Not For Sale
Noel Maghathe and Tiffany Tran
February 2-12, 2019
Opening reception Saturday, February 2nd, 2019 6-9 PM
Additional gallery hours: Thursday 2/7 6-9 pm
Saturday 2/9 12-4 pm
Sunday 2/10 1-3 pm
Anytime Dept. is pleased to announce Not For Sale, a two-person, collaborative exhibition by Noel Maghathe and Tiffany Tran. This project is the second installation of an exhibition series where opportunities are extended to recent MFA and BFA graduates inviting them to produce new work and develop written statements after completing their degrees.
This is not for you, but you can certainly look.
In Not For Sale, Noel Maghathe, a mixed Palestinian American artist, and Tiffany Tran, a Vietnamese American artist, exhibit both collaborative and individual works that intimately expose us to their cultural identities. Ranging from sculptural work to performance, the show makes space for conversations on representation and the collision of past and present.
Maghathe utilizes temperature and performance to generate a series of real and fabricated moments in an attempt to understand a deep seated sense of longing for their country, past memories, and personal clarity. Maghathe deals with confusion about where personal history and the present-self converge.Their practice engages these ideas through personal symbolism, reflecting on being denied access to something (memories integral to identity formation) so precious to them.
Tran’s work presents to the viewer an enlargement of material reality. Her practice attempts to push against the commodification of Vietnamese culture by focusing on where the lines blur between real and fictional identities. This is a fallacy because she has only lived the experience of an American born Vietnamese, and therefore can only shift the assumed and material narratives of cultural objects and imagery. With an unreliable memory she attempts to confront invisibility - of immigrant labor, the last traces of a mother tongue, and the meaning of a first language. She likens the experience to the transactional exchanges of a nail salon - when the worth becomes the work, materiality and meaning drift from each other, like two buoys connected by fishing line, drifting and floating, a little closer, a little farther, continuously.
Noel Maghathe is a Mixed Palestinian American artist and graduate of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Dedicated to gender and identity politics, Maghathe uses performance, sculpture and installation to advance socially conscious dialogues centering queer voices.
Tiffany Tran is a Vietnamese American artist currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is originally from Madison, Wisconsin and graduated in 2017 from the Art Academy of Cincinnati with a BFA in sculpture. Her work touches on the experiences of a southeast Asian American person living in the Midwest.
Anytime Dept. started out as an unnamed project between two artists who wanted to celebrate the overlaps in their communities and to support rich dialogues that extended beyond the tradition of works in space. Since forming the base of our argument-as-project, we have devoted resources to this frontier in gestures of devotion to a lingering idealism about the endeavor of art making. No one will create space for you if you don’t make it for yourself. We aim to consider and support artists who are challenging existing models of survival, who are creating new channels of the politic by inventing it, who are allowing the shapes of these tributaries to formulate as they carve out pathways and alternatives.