“A Certain Thread” Exhibition

Arts Warehouse is pleased to present a new group exhibition, A Certain Thread, featuring the work of artists Rachel Anzalone, Shawna Moulton, and Yochi Yakir-Avin.

Opening date: September 6th, 2024
During First Friday Art Walk, 6 – 9pm
On view September 6th – October 19th, 2024
Artist Talk October 17th, 6:30pm

A Certain Thread brings together three women artists exploring their family history, identity, and memories both remembered and missing. These artists come from diverse backgrounds and family lineages, and yet this intimate process of recording and creating is kindred in spirit.

Through a variety of mediums, commonalities weave through the exhibition in the expression of their personal stories. Photos, cardboard, leaves and branches – become examples of specific memory triggers linked to a particular person or moment in time. The desire to learn and preserve is a thread that binds them, much like a thread that links one to their family history and their future.

Every drawing and artifact created is an exercise in remembering. We are invited to experience these intimate and nostalgic moments throughout the exhibition and reflect on our own personal stories.

 

 

Artist information:

RACHEL ANZALONE

Anzalone’s current art exploration is called Famiglia. Over the last three years Famiglia has become a series of works that were created in response to the notion of memory, permanency, and language. Famiglia reflects the struggles and perseverance of the artist being new to both Canada and Nova Scotia, along with her Italian family’s history of immigrating to the United States.

Through conversations with family and by translating their books from Italian into English, Anzalone is learning about her family’s past and exploring this history through a multimedia creative process. She collages fragmented stories and dissolves old family photographs into paintings; she hand-draw animations; and makes small sculptures that reference objects of nostalgia. Subjects are physically layered on paintings, which include frosted mylar and tracing paper. These materials cover each surface and cloud the images, while providing a small preview of what is underneath.

As her famiglia’s memories begin to dissolve with time’s passage, she worries about loss: for her family’s history and their language being forgotten. Still, she trusts through the process of creation, that disconnected moments will be reconnected once again.

SHAWNA MOULTON

Shawna Moulton is using art to reflect and find herself; with a want to honor and connect with her ancestors and create a legacy for future generations. The core of her work is celebrating what it means to live a life by connecting with the past, present, and future. Shawna uses various mediums that diversify these different aspects of myself, using mixed media portraits, body casting, and watercolor.

Shawna Moulton is a multi-disciplinary artist and art educator based in South Florida. She was born in Freeport, Bahamas, raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and then migrated to the United States. At an early age, she discovered the magic of art-making, manifesting works of drawings, paintings, sculptures, and paper-making. In 2015 she graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts.

Her art journey has taken her to the Awagami Factory in Tokushima, Japan, where she learned traditional Japanese paper making. She has several years of experience working in museum education departments such as the Museum of Contemporary Art (North Miami), the Norton Museum of Art, the Young At Art Museum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts Museum. Her role has been engaging the public community with conversations around art, teaching art techniques, and designing art curriculums.

Moulton has been in residence at the Bakehouse Arts Complex (2022) and is presently a member of the Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator. As Shawna continues to work on her creative practice, she is active as an independent teaching artist around South Florida.

The artworks she creates reflect her search for identity through her heritage as an immigrant in America, with deep connections to the Caribbean rooted in the richness of the African Diaspora. She believes that diverse stories are essential to creating a more just world for people to be seen and represented, and this is something she is deeply committed to manifesting through her art. Her work includes life-size paper-casting figures, illustrations on handmade paper, and watercolor paintings reflecting her journey into motherhood. shawnamoulton.com

 

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YOCHI YAKIR-AVIN

Yochi Yakir-Avin is a multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses painting, object making, and installations. Her art merges these mediums to examine time and memory, emphasizing an understanding of both personal and collective history. By exploring how memories shape our perception of the world, she seeks to create a dialogue that fosters emotional and intellectual connections. Yakir-Avin frequently uses monochrome to evoke the material softness of faded photographs, highlighting the way images, like language, function. She employs disarming, recycled, and found materials that carry tangible remnants of time, prompting refection on the transient and mutable nature of memory.

 

Born in Poland and raised in Israel, Yochi Yakir-Avin is currently based in South Florida. She is a resident artist and art instructor at Studio 18 Art Complex in Broward, Florida. She pursued her fine arts education in both Israel and Italy, obtaining her BFA from the Brera Academy of Arts in Milan. Yakir-Avin has recently been awarded the Broward Innovation Grant 2024 for her upcoming project, which will be a collaboration and fusion of visual art and theater, marking the next step in her artistic evolution. This project, a testament to her ongoing research known as “The Memory Project,” follows three personal exhibitions held in 2020, 2021, and 2022, all supported by grants from the Broward County Cultural Division.

Her work has been showcased in various notable exhibitions, including the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin, the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club in New York, the Salmagundi Art Club in New York, the Lore Degenstein Gallery in Pennsylvania, and the B.J. Spoke Gallery in New York. Locally, her work has been exhibited at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, The Frank Gallery in Pembroke Pines, the MIFA Gallery in Miami, and the JCC Museum in Boca Raton, among others. yochiyakiravin.com