Opening

Sascha Braunig (b. 1983, Qualicum Beach, BC, Canada) lives and works in Portland, ME. She earned her BFA at The Cooper Union (2005) and graduated with an MFA in 2008 from the Yale School of Art. Recent exhibitions include “Free Peel,” Foxy Production, New York, NY; “Shivers,” MoMA PS1, New York; and “Torsion,” Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway.

Paul Anthony Smith was born in 1988 in St Ann’s Bay, Jamaica and later raised in Miami where he attended the New World School of the Arts. He received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and now resides in New York City. His work has been acquired by numerous public collections, including most recently the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas, Austin. Inclusion in museum exhibitions include a forthcoming two person show at the Philadelphia Photo Center, curated by Nathaniel Stein, as well as group shows at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Nasher Museum of Art, the Seattle Museum of Art, the Studio Museum and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. He is represented by Zieher Smith in New York, where he currently has a solo exhibition.

Her work has screened at festivals worldwide including Frameline LGBTQ Film Festival, New Voices in Black Cinema, Toronto Inside Out Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Maryland International Film Festival, and Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her films and experimental videos have been exhibited at museums, universities, and cinemas both nationally and internationally including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Chicago’s Black Cinema House, Museum of Contemporary Art LA, ICA Boston, Indiana University’s Cinema, Anthology Film Archives, and the Made in New York Media Center. She is the recipient of the Sundance Documentary Fund Production Grant and the Jerome Foundation Film and Video Grant.

Swimming Them Homeward, is a survey of artists from Lexington, Kentucky featuring works by Charles Williams, Louis Zoellar Bickett, Robert Morgan, Mike Goodlett, Guy Mendes, James Baker Hall, Mare Vaccaro, Lina Tharsing, and Robert Beatty. Lexington’s art community is extraordinarily prolific and interconnected, but artists from here are rarely shown outside of regional art centers. This relative seclusion has led to the development of a geographically specific style that is seen today and can be traced back at least to the early 70’s. Anxious, baroque forms and compulsive tendencies of collecting or producing objects define these artists’ practice. The relationships between these artists extend beyond theme and tendency and also, perhaps most importantly, take place in the real world. They collect each other’s work and have maintained long term friendships.

Steffen Sornpao lives and works in Atlanta, GA. He received his BFA at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design and has shown extensively around Atlanta. He is Co-Director at the artist run space Good Enough.