Station5
Micro-Gallery

Narrow Road to the Interior (from Bashō) is an exhibition of drawings that explore artists’ use mark making as line, as a pathway, as a road to something unseen and mysterious. The accumulation of marks are a groping in the dark, a feeling for, and revealing of something idiosyncratic and human.

Artists: Masha Sha, David Leigh, Edie Tsong

Masha Sha was born in Chukotka, RU in 1982. She graduated from Pro Arte Institute, St. Petersburg, RU (2005), and received an MFA from the University at Buffalo, NY with the Fulbright scholarship (2010). Masha then completed The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation in Rochester, NY (2011). She received the International Award of Recognition from STRABAG in Vienna, Austria (2014) as well as the Young Artist Prize in Moscow, Russia (2006). She participated in many exhibitions and projects, as well as a few residences, including Yaddo and Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. Her works belong in private and public collections including the Russian Museum in Saint-Petersburg and Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art in Roswell, NM. Masha is currently lives in Roswell, New Mexico.

Statement: Masha is interested in the poetic, often puzzling places where our minds dwell to linger. Her drawing practice is free style open ended unplanned mark-making. The work manifests itself in the large scale graphite and crayon drawings on tracing paper. The images are formed with wild floating lines or made up of small expressive marks.

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David Leigh is an Albuquerque-based artist, curator, and educator. After receiving a BA in Art History from Arizona State University, he attended the University of New Mexico, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing. From 2004 to 2015, he focused his energy on arts collaborations, founding and directing multiple galleries in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. During that time, he worked with other artists and educational institutions on large scale projects, and his own work was included in numerous national and international exhibitions. Before coming to Albuquerque High School, he taught painting and drawing at the University of New Mexico and Santa Fe University of Art and Design, and he supported the development of public art and community engagement as Visual Arts Director at Working Classroom. He has received multiple grants for site-based projects at AHS, organized a monthly Art Mart sale with fellow teacher René Palomares, where students develop a deeper understanding of the business around being an artist. In 2021, through a partnership with 516 Arts, he started a two-year school-based artist-in residence program that hosted artists Joanna Keane Lopez and Margarita Paz-Pedro. He also led two large-scale mural projects which were funded by the APS Education Foundation. will be hosting its second artist this spring. Currently, he is writing a book about tart education, which he hopes to have finished sometime next year. He teaches drawing and painting at Albuquerque High School and was named New Mexico Art Education Association teacher of the year in 2022.

Statement: I find a thread, and I pull on it. It’s a lot like writing, where you build a sentence, one word at a time, and then you add a new sentence, until at the end of the day, you have a picture of something. Sometimes, those threads come from books or random ideas or what’s going on in the world. But that choice, that first thread, begins with this pulling, this scratching process. And I never really know what that thread will be. It’s usually something that fills me with large or small awe, however briefly, and then I respond to it.

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Edie Tsong (Taiwanese American) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She has exhibited at the Mattress Factory, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Aspen Art Museum, 516 Arts, Babel Kunst, SITE Santa Fe, and the New Mexico Museum of Art. Her video and socially-engaged projects have been a part of April Meetings in Belgrade, PICA’s TBA Fest, and The PASEO in Taos, NM. Tsong’s work is collected privately and in public collections including the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the Anderson Museum of Art. She is the recipient of the Lilla Jewel Foundation grant and the SPREAD 3.0 SITE Santa Fe grant (for Cut+Paste Society) as well as artist-in-residence grants at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Anderson Art Center, and others. She was the Founding Director of Cut+Paste Society, women writers and artists in Santa Fe (2009 – 2015) and their city-wide Snow Poems Project (2011 – 2018). Tsong is a Nancy Blackburn Fellow at the Randolph Low-Res MFA in Creative Writing program and performs with Lost Time, an improvisational quartet. Tsong lives and works in northern New Mexico. edietsong.com

Statement: I’ve been drawing large spirals on maps, pieces of scrap paper, and notebook paper for three decades. The sumi ink line is a watery continuum that quiets me and leads me gently into difficult spaces and the unknown. I started these drawings as a way to integrate seemingly disparate experiences, to contemplate my parents’ sudden deaths, to center myself, and now, using a blade as a line to cut through to the other side. The other side: as in the outside looking in, on the margin, kept out, invisible, unseen, as in mystery, as in what cannot be named, as in life and death.

