Someday is pleased to present a solo booth with Rachelle Dang for NADA Miami 2023.

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Dang is a New York-based artist and educator whose work engages the environmental legacies of colonialism. Her sculptures and multidisciplinary projects examine interwoven histories and complex environmental connections, bringing together historical facts, botanical research, generational memory, and poetic allusion.

 

For the fair, Dang presents new glazed ceramics alongside “Botany is Ancestry, ” a sprawling floor installation composed of concrete, copper, wood, ceramic, and paint. The formal arrangement is loosely based on the actual layout of Dang’s family home in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Fragments from architectural blueprints drawn from memory are traced in patinated copper and spray-painted cinderblocks - a ubiquitous building material commonly used to construct homes, schools, prisons, industrial warehouses, and housing projects. Anchoring the installation is a scattering of ceramic breadfruit, cast in various states of health and decay. The materials allude to themes characteristic of Dang’s overall practice, such as economic hierarchy, ecological degradation, and disenfranchisement, explored through the hazy web of personal recollection. Through this process, Dang seeks to “span the difference between historical events and present-day consequences.” In the artist’s own words:

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“I rebuilt part of the foundation of my family’s home over the concrete floor of my New York studio. I wanted to align and acknowledge two very different worlds. This hybrid platform enabled me to ask how historical projects are literally brought home, how they can be actualized in my world and in the viewer’s presence. The ground floor of my home, including my bedroom, was constructed entirely from cinder blocks, from floor to ceiling. I know its texture from lying in bed as a child and tracing the edges of the painted cinder blocks with my fingers and feet. They are a visibly ubiquitous building material in tropical places.... as a cheap, mass-produced construction material, it feels immediately of our own time, helping me to span the distance between historical events and present-day consequences. The copper boxes have a size and material presence that refer to luxury containers such as 18th-century lacquered chests made to transport tea leaves from China to Europe. I wanted the variegated patina effect created from salt, vinegar, torch, and sulfur to evoke old maps and geologic topographies.” - Rachelle Dang

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Rachelle Dang (b. Honolulu, HI) is a Brooklyn-based artist and a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Craft/Sculpture (2023). Dang’s public art commissions include Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island (2023), and Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City (2019–20). She has exhibited at Nino Mier Gallery, Glassell Park (2023); Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (2022); Someday, New York (2021 and 2019); A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn (2020); Smack Mellon, Brooklyn (2019–20); Lesley Heller, New York (2019); Haverford College Art Galleries, Philadelphia (2019); Hawai`i Pacific University, Kaneohe (2013), and the Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawai`i (2011 Biennial). Her artist residences and fellowships include Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace (2022–23); Museum of Arts and Design (Fellowship 2022); Yaddo (2021); the Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program (2019–20); Shandaken: Storm King Art Center (2018); and Cooper Union (2018). Dang received her MFA from Hunter College, CUNY, and her BA from Wellesley College. She is Critic at Yale School of Art.