Too Close
RISD MFA Photography Class of 2023
Renee Hee Young Cha, Kerr Cirilo, Jamil Fatti, Anique Jordan, Alana Perino, Zeyuan Ren, Kai Wasikowski, and Yunwei Zhou
Curated by Thea Quiray Tagle
August 4-24, 2023
Opening reception Thursday August 3, 6-8pm

Installation Views

Microscope Gallery is pleased to host Too Close, a group exhibition of new work by the Rhode Island School of Design MFA Photography Class of 2023: Renee Hee Young Cha, Kerr Cirilo, Jamil Fatti, Anique Jordan, Alana Perino, Zeyuan Ren, Kai Wasikowski, and Yunwei Zhou. The exhibition is guest curated by Thea Quiray Tagle, associate curator of the Bell Gallery at Brown University. 

Curatorial Statement by Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD: 

Distant Proximities: On being “too close”

Collectively, we are three years into a global pandemic, and it’s no stretch to say that our ways of relating to one another have become very awkward. People with chronic illness and disability and folks with isolationist tendencies have become more marginalized while the majority have proceeded with life as normal, though all our realities are now fundamentally altered. At least for middle-class people in the US, we have emerged (partially or wholly) from our quarantine cocoons into discomfiting social relations where public displays of grief and disaffection have been expunged and disavowed. For some, small talk has become entirely impossible to sustain in the aftermath of years of deep introspection; for others, small talk remains the only bearable type of interaction after years of losses both small and profound. In this strange present, the terms of intimacy, of proximity, of closeness with lovers, family members, acquaintances, colleagues, and friends must be renegotiated– and this rebirthing process, quite frankly, hurts. 

Navigating everything from the alienation inherent to online dating apps to meeting the demands of grueling graduate programs, younger artists have transmuted this general milieu of destabilization into their work– and the 2023 cohort of RISD MFA Photography graduates provides evidence of this. Self-selecting the words Too Close for the title of their New York group exhibition, these artists have each created bodies of work that oscillate between the polarities of distance and proximity, and linger in the tensions therein. 

Half of the artists in this show overtly or subliminally explore questions of intersubjectivity and proximity across scales from the personal to the structural. Jamil Fatti’s Plume meditates on the value of meaning in the face of impermanence. The images in Plume ask an open-ended question about what meaning and purpose can be found once religious beliefs of the afterlife are no longer palliatives against insignificance. Considering loss from a cultural and intergenerational lens, Kerr Cirilo’s As We Mourn Other Suns utilizes the aesthetic of queer maximalism to overwhelm viewers with the palimpsestic histories of imperialist and colonialist violence in the Americas and the Pacific. Constructing alternate personas using his own body as proxy, Cirilo’s speculative subjects are quite literally entangled within (and resist being engulfed by) the intimacies of empire and its ongoing afterlives. Within Anique Jordan’s lightboxes, part of her series To Score the Marvelous/Notations, are pictured Black women who gesture, dance, and move to music unheard. They are almost lifesize yet remain out of reach, their bodies contained yet resisting being restrained by their frame– they refuse the distancing and dehumanization that Black women have been subjected to across space and time. And in Alana Perino’s In A Condition of No Light, the artist ruminates on their Ashkenazi Jewish cultural inheritances through picturing the home as a domestic stage.  Quite literally too close to family members at times, Perino processes their own proximities to whiteness and the heteronormative domesticities that have structured their families of birth, and works to queer notions of kinship, family, and home.

The remaining four artists featured in Too Close linger in the stew of disidentification, estrangement, and intentional disavowal. Kai Wasikowski’s Garden Etiquette picks through his personal and familial connections to nature, and critiques the settler colonial foundations of the national park system in Australia and the United States. The work obliquely subverts the colonial logics underlying discourses of land preservation and environmentalism, which have been deployed by the state to displace Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands for use and enjoyment by white settlers (including the artist’s own family). Moving through land- and seascapes differently, Zeyuan Ren’s Coast to Coast (Preamble) is an essayistic video installation on the artist’s temporary displacement from China to the US that uses the Sutro Bath Ruins in San Francisco as a place for self-reflection. As the crumbling remains of a pleasure site on the US Pacific Coast, this now-tourist attraction traffics in nostalgia for times past, in ways that allow the artist to (dis)identify with their own liminal position in the here and now. Renee Hee Young Cha’s Happy Days plays with the absurd and the impossibility of maintaining a whole self. Utilizing the anti-logic of Samuel Beckett’s plays, Cha’s images refuse narrativization and labor to break out of Western-imposed dichotomies and worldviews about the stable, and thus knowable, subject. Finally, Yunwei Zhou’s sculpture “Drop Shadow” reveals the agency and autonomy of the object, and its ability to resist incorporation or assimilation when forced into a structural relation. Each component operates independently despite the artist’s interventions, and the imposed system continually breaks down of its own volition– a fitting reflection of these challenging and awkward times we inhabit. 

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Hee Young Renee Cha is a visual artist who focuses on the affinities between marginalized identity and the act of translation. Drawing on her own experiences of a fragmented identity and multilingualism across Korea, China, and the U.S., Cha uses photography, moving images, and installation to explore and subvert the complex processes of translation that are inherent in literature and visual art. Cha holds a bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Korea University. She received her MFA degree in Photography at Rhode Island School of Design. 

