Stronger Together: Partners in Life and Art
Demetrius Oliver, Lauren Kelley and Merav and Halil
Joining us in May 2022, Demetrius, Lauren, Merav and Halil are part of Fountainhead Residency's inaugural Stronger Together: Partners in Life and Art residency, reserved for artists whose romantic and creative partnerships are intertwined. Merav and Halil’s residency is generously sponsored in part by Artis and the Consulate General of Israel in Miami.
Demetrius Oliver
Atmospheric, architectural, and immersive in its form, Demetrius Olivers’ work is concerned with natural phenomena that occur in our physical and spatial plane. Examining the different properties and behavior that might make up our visual interpretation of a hurricane, a meteor or a thunderstorm, Demetrius attempts to conjure that sensorial experience within the boundaries of an art gallery. Whether working with installation, photography, sculpture or drawing, Demetrius observes how space, time, light, sound, and color are manipulated through meteorological events, and suggests those encounters as acutely as possible: Viewers, for example, may only be able to access his gallery shows if the sky is clear enough to see the stars.
His process begins with sourcing prosaic materials that he discerns are open enough to be manipulated according to his needs, such as coal or tires; and he frequently works with the same kinds of objects sourced from different places and experiences. Once he’s selected his materials for a particular project, Demetrius will consider a space’s floor plan before he begins making particular works of art, since all of his projects are designed to punctuate a room. The finished result is less about understanding the artists’ intentions and more about the felt experience of living within the elements. His work has been most recently featured in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts along with solo shows at Klaus von Nichtssagend gallery in New York and Inman Gallery in Houston; he is a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant and is an alumni of the Studio Museum in Harlem residency program.
Lauren Kelley
Lauren Kelley is an interdisciplinary artist who employs a wry wit when commenting on matters of innocence, race, and girlhood. At the core of her practice is a series of short, stop-motion animated videos that combine claymation with her brown, plastic dolls. Stylistically evocative of children’s television programs of her youth, Kelley stages absurd, jittery, and sometimes endearing narratives. These low-tech scenarios occur in her Technicolor dioramas; a plush backdrop in contrast to the flaccid tales of a discontented cast of ingénues. For Kelley, dolls are a vehicle for navigating the space between luxuries and necessities; sweet and unsavory sentiments; Black and non-black worlds. Currently she is developing a body of work inspired by mid-century American history and the grotesque charm of Todd Haynes’ 1988 cult classic, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.
Kelley’s process is a tactile endeavor that revolves around objects and images of objects sourced from eBay. Apart from utilizing dolls, she pursues items that are malleable or evoke an off-kilter aura. Similar to digesting fiction and people watching, browsing online also spurs the impetus for constructing her vignettes. Found imagery informs the production of digitally collaged storyboards, miniature sets, photos, and independent sculptures. Her freestanding works buttress the videos and allow for storylines to unfold incessantly. Her work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem, Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College and at PPOW in New York. She is a Creative Capital grantee and the former director of the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in Manhattan.
Merav and Halil
As partners in life and work, Merav and Halil’s artistic practices arise out of their collective intuition: They follow their instincts toward the creation of works that fuse nonsense and humor with history, sexuality and fantasy. Working with materials like wood, metal, fabric and cardboard to create sculptural dolls and large-scale drawings, in a process they have called ‘blurry’ and even ‘stupid’ - a reference to the freedom from judgment they hope to lend themselves while working toward its final stage. Once they think they might be there, they step back and analyze what the work is ultimately trying to say. Their doll-making, coupled with their individual drawing practices, is often based on an inside joke or ironic anecdotes they encounter in their everyday lives and was borne out of their relationship: They started making the dolls as gifts to one another, and began selling them at fairs soon after, and later developed them conceptually to widespread critical claim.
The drawings, made of watercolor and ink, are engraved into the paper in a process the artists akin to tattooing onto skin. Because the technique requires them to work quickly, the drawings have a spontaneous quality to them. The sculptures are likewise driven by this innate motivation, and encompass assemblage techniques driven by the material they choose to work with for each individual piece. Merav and Halil’s collaborative work is part of the collections of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and has been exhibited in Germany, the United States, and the Czech Republic, among others. In Miami, they’re preparing for a solo show at the Israel Museum in January 2023.
