Exhibition Runs: June 14 – July 29, 2021
Virtual Reception & Artist Talks: Thursday, July 8 @ 5:30pm

SURFACE: Emerging Artists of New Mexico is an annual juried exhibition, endowed awards and professional development program presented by Harwood Art Center, to support the creative and professional growth of emerging artists and to expand their visibility and viability in our community. We have received hundreds of noteworthy submissions over the eight application cycles to-date; as of this year, the program has served 106 exceptionally talented, committed artists, including the 10 accepted for 2021.

SURFACE 2021 artists are: Thomas Bowers, Jordan Caldwell, Bridey Caramagno, Harley Kirschner, Adrian Martin, Madison McClintock, Kate Overton Miller, H. E. Ramage, Lauren Dana Smith and Daisy Trudell-Mills.

Exhibition Reception & Artist Talks

The Opening Reception is one of the prized components of an exhibition for our artists – as well as for our whole Harwood community who gets to come meet, speak, and celebrate. We held a virtual reception to honor the artists.

Building off of our platforms and recent online gatherings, we held a public reception and “lightning” artist talks featuring this year’s group of SURFACE: Emerging Artists of NM artists and Nate Lemuel (our 2020 solo exhibition award winner). Far-reaching friends and family joined us in these online spaces, along with local community. To view the recording of the talks please visit the link below.

By Appointment Hours

This exhibition will be installed in our gallery and will be accessible to the public by appointment only for up to 2 people at a time. All visitors must wear a face mask, complete a health screening, practice social distancing, and comply with all safety guidelines set forth by the CDC.

Appointments are available for every monday of the exhibition from 10am – 2pm. Make an appointment with the link below!

 

SURFACE EMERGING ARTISTS: PROGRAM ADJUSTMENTS FOR 2021

About Surface

SURFACE: Emerging Artists of New Mexico is dedicated to cultivating the creative and professional growth of artistic talents and to expanding their visibility and viability in our community. Each year Harwood Art Center invites emerging artists from around New Mexico to submit works for consideration in SURFACE. SURFACE artists are eligible for a solo gallery exhibition award and all receive a special honorarium for their participation.

SURFACE enjoys a six-week exhibition in Harwood Art Center’s Hall Gallery throughout June and July. SURFACE artists also participate in a private day-long professional development workshop. Workshop sessions are led by professional artists, gallerists, public relations / communications specialists and local media, and focus on refining artist statements / written materials, developing a web and communications presence, audience and collector cultivation, as well as a group walkthrough and critique of the exhibition.

Digital Program Adaptations

As we cannot host as many people at a time in our public physical galleries, we’ve put together an online exhibition and comprehensive digital catalog for the exhibition.

Surface Professional Development Workshop & Alumni Circle Reception

We have an amazing network of program alumni and panelists who have served in the workshop in years past, and we will work with them to adapt content and dialogue with the recognition that there are not yet experts and best practices for this current landscape, that we are treating SURFACE as a collaborative laboratory to experiment and explore them, and that we can all benefit from a circle of support and camaraderie.

Surface Awards

In addition to receiving the SURFACE: Emerging Artists of NM award and honoriam, artists juried into the exhibition are eligible to win additional endowed cash awards.

Reggie Gammon Award 

Since 2011, Harwood has honored the memory of painter, printmaker, and longtime member of our creative community, Reggie Gammon, by recognizing and presenting an endowed award in his name to a New Mexico-based emerging artist of exemplary caliber, character and dedication. Fittingly this year’s recipient describes her work as expressing “ moments in the lives of those close to her...depicting journey(s) from control to agency, from fear to adaptation and growth.

The 2021 Reggie Gammon Award is presented to painter H.E. Ramage.

Marion & Kathryn Crissey Award

The Marion & Kathryn Crissey Award was established and endowed to support the endeavors of emerging artists who demonstrate a commitment to their artwork, their on-going education, and the community in which they live. Accordingly, this year’s recipient endeavours “to portray the beauty of mundane life and our everyday surroundings. Finding the beauty in places you would normally overlook and taking the time to appreciate it. To appreciate it is to live in the moment…”

The 2021 Marion & Kathryn Crissey Award is presented to Jordan Caldwell.

Meghan Ferguson Mráz Award      

The Meghan Ferguson Mráz Award celebrates an emerging artist based in New Mexico who explores themes of personal and social significance, exhibits noteworthy care for and skill in their craft, and invites reflection on connection, compassion, and gratitude. Resonantly, in their work, this years recipient focuses on “ social justice issues especially unlearning internalized toxic masculinity that is crucial to upholding toxic systems”

The recipient of the Meghan Ferguson Mráz Award is Harley Kirschner. 

