Name: Sonja John Opening Reception: YARD WORK
Start: 2023-02-16T18:00:00-05:00
End: 2023-03-16T20:00:00-04:00
Location: Rio III Gallery

Sonja John Opening Reception: YARD WORK

Broadway Housing Communities

A Solo Exhibition by Sonja John at The Rio Galleries.

Rio III Gallery

<h1><em><strong>YARD WORK</strong></em></h1><p>Gardens are simultaneously natural and unnatural constructed spaces. Their aesthetics are informed by taxonomy and hegemony, systems of colonial oppression. Race and gender are also constructed spaces. Entire territories are cultivated, and queer bodies of color are excised.</p><p>If migrants are forced to relocate due to war, racism, or state-sanctioned homophobia, are they considered invasive species in new homes, or do they gain endemic status? The Middle Passage—a forcible uprooting—brought enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. When these diasporic organisms propagated in their new territories, they bridged the flora and fauna of multiple continents.</p><p>I explore this cultural, botanical, and material hybridity through paintings, textiles, printmaking, and site-responsive installations that reference plant forms across equatorial zones. These plant motifs investigate nostalgic fictions of the Caribbean built from history, memory, and family lore. Using collage, abstraction, stencils, and natural dyes, I both preserve and transform references to my parents’ birth countries (Trinidad, Jamaica, the Philippines) in order to visually undo the simultaneous invisibility and exotification of tropical bodies.</p><p>Drawing from decorative and scientific visual languages, my work explores landscape, fantasy, queerness, migration, endemism vs. invasiveness, and the relationship between body and environment.</p><h2>Bio:</h2><p>Sonya John is a queer, first generation, Bronx-based artist, educator, and curator.  She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017.  Her contributions to museum education have been featured at the RISD Museum, The New Yorker, and Hyperallergic. She is curator-in-residence for The Yard, Greenpoint. Her poetry has been featured at Jazz At Lincoln Center and The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and her work has been featured on I Like Your Work Podcast, n+1 magazine and Seeing Color Podcast with Zhiwan Cheung. </p><p></p><p>contact</p><p>email: sonjaljohn@gmail.com</p><p>instagram: @sonja__jay / @sonjajohncuratorial</p><h3>Exhibition Locations: </h3><p>The Rio II Gallery | 583 Riverside DR New York, NY, 10031</p><p>The Rio III Gallery | 898 St. Nicholas Ave @ 155th Street, New York, NY 10032</p><h3>Reception location: </h3><p>The Rio III Gallery | 898 St. Nicholas Ave @ 155th Street, New York, NY 10032</p><h3></h3>

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Sonja John Opening Reception: YARD WORK

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Sonja John Opening Reception: YARD WORK

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