ACCUMULATION

One common way to create something substantial is to make it big. Another way is to accumulate. Gather a lot of small things over a long period of time. Things that are not very significant in themselves. But when you keep piling up a bunch of dumb details, they might add up to something interesting.

ACCUMULATION, at Station 5 Micro-Gallery, is a presentation of selected “collections” by Burning Books — visual artist Michael Sumner and writer Melody Sumner Carnahan. This small sampling of the detritus of Western civilization may or may not have any political or sociological significance. But these objects and images and words, gathered over several decades and locales, can reveal something about the collective engineering intent and inadvertent artful integrity of the people who made these simple, curious things.

Examples of some of what is included in this exhibition:

• 152 ugly pennies
• 1000 little metal objects that were found on the streets
• a pyramid of 55 rusty steel beer cans opened with a church-key-punch
• vintage balls, very old rubber boot heels
• and photo collages of bollards / stop signs / floppy discs / confirmation-of-delivery photos / “Free TVs” from Craigs List / “No Postage Necessary” horizontal bars.
• Plus, a new book published on the occasion of this exhibition, along with other ephemera.

BURNING BOOKS was founded by writer/editor Melody Sumner Carnahan and artist/designer Michael Sumner in 1979 in Oakland, California. The Burning Books imprint has published thirty-five books. In 1989 Burning Books moved to New Mexico where the two founders continue to produce books, posters, pamphlets, and postcards.

burningbooks.org

Edie Tsong: The Lineage series of ballpoint drawings began in 2003, where I became interested in the relationships that make up who we are, and what can go unexpressed, unknown, and unsaid. Having grown up in a trilingual household, I found languages to be limiting and suspicious. Reducing language to a simple line, one that marks time and gives evidence of existence, was a way to write into a family history that was mostly mysterious. Each stroke of the pen is a way to touch relations that can feel very distant. I start from family photographs, enjoying the shape of the whole or parts of the family, independent of any objects and environment, wondering if relationship itself becomes its own landscape or organism, something that offers containment and belonging.

Rachelle Rojany: Backed on linen and framed in hardwood, Rachelle Rojany’s pplanes are small sculptures on copper foil. Sanded, scraped, and patinaed with acids, the pplanes are deliberately degraded to explore aging on the human scale as well as on the scale of the artifact. / pplanes: poems songs incantations, ancient prayer formulations, flags venn diagrams tantric tables, flat plane airplane plein-air, breaths and wind

Elisa Keir: Addressing the needs of blossoming mystics, this collection of handcrafted tools and objects supplies a stimulating interplay between extrasensory development and creative cultivation. Capricious and adaptive, these tools allow users to develop their powers of storytelling and spellcasting. Note: tools may shape-shift into ordinary artifacts when the user prefers to conduct their mystical experiments in the whispers of sacred anonymity.

Born and raised in England, Clare Dunne graduated from Edinburgh University in Scotland with an MA in History. She has made art throughout her adult life in her home, largely self-taught, in the midst of her family. Clare’s drawings and paper-cuts are in private collections in the UK and US.

Exhibitions at PhilSpace, Santa Fe, NM
Feathers and Fur, 2014
Wild Earth Guardians Benefit, 2017

My thanks to Elisa Keir, Sarah Potter, James Hart, and Sandy Goins.

( ALF ) is an ongoing collage series on wood panel, it’s up to about 1200 works in the series.

Pushing clipped images of animals into a dadaist environment. Random colors, words and animals mix freely (Liberation) in a world turned upside down. Word meanings juxtaposed with the animal image create possibilities in reflection about the artworks. The series attempts to honor all wild and domesticated animals. I have strong feelings about all animals beyond humans, I believe they are far more important and sacred to our earth then the ongoing self-destructive human race.

Process involves, a gathering of thrift store buys of kid’s animal books, scrapped wood paneling, glue and junkyard acrylic paints. Its classic assemblage methods of glueing image and colors into mysterious narrative messages. With all materials in front of me, the process is automatic, mixing and matching to create images I like. I usually make a batch of collage paintings every couple of years, averaging about 60 to 80 paintings per session. These collage series I consider my street art, dirt cheap and available to the masses, operating outside of the pretentious gallery system.