Valerie Roybal Award

The Valerie Roybal Award recognizes an emerging artist based in New Mexico who – with Valerie’s spirit of curiosity and courage – channels identity, circumstance, and experience into creative practice, generating work that considers transfiguration, metamorphosis, or transmutation. Poignantly, this year’s recipient describes their practice as, Beginning in reality (and being) influenced by stories of real people and present sociocultural and environmental inquiries. She uses video to illuminate these stories in an effort to offer an alternative sense of understanding and to cultivate compassion in audiences. 

The recipient of the Valerie Roybal Award is Madison McClintock

Harwood Solo Exhibition Award            

The Harwood Solo Exhibition Award is presented annually for artistic excellence, originality of vision, and dedication to practice, and culminates with a show concurrent to SURFACE in the following year. This year’s recipient aptly states ”As artists, as human beings, we pull our livelihoods from the resources we are given. 

We are delighted to award this opportunity to Thomas Bowers. We look forward to seeing what he creates – and inspires – when offered a whole gallery as a platform for his extraordinary voice.

SURFACE: Emerging Artists of New Mexico Digital Exhibition

Thomas Bowers

Artist Statement

Bowers’ work is often influenced by Raw Art, outsider artists, children’s art and expressionism. Thomas’ work is often described as whimsical, fascinating and brilliant. Thomas experiments with a wide variety of mediums consisting of house paint, oil pastels, watercolor, ink, color pencils and acrylic paint. A painting or an idea differs upon the surface. He tends to stay away from traditional materials. Often creating paintings from found surfaces or pieces of ply wood, or even on furniture. Although sticking and experimenting with different types paper or card stock for his drawings. Bowers constructs figures evocative of deeper psychological undertones. In allowing his marks to transform the normal and everyday into serendipitous conglomerations of human, animal, abstract, and monster figures. He seeks to create an otherworldly space to navigate within.

About Thomas

Thomas Bowers grew up in Albuquerque New Mexico and began making art in 2014 at the age of 16. He began creating as a form of survival without a formal art education. As artists, as human beings, we pull our livelihoods from the resources were given. His first drawings came out of a tattoo book, and this simple act of meditation quickly transformed into a way to escape the violence, drugs, emotional turmoil and trauma that marks the lives of both himself and countless others. In this way it is essential that the accessibility of art and art making alike should be shared as gifts to the community.

instagram.com/fappass

Jordan Caldwell

Artist Statement

The perspective of Jordan’s art is of the people of Albuquerque. He wants to portray the beauty of mundane life and our everyday surroundings.Finding the beauty in places you would normally overlook and taking the time to appreciate it. To appreciate it is to live in the moment; freeze frame of the city, waking up early for school, getting home from work at dusk.

About Jordan

Jordan has lived in Albuquerque most of his life, he finds his inspiration from his surroundings as he took the city bus to school and work for many years at all times of the day. He aims to depict the cold/beautiful isolated world he and others live in. He achieves this with his style of balancing realism and details with emphasis on color and texture. Romanticizing the mundane world around him through the glorification of saturation, contrast, and liquid-like textures. His primary influence is Edward Hopper, who captured the essence of 1930’s-1950’s America; geometrical, round, candy-colored, and sleek. Subtly portraying the struggles, isolation, and leisure of the average American.

 

whiptailoils.com

Bridey Caramagno

Artist Statement

The body has always been an abstract idea. The way we move, how we present ourselves to the world, and generally just why our bodies exist. Bridey’s practice spans from photography to painting to performance, any possible way they can abstract the body. Their work is an outlet. Abstracting the body in any way possible feels very cathartic Bridey’ss biggest inspirations are those around them and the world around them. Specifically, finding themself looking at faces and bodies and how odd they can begin to appear. As a nonbinary person they have never truly liked having a body. Exploring this through art is something very near and dear to them. They use these mediums to explore the body, and more importantly, why they hate the body as a vessel.

About Bridey

Bridey Caramagno is a visual and performance artist currently based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They were born and raised in the East Bay where their interest in art began. Taking their first photography class in their freshman year of high school. They became obsessed with the hands on process that came with the analog processes. This has stayed true in much of their body of work, always trying to find ways to combine any medium they can as much as they can. Bridey has been working in Albuquerque for four years now and is constantly inspired by the scenery the southwest has to offer. They have spent the last 22 years experimenting and learning and hope to do the same for the rest of their life. They are currently working towards a Bachelors in Art Studio at the University Of New Mexico.

bridey-caramagno.squarespace.com

Harley Kirschner

Artist Statement

Harley Kirschner’s work combines painting, collage and assemblage, spell craft and writing. Incorporating symbols of flora and fauna their works offer the magic of storytelling with the harsh complexities of reality. contrasting pain, fear and hatred with resilience, gentleness, and healing. Beautifully illustrated narratives of growth, transformation, rebirth, various mythologies, and storytelling itself bring childlike wonder to his pieces. Melding the discarded with the precious. Combining castoff objects, both manmade and naturally shed or collected, offers a mirror to the naturally exquisite, resilient, and beautiful trans community that he belongs to. A community that is all too often discarded and abused. Strong enough to stand alone, Kirschner’s pieces are created in series, often as parts of installations. His box-like works render as maquettes for the installations in which they star, while his paintings, typically gilded portraits, offer faces and bodies to showcase complexities of identity within their community.

