Touchstones | Yevgeniya Baras, Hawkins Bolden, Christian Quin Newell, Laurence Pilon, Nickola Pottinger

January 6 – February 18, 2023

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present Touchstones, featuring works by Yevgeniya Baras, Hawkins Bolden, Christian Quin Newell, Laurence Pilon, and Nickola Pottinger.  Representing a variety of backgrounds and nationalities, several of these artists have chosen or been forced to leave their countries of birth for new homes, while others have radically reexamined the internal and external landscapes they inhabit.  Through nuanced abstractions and unconventional media, all of them consider themes of migration, translation, wayfinding, and landscape in their work.  Like a smooth stone carried in a traveler’s pocket, the assembled artworks represent what these artists have held close throughout their migrations, helping them to chart new courses through unfamiliar territories.

Yevgeniya Baras (b. Syzran, former Soviet Union) is an artist in New York. She has exhibited her work at galleries including White Columns (New York, NY); Nicelle Beauchene (New York, NY); Reyes Finn Gallery (Detroit, MI); Gavin Brown Enterprise (New York, NY); Inman Gallery (Houston, TX); Sperone Westwater Gallery (New York, NY); Thomas Erben Gallery (New York, NY); as well as internationally.  She is represented by The Landing (Los Angeles, CA) and Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY).

Baras' paintings take shape through a process of layering and accumulation, combining oil media with various found and unconventional materials. The resulting objects hover between painting and sculptural relief, with layers that frequently extend onto the sides and supports of the canvas, refusing any definitive boundary. Within these stratified compositions, Baras creates symbolic topographies which address ideas of language, migration, and translation. The material richness of the work serves to generate abstractions that are encoded and deeply personal to the artist.

Baras was named Senior Fulbright Scholar in 2022. She was a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2021, Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, the Pollock-Krasner grant and the Chinati Foundation Residency in 2018, and the Yaddo Residency in 2017. She received the Artadia Prize and was selected for the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, and the MacDowell Colony residency in 2015. In 2014 she was named a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize.

Baras co-founded and co-curated Regina Rex Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side (2010-2018).

Baras holds a BA in Psychology and Fine Arts and an MA in Education from the University of Pennsylvania (2003) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007). Baras teaches at Rhode Island School of Design.

Hawkins Bolden (b. 1914, Memphis, TN – d. 2005) was a self-taught artist who lived his entire life in Memphis, TN. At the age of seven, Bolden was left completely blind following a baseball accident involving his twin brother. Later in life, he began scavenging the alleyways and fields around his home in search of discarded materials, litter and other debris with which to work.

Utilizing only his sense of touch, he created a vast number of scarecrows, tall totems and mask-like objects from these found materials to protect his backyard vegetable garden from pests and predators.

Christian Quin Newell (b. 1991, Latisana, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy). In his paintings, drawings and miniatures, Christian Quin Newell presents coded narratives to reflect on and process the world around him. Often anchored around a semi-autobiographical protagonist the works form a personal mythology, in which Newell employs a distinct iconography of semiotic marks, archetypal images, transhistorical characters and multilayered plots.

Newell’s visual language draws on his own lived experience, as well as a myriad of references from buddhism, mysticism, alchemy, psychology and art history––utilising the underpainting techniques and palettes of the Venetian Renaissance, as well as natural semi-precious pigments such as cinnabar and malachite found in Indian miniature painting. Ruminating on concepts of rebirth, karma, morality, and the act of storytelling itself, Newell’s modern allegories become a strategy of fantastical autobiography and a unique way of seeing––looking closely at both the external world and deeply within oneself.

Laurence Pilon is an artist based in Tiohtià:ke-Mooniyang (Montreal). They hold an MFA from the University of Guelph (2021) and a BFA from Concordia University with Great Distinction (2015). Throughout their academic background, they received several awards including the Joseph-Armand-Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC, University of Guelph) and the Betty Goodwin Prize in Studio Arts (Concordia University), and their current program of work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Their most recent solo exhibitions include A Scape Unnamed (Galerie Nicolas Robert, 2021), More-than-ghosts (Thesis exhibition, University of Guelph, 2021) and It Once Was a Garden (Galerie McClure, 2018).

Nickola Pottinger is an artist and curator born in Jamaica, West Indies. Raised in Brooklyn, she went on to earn her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008. Recent exhibitions include the New Museum Triennial, New York, Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris, and the Galveston Artist Residency, Texas.  Previous solo exhibitions include Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, Deanna Evans Projects, New York, NY and Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.  The artist continues to live and work in Brooklyn, NY and will have her first solo exhibition with Mrs. in 2023.