Kerr Cirilo (b. 1996, Paniqui, Tarlac, Philippines) grew up in Oahu, Hawaii. They received their B.A. in Religion and Studio Art from Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA and their M.F.A. in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. While their experiences as a first-generation, queer, immigrant of color heavily influence their thinking and making, their core concerns are that of the image and its entanglements with empire. 

Jamil Fatti is an artist and landscape architect whose recent work explores the creation of “meaning” in relation to intersubjectivity, the poetics of love and loss, and the interplay between temporality, death, and futility.

Anique Jordan is an artist, writer and curator who looks to answer the question of possibility in everything she creates. As an artist, Anique works in photography, sculpture and performance often employing the theory of hauntology to challenge historical or dominant narratives and creating, what she calls, impossible images. Recently, she has been thinking about time, the surreal, and the rejection of the singular and linear ways of thinking or being in the world. Anique has lectured on her artistic and community engaged curatorial practice as a 2017 Canada Seminar speaker at Harvard University and in numerous institutions across the Americas. In 2017 she co-curated the exhibition Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood at the Art Gallery of Ontario. As an artist, she has exhibited in galleries such as Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), Art Gallery of Guelph, Doris McCarthy Gallery,  Art Gallery of Windsor, Gallery 44, and Y+ Contemporary. She has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships and in 2017 was awarded the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist of the Year award. Anique completed her MFA in Photography at Rhode Island School of Design.

Alana Perino was born in 1988 and grew up in New York City, the North Fork of Long Island, and the stretch of highway between the two. They studied European Intellectual History and Photography at Wesleyan University, where their questions concerning the nature of belonging were only further problematized. After working as a photojournalist in the Israeli-Palestinian territories, skeptical of the privileged nature of their stay, Alana returned to the United States. They lived in California for eight years, crisscrossing the country to photograph “American” heritage sites. In the summer of 2021 they returned to the East Coast to photograph the people and places that raised them. Their artist practice can be broadly described as an attempt to find strength in the insecurities of heritage. Alana resides on the unceded land of the Pokanoket, Wampanoag and Narragansett in Providence, Rhode Island where they recently completed the MFA Photography program at RISD in 2023. They are still searching for home.

Zeyuan Ren (b. 1997, Ningbo, China), lives and works in Providence, RI, is a visual artist whose work engages with displacement and in-betweenness. Incorporating photography, video, performance and installation, his recent practice takes place and evolves on coasts, examining how the linear model of time and knowledge is distorted and ruptured by the ocean. Ren’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Sol Koffler Gallery (Providence, US), Photo Open Up Festival (Padua, IT), Jimei X Arles International Photo Festival (Xiamen, CN), Ningbo Museum of Art (Ningbo, CN) and more. He has been a finalist in the UCCA Lab Emerging Artists Program (Beijing, 2022), and a recipient of the Graduate Commons Grant (2023). He recently received his MFA in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Kai Wasikowski is an artist working across photography, video and sculpture. With British, German and Polish settler ancestry, Wasikowski uses photography to better understand his positionality in relation to the impacts of settler colonialism, and the inseparability of environmental justice from its structural violences. Wasikowski’s projects have engaged with western traditions of landscape photography, with an interest in the instrumentality of the camera—how it and various optical technologies prescribe ways of seeing whilst simultaneously constructing an unseen. Wasikowski received his BFA from the University of Sydney (2016) and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2023). In 2017 he received the Dr. Harold Schenberg Art Fellowship presented by the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2018 Wasikowski exhibited at Artspace (Sydney), Home of the Arts Gallery and the Australian Centre for Photography, and in 2019 he was artist in residence at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (China). In 2020, Wasikowski received the American Australian Association’s AusArt Scholarship to pursue studies in the USA. His work has been featured on the cover of Art Monthly Australasia, and written about in Artist Profile, Art Collector and VAULT Magazine. Recently, he was a recipient of the Marten Bequest Scholarship, offered by the Australia Council for the Arts.

Zhouxizhaoren (Yunwei Zhou) is a visual artist who creates kinetic, time-based structures that teeter the lines between permanence and ephemerality, space and place, and systems. Born in China, Zhouxizhaoren received his MFA at Rhode Island School of Design in 2023, and BS at University of California, Santa Barbara in 2015. Zhouxizhaoren’s art practice revolves around installation works that explore the relationship between objects, space, and perception. With an unconventional approach to utilizing and understanding tools and technology, Zhouxizhaoren constructs spaces and systems that challenge established perceptions and beliefs. These installations are often meticulously designed to create a sense of disorientation, challenging assumptions about the world and encouraging a rethinking of our surroundings. Zhouxizhaoren is particularly interested in exploring the ways in which our perspectives shape our understanding of reality. Ultimately, Zhouxizhaoren seeks to create immersive experiences that invite engagement with surroundings in new and unexpected ways.

Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD is a transdisciplinary scholar of queer studies, ethnic studies, and visual studies; writer; and Associate Curator of the Brown Arts Institute and Bell Gallery at Brown University. She is co-curator of New York Now: Home, the inaugural contemporary photography triennial at the Museum of the City of New York, open through August 20, 2023. www.theaquiraytagle.com