Featured Artists
For our 2012 season, Recession Art has selected six of our most promising, talented emerging artists as Featured Artists. They will receive a solo show at RAC, a place in our first annual Featured Artist Catalog, and access to special partnerships and services throughout the year. We are honored to support and assist them as they move towards the next stage of their careers.
With art that at once evokes the idealization of American suburbia and reveals the frailty of middle class desires, Megan Berk creates paintings and prints with a darkly subtle beauty. Born in Los Angeles, Megan currently works out of Red Hook, Brooklyn. In 2001, she earned her Bachelor of Arts from New York University, and in 2008, she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute. She has exhibited widely in the greater New York City area, including at Silas Marder Gallery, Bowman / Bloom Gallery, BWAC, Brenda Taylor Gallery, the New York City Affordable Art Fair, and the German House at the German Consulate General.
Gabriela Vainsencher was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and raised in Israel. In 2005, she earned a Bachelor of Education and Fine Arts from the School of Art at Beit Berl College in Israel. Her drawings, videos, and installations have been shown widely in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad, including Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, La Chambre Blanche in Quebec City, the Freies Museum in Berlin, and Pierogi Gallery and Parker’s Box in Brooklyn. She has participated in several artist residencies, including Yaddo in 2008, La Chambre Blanche in 2009, Triangle Arts Association in 2010, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2011. She currently lives in Brooklyn and Philadelphia and occasionally teaches art at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Tate Foley was born in Millerton, a small rural town in Northcentral Pennsylvania. He currently lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, where he is an Assistant Professor of Art/Visiting Artist at the Leigh Gerdine College of Fine Arts at Webster University. In 2007, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and in 2010, he earned a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. He has exhibited extensively across the United States, including recent solo and group shows in New York City, Washington, DC, Portland, St. Louis, and Cleveland. He has been a visiting artist at Georgia College and State University and Piedmont College in Athens, Georgia.
Jennifer Mills lives and works in Chicago after moving there from Brooklyn in 2009. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art and French from Concordia College in Minnesota in 2007, and received a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Performance/Video Art from the New York Center for Art and Media Studies in 2008. She graduated in 2011 with her Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she currently teaches in the Contemporary Practices Department. As part of her artistic practice, she is involved in Chicago’s theater and comedy scene, frequently performing a fast-paced musical parody show throughout the city. She has exhibited in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Michigan, Minnesota, Seattle, and Berlin. Her work, which is centered on personalization and the dissemination of multiples, is in hundreds of collections worldwide.
Ian Trask is a scientist-turned-artist. After earning a degree in biological science from Bowdoin College in Maine in 2005, he worked for several years as a technician in various research labs in Boston and Salt Lake City. He left that life behind in 2007 when he moved to New York City to pursue a career in art. Between careers, he was a hospital groundskeeper, cleaning up trash daily. This direct experience with trash proved extremely influential in the development of his art. Being constantly confronted with other people’s waste, he discovered an infinite source of materials and inspiration. Now, almost four years later, his environment has changed, but his commitment to making art out of waste has not. Ian’s exhibitions and installations have included those at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, Bushwick Open Studios, the DUMBO Arts Festival, the Atlantic Avenue ArtWalk, Webster Hall, the Figment Interactive Art Festival, the Wassaic Project, the Affordable Art Fair, Bertrand Delacroix Gallery, and Coleman Burke Gallery in Portland, Maine.
Danny Ghitis is a Brooklyn-based photographer specializing in social documentary and portraiture work. Born in Cali, Colombia, his family moved to the United States when he was four-years-old. After graduating from the University of Florida in 2006 with a Bachelor of Science in Journalism, he worked for several Florida newspapers before seeking out a freelance career. He now does photography for a variety of clients in New York, including The New York Times. He is constantly searching for interesting strangers and culturally ambiguous spaces to document, believing that challenging social norms with satirical imagery can spark an open dialogue. Danny has been recognized by Magenta’s Flash Forward, the Nikon Emerging Talent Award, the Hearst Photojournalism Championship, College Photographer of the Year, the National Press Photographers Association, University of Florida’s Scholars Program, the Eddie Adams Workshop, and he has been nominated for UNICEF Photo of the Year.