About Harley

Harley Kirschner is an artist, activist, and writer. Originally from upstate New York (Ithaca), they relocated to Albuquerque to transition discreetly. Kirschner has been an art instructor for fifteen years, helping them explore various media for his own practice. Living as a pipefitter in the very toxic coal industry, taught them the importance of following his own passions as an artist, activist, and writer. He is currently a Senior at the University of New Mexico, where they transferred from Central New Mexico Community College in the spring of 2020. Their academic concentration has been painting, mixed media and social justice issues (especially environmental regarding the nuclear devastation of New Mexico and unlearning internalized toxic masculinity that is crucial to upholding these toxic systems). Kirschner resides in Tome with Linus (mohawked DoxieCairn) and Sparky (fluffy black cat), where they get to slow down to meditate on stars and shade trees.

instagram.com/harleykirschnerart

Adrian Martin

Artist Statement

Drawing on influences from horror, fantasy, turn of the century art and design, absurdism, and internet subcultures, this work straddles the line between desirability and revulsion. Similar in function to dolls or taxidermy animals, these mixed media pieces act as both everyday decorative objects as well as uncanny artifacts.

About Adrian

Adrian Martin was born and raised in New Mexico. In 2010 she received a BFA from the University of New Mexico, and spent most of the following decade photographing weddings and events throughout the state. Her mixed media work has been used in film productions, decorated theme bars, and cluttered up a number of private residences at home and abroad. She currently lives in Albuquerque.

instagram.com/some_rabbits

Madison McClintock

Artist Statement

Madison’s practice begins in reality. Influenced by stories of real people and present sociocultural and environmental inquiries, she uses video to illuminate these stories in an effort to offer an alternative sense of understanding and to cultivate compassion in audiences. Madison is fascinated by what new meaning can be created in the space between reality and stylization. By creating films that blur the lines between genres, she invites viewers to question their own assumptions and create a space for alternative ways of perceiving reality.

About Madison

Madison McClintock is a filmmaker and multimedia artist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her aim is to share the human stories behind conservation efforts, document cultural traditions for future generations and give a voice to underrepresented communities and the environment. By doing so, she hopes to highlight the nuances and contradictions that exist in all stories and cultivate a sense of understanding and compassion in audiences. Madison received her BFA in Environmental Studies & Studio Art from Franklin University Switzerland and her MFA in Science & Natural History Filmmaking from Montana State University. Madison’s films Red Wolf Revival and Fungiphilia Rising have been broadcasted and featured at film festivals and in classrooms around the world. She is also an instructor and consultant, previously teaching documentary production to high school and non-traditional college students in the Amskapi Piikani (Blackfeet) & Apsalooke (Crow) communities and to Tibetan community leaders in Northern India.

 

madisonmcclintock.com

Kate Overton Miller

Artist Statement

During Kate’s childhood, when the alleyways would flood with rainwater, she would collect the writhing earthworms in her pockets to save them from the storm drains. Seashells also filled her pockets, collected with an obligation and desire to remember whatever place or memory she feared forgetting. A photograph exists somewhere between earthworms and crusted seashells. Earthworms signify a liberation and afterlife of sorts, while seashells are caskets of death that house memories but constantly remind us of all that they will never be, all that we lost. Photography lives in a symbiotic relationship with death and preservation, and sometimes even life. Through the revival and simultaneous memento moris of whimsically paired specimens with forgotten family photographs, she seeks to understand the context and nature of death and life through its inherent qualities in photography.

