Five artists affiliated with UH Manoa Department of Art to be featured in New York City exhibition

HAWAII 5

Mary Babcock

Eli Baxter

Shawn Spangler

Jonathan Swanz

Tom Walker

HAWAII - 5 / GalleryHNL launches its first New York City exhibition with five artists affliated with the UHM Department of Art and Art History.

MARY BABCOCK
ELI BAXTER
SHAWN SPANGLER
JONATHAN SWANZ
TOM WALKER

October 29 to November 27, 2015

Tambaran Gallery, 5 East 82nd Street, New York, New York 10028 | Map

Gallery Hours : Monday–Friday 11am – 6pm, Saturday 11am – 5pm 

MARY BABCOCK is deeply interested in the intersection of art, contemplation and social activism. Mending is a central theme in her work, both as an actual reparative action, and as a metaphor for personal and social change. Her Salvaged Net Series, Hydrophilia, is a key example of this approach. Works in this series are large scale tapestries created from discarded fishing nets, ropes and line collected from rivers and seas across the Pacific. 

ELI BAXTER is a sculptor and installation artist. Her inspirations often come from discarded materials, both organic and inorganic, found in the streets. Whether rusty metal straps or pieces from worn leather couches, she enjoys transforming them into something else, or suggestive of something else. Over the years recycled bicycle inner tubes became her dominant media. By contrasting the worthlessness of the material with her painstakingly detailed handwork she comments on the gluttony and waste of consumer culture and the ways in which desire is manufactured. 

SHAWN SPANGLER's work draws inspiration from craft, design and digital fabrication. His wheel thrown porcelain are often created through the combination of multiple parts, each referring to historical received forms. Examples of influences include forms from the Kingdom of Koryo (高麗, 918–1392AD) and Song dynasty (宋朝, 960 to 1279AD). Spangler traveled extensively in Asia and was a visiting artist at the SanBao Art Institute, Jingdezhen Ceramic Art Institute, and Yun Jun Studio in China. 

JONATHAN SWANZ perceives inert matter to have vitality parallel to that of human beings. Both exhibit attraction and repulsion, ascribe to the law of energy conservation, fatigue under pressure, respond to gravitational influences, and self-organize. He is interested in the way materials seem to demonstrate certain social attributes, and the way humanity, in turn, expresses material qualities. His ongoing series, Vibrant Matter, explores the aforementioned parallels by harnessing the fluid and expressive vitality of molten glass. 

TOM WALKER's father worked for the Department of Defense and NATO encrypting and decrypting information. He remembers going to work with his father and being shown the computers and equipment used to transmit and receive information. He recalls fondly how he was taught the language and terminology of these devices. Recently Walker realized the impact that this experience has had on his current project Sequence, in which he is developing a visual language for communicating how digital information is transmitted and received, along with the errors that occur in the process.

For more information, visit: http://us10.campaign-archive1.com/?u=f2d387488655df6237f089e31&id=128f34fd2