Savannah Bustillo, Ryan Gerald Nelson, Sarah Evenson

Exhibition Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Friday, May 13; 6:30-9pm

L to R: Savannah Bustillo, Ryan Gerald Nelson, and Sarah Evenson viewing the work of Julie Mehretu

Please join Highpoint to celebrate the artistry of the 2021-2022 Jerome Early Career Printmakers at their culminating exhibition. With generous support from the Jerome Foundation, Savannah Bustillo, Sarah Evenson, and Ryan Gerald Nelson were awarded with the opportunity to work within a supportive studio program that fosters experimentation and growth. The artists were provided access to the artists cooperative printshop at Highpoint, technical support, and critical dialogue with invited arts professionals during the nine-month residency. This exhibition features prints, printed objects, and other works of art created during the residency.

Savannah’s work focuses on the ways language practices shape her identity as a queer second-generation bilingual Latina woman. By taking small discarded objects, sounds, and movements that seem silent and insignificant, she reemphasizes them to show both the strength and trauma in marginality. A key aspect she explores is the relationship between “authenticity” and race. The body of work she is working on so far during the residency continues exploring these dynamics, including research into the history of racist phraseology and teaching practices, historical shibboleths, and the way language works through the semantic concept of assimilation (when phonemes are adjusted by the phonemes that come before or after them, done often in English).

Sarah uses their experience as a queer transgender artist to create books, zines, prints, and pieces of writing that explore queerness, transformation, embodiment, and the subversion of structural hierarchies. In making this work, they are not interested in normalizing queer and trans lived experience. Rather, their pieces are spaces in which queer joys are celebrated as strange, wild, and exuberant sites of social change and bodily resistance.

Nelson’s body of work visually and conceptually investigates his own developing theory of the Image by breaking down and depicting different stages of the metamorphosis of the Image as it traverses a myriad of mediated landscapes. By presenting the Image as being more analogous to a biological organism in an unforgiving ecosystem than simply a stable technological relic, Nelson points to the susceptibility of both the Image itself as well as the structures and apparatuses that make the Image possible or not. Nelson contends that our new world has proven that the Image—highly compressed, politicized, venerated, even iconoclastic by nature—exists in a perpetual state of precarity: its visual constitution open to manipulation, its meaning able to be rewritten many times over, often simultaneously, and its existence (digital or physical) certainly no guarantee.

Highpoint would like to thank the jurors for the 2021-2022 Residency Laura Wertheim Joseph and Connor Rice as well as guest critics, Esther Callahan, Laura Wertheim Joseph, Connor Rice, and Gregory Smith and Rebecca Heidenberg.