About Kate

Kate Overton Miller graduated from UNM with a BFA in studio art. She has been a part of various local exhibitions and eagerly volunteers her passions for art in learning environments, formal and informal. She is a multimedia artist with a deep resonance and first love for the photographic process. Much of her recent work explores the ways in which photography lives in a symbiotic relationship with death and preservation, and sometimes even life. Her imagination wanders through process from everything from collaborative video pieces with caterpillars to annotating books with spinach anthotypes to photographing the cultivation of brilliant mold-gardens. Her art lives in a poetic and whimsical humor with roots in intuitive play. Her heart is to offer these tiny worlds for auratic thought, a good laugh, precious holding, and inevitable decay.

instagram.com/kate.m.overton

H.E. Ramage

Artist Statement

H. E. Ramage’s work uses the figure as storyteller for moments in the lives of the artist and those close to her. Minty Bloomers was painted in a time of emotional turbulence and personal loss, seeking control in the face of powerlessness. In Watching Football Ramage’s partner wears her grandmother’s nightgown, a precious artifact filled with memories. After moving into the artist’s childhood home, they were coping with dissonance between past and present. Like Ramage’s partner as he sat trying to watch a game, they adapted and became comfortable in the unfamiliar. Teacup 1 presents the artist with an heirloom porcelain teacup and is the first nude self-portrait H. E. Ramage painted. Ramage’s teacup series stems from her recovery from disordered thinking and body image, moving beyond a childhood of fear and control. Together these works depict a journey from control to agency, from fear to adaptation and growth.

About H.E.

H. E. Ramage (b. 1993, United States) received a BFA in Painting with a minor in Portrait Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2017. She has exhibited her work internationally in Lacoste, France and domestically in New Mexico, Georgia, and Ohio. Ramage has participated in both group and solo exhibitions, and her work is part of private collections in New Mexico and Georgia. Ramage was the Artist in Residence at Lacawac Sanctuary in Lake Ariel, PA in the fall of 2018. She is currently living and working in Los Alamos, NM.

heramage.com

Lauren Dana Smith

Artist Statement

Lauren Dana Smith’s current work explores the climate of internal place, magnified through the layering of unexpected yet familiar corporeal forms, the emotional impact of color and the stillness of memory. Her paintings reflect the bodily experience of the land and the mirror it provides in times of calm and chaos. Prior to permanently relocating to New Mexico in 2020, Smith served as a front-line healthcare worker in a New York City hospital providing psychological support to COVID-19 end-of-life patients and their families. To be present for these intimate moments, Smith initiated this series in response to the immensity of loss witnessed on a daily basis. Smith’s creative life has always straddled two worlds: healing and art. These works explore rupture and repair; the impact of personal and collective trauma and transformative experience on the psyche through the composition of abstracted forms, saturated colors and textural/sculptural elements.
Guided by the storied process which emerges, she forges connections contained within traditional tools and materials and a conversation is sparked between the maker, material, and process. Through her work she asks – What draws us and guides us? What do we align with? Where do we go from here?

About Lauren

Raised in the Northeastern United States, Lauren Dana Smith is a painter and art therapist who lives on the mesa in Taos, New Mexico. She creates textural and sculptural paintings that explore the interior spaces and exterior boundaries of physical form, the natural world and human consciousness. A visual artist and mental health care worker shaped by intensive care units, hospice care and the emergency rooms of New York City, she brings arts-based perspectives into the dialogue around living, dying, healing and wellness in this country. She is interested in honoring the depth, contour and narrative of the American Southwest and its parallels to personal histories, myths and memories. Smith studied painting and studio art and received her Bachelor of Arts at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY; she received her M.P.S. in Creative Arts Therapy and Creativity Development from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

 

laurendanasmithart.com

Daisy Trudell-Mills

Artist Statement

As an artist, Daisy Trudell-Mills works primarily with human and natural form in a metaphysical surrealist style. This allows for a confrontation of the viewer with juxtapositions of real and fantasy imagery. Surrealist dreamscape allows for an element of unexplained mystery which can be interpreted in various ways. Trudell-Mills intends for each viewer to take away a personal reading based on individual life experience. Scenarios presented in their work are meant to provoke emotion and to pose questions about the essence of life and the manner of an individual’s engagement with the world around them. By juxtaposing animal, human, and floral subject matter with fantasy dreamscapes, Trudell-Mills explores the child archetype and the trauma brain’s manifestation into dreams and identity. Sensuality, tenderness, and innocence are central to the content of her work and she utilizes the figure to communicate these themes.

About Daisy

Daisy Trudell-Mills hails from the mountains and meadows surrounding Mora Valley of Northern New Mexico, where she was born in 1998. They studied at the New Mexico School for the Arts from 2013-2015, and went on to receive their Bachelors degree in Fine Arts from New Mexico Highlands University in Spring 2019. She was awarded the Lorraine Shula Scholarship in 2017, and was a recipient of the National Museum of Women in the Arts Scholarship in 2019. Daisy’s work is an exploration of self through recollection of memory, dreams, and the concept of identity. Daisy’s recent work examines the child archetype and the trauma brain and studies how these two things intertwine and manifest in the subconscious dream state. Daisy continues to learn and practice in her home state of New Mexico.

 

daisytrudellmills.com

Exhibition Catalog

Installation & Details