jewish American artist originally from Los Angeles, currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Growing up in Los Angeles in close proximity to the entertainment industry, she spent much of her youth in performing arts schools learning dance acting and musical theatre, and never considered visual arts until she was randomly placed in a mixed media art class her first semester of college. Being the oldest sibling of a single parent low income family, the places she lived in growing up were inconsistent and often messy, creatively pieced together, shared spaces. Since living in New York, interior space and surroundings have been a very important part of her life and feeling at home. This value is woven into her work, which often depicts feminine figures in domestic comfort spaces peacefully coexisting and blending with their surroundings. She uses vibrant exaggerated colors to depict her subjects in private spaces with her intimate dreamlike portraits. Using herself as a model, she gives the viewer an intimate look into her personal spaces both real and imagined. Rubin has exhibited her work in NYC at galleries such as La MaMa Galleria, Deep Space Gallery, Chinatown Soup, and more.

Artist Statement

In my work I examine the way that the spaces we live in can represent and interact with us as much as we do with them. The places where we spend most of our time have a huge impact on our experience of the world. In my life I have not always had control over creating the physical spaces that I occupied. I use the idea of comfort and safe spaces in my work, how I have learned to find comfort in isolation. For much of the last two years many of us have spent more time than ever in our own bedrooms and domestic spaces. This forced proximity places another level of importance on our personal spaces and they become a necessary extension of ourselves. We require a level of care for our spaces so they can care for us. Within these spaces, I use the body as a landscape with organic shapes and curves and unnatural vibrant colors. I paint the figures from unusual perspectives, sometimes including the perspective of the subject so the viewers can step into the work as if they are looking down at their own body. I use myself as a model, I start with taking photos in groups setting up a space I want to occupy and share. I make digital drawings for composition and use the drawings as reference for the larger piece. I choose colors intuitively using vibrant exaggerated colors to emphasize the emotional context of the work and highlight certain areas of the composition. This unusual way of viewing the body of another person evokes a sense of distortion of the body that expresses the disconnect that I often feel in my own body with the way feminine bodies are viewed and debated about by others. I center the feminine perspective, how we exist in spaces and feel most natural, how we view our own worlds, not trying to look a certain way just existing.

About the Artist

Kim Tateo is an artist, musician and educator living in Troy, NY. She is also the Executive Director and Farm Manager of Friends of Tivoli Lake Preserve and Farm which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that facilitates conservation, environmental education and outdoor recreation within Tivoli Lake Preserve which is located in an Environmental Justice (EJ) community in Albany, New York. 

Kim was born in 1984 in Seoul, South Korea. She was adopted when she was three months old and grew up in the state of Iowa. She received a BA of Music from the University of Iowa. After college, she relocated to New York City where she resided for nearly 10 years before moving to upstate NY. 

As an artist, Kim explores connections of the seen and unseen and works in all mediums including paint, glitter, watercolors, pastels, plants, and anything that creates color. 

When she is not painting, she is singing or shepherding a flock of sheep (sometimes both simultaneously) and her work is greatly influenced by her time with plants and animals.

Kim has been part of several group exhibitions in NYC and the Capital Region. Highlighted shows include “What Blooms in Moonlight” which was a solo event held at Taste Collection in 2019 and two jury-selected shows, S010 at Con Artist Gallery in collaboration with Meural and The Sixth Annual Regional Juried Art Show at the Spencertown Academy.

Artist Statement

Kim Tateo is an artist who paints her feelings into worlds of whimsy. A common theme for her work is interconnectedness—to each other as humans and to the Earth. Her work moves between releasing feelings into abstract expressions and creating magical worlds which are meant to be the unseen spaces where all hearts are connected. Her work is meant to evoke a sense of dreaming, playfulness, peace and gently pull on the heartstrings of whimsy that are in all beings.

Her recent works have been exploring the idea of moving through the “ego” or the “self” and into the collective—the heart space where we are all flooded with love. 

Moving from somewhere to everywhere, moving from someone to everyone, from something to everything.