Blank Forms at Independent Art Fair

Candace Hill-Montgomery is a Queens-born artist now based in Bridgehampton, Long Island, whose decades-long career has spanned a wide array of media and approach: painting, photography, installation art, public interventions, video, poetry, performance, and fugitive combinations thereof. Over the last ten years, Hill-Montgomery has largely worked with weavings made on homemade looms, cunningly fusing an assemblage of techniques and materials including sheep’s wool, mohair, linen, paper yarn, and other fabrics, often augmented by found objects. The pieces are typically exquisitely layered in both composition and subject matter, bursting at the seams with color and movement, mirroring her iterative and free-associative poetry practice and variously drawing from pop-cultural and religious iconography, vernacular textile craft, art-historical and literary references, and delirious, free-wheeling wordplay.

The Japanese ceramicist Tori Kudo is perhaps best known as cult icon of Japanese underground music, He is the ringleader of the long-running, loosely-formed collective Maher Shalal Hash Baz (“the spoil speeds, the prey hastens” in Hebrew), which he began in 1984 with his wife and longtime collaborator Reiko Kudo and the euphonium player Hiro Nakazak. In the 1970s and ’80s, Kudo played with a slew of short-lived noise, drone, and psych-punk units, including Guys & Dolls, Noise, Snickers, Sweet Inspirations, and Tokyo Suicide. Kudo studied design and pottery in London in the ’90s, though he first encountered ceramics through his father, who produced Tobe ware plateware, a distinctive porcelain style developed in Kudo’s native Ehime prefecture. Kudo has been producing ceramics for the past two decades, cultivating a sensibility loose and organic, functional and abstract. Kudo made his New York debut in 2021 with the show Ceramics at Blank Forms. These recent pieces are part of a series titled “iron and clays are crushed together,” ceramic ware inspired by the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon, recounted in the Book of Daniel. 

Áine O'Dwyer was trained in both visual art and music, graduating from the Limerick School of Art and Design in Limerick, Ireland, in
2006 and the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2011. O’Dwyer is a performer of her own works for harp, pipe organ, and voice, best known for her experimental performances and recordings that draw freely from the idioms of liturgical music, folk song, the avant-garde, and sound art. Hailing from the village of Pallasgreen in midwest Ireland, O’Dwyer grew up studying Gaelic music, tin whistle, and flute, immersed in the pastoral allure of Limerick county that would later influence her expansive sound and picaresque watercolor. Her art education and study of instrumental performance intermingle with her interests in folklore and ritual to inform her open-ended musical ethos, variously influenced by musique d’ameublement and Fluxus, and her visual approach, with a personal Surrealist vocabulary redolent of Hans Bellmer’s etchings and Leonara Carrington’s dreamworlds.