All photographs by Paul D’Agostino.
On the fourth floor of a fortunately yet-industrial, local-beacon-like outcropping on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 46th Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is the NARS Foundation, an arts organization and residency program.
During my recent round of studio visits there as a guest critic, I met with Gunilla Daga, from Sweden; Julie Trudel, from Canada; Jennifer Lawint, also from Canada; and Cecilia Enberg, from Sweden. We talked in general about the joys of tapping into the surfeit of cultural riches in New York City, and more specifically—and respectively, per the listing of names above—about earthy pigments, compositional moods, and potentials for embroidered contours and depths; varicolorful plexiglass substrates that might become even more mesmerizing and perhaps spatially informative if dangled from the ceiling; the ranging weirdnesses and sometimes individualized efficacies of emotional counsel culled from the books of a most obscure self-help guru; and about overlapping immigrations and cultural strata, notes about noises and other things fleeting, and the surprising formal parallels that can’t be overlooked between selectively cancelled texts and charcoal rubbings done on bricks.
Here are some images from my visit. Much more information about the NARS Foundation, and about these and other artists-in-residence, is on their website.
In Gunilla Daga’s studio.
In Gunilla Daga’s studio.
In Julie Trudel’s studio.
In Julie Trudel’s studio.
In Jennifer Lawint’s studio.
In Jennifer Lawint’s studio.
In Cecilia Enberg’s studio.
In Cecilia Enberg’s studio.
Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, translator, curator and professor living in Bushwick, Brooklyn. More information about him is available here, and you can find him as @postuccio on Instagram and Twitter.
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