Roxana Azar and Alex Kovacs : Futures Passed
Exhibition Dates: August 28 - September 19, 2020

All Artwork Available Now to View/Purchase
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In their first collaboration, artists Roxana Azar and Alex Kovacs position their opposite material and aesthetic sensibilities in a series of installation vignettes. These pairings transform and compliment the individual pieces within, creating new shrines and portals that are dislocated from specific historical or cultural context; simultaneous artifacts and futuristic discoveries.

With each moment of overlap, objects that are functional, decorative, sculptural, hand-made, digital, painted, photographic, gravity-bound and atmospheric both bask in and overcome their apparent contradictions. While the pieces each stand on their own, created in the artists’ geographically separate, individual studios, they take on a symbiosis that multiplies their potential – merging references from geometric temples and pagodas to nebulous foliage and galaxies.

Roxana’s work relies on photography and digital manipulation, printed into synthetic materials, that are machine-cut into organic, or soft-edged forms. Flat outlines cast colors and patterns making space a flexible, additional aspect of the viewing experience. Alex’s hand-built ceramics are black and white, planar, and suggest a digital perfection in their linear patterns and grids. Slim, similar vases are adorned in charms, chains, handles and stretch the language of the traditional ceramic vessel into fashion and architecture.

Recognizing the expansive ethos of their individual practices, the two artists began a conversation from afar and collaboration by mail. Documenting the surprising interactions of the opaque, structural vessels and translucent, digital shapes, tiny pairings turned into still lives, which became arrangements and formed the foundation of this antithetical past/future world.

Throughout the gallery, each artist’s vision is fully immersed into the other’s, each relinquishing a set authorship or expected definition of voice. Futures Passed asks us to consider the lines that are drawn in art and design, or commodity and experience, and find the magic that exists in the paradox.
- written by Alex Ebstein

Please email info@paradigm-gallery.com if you would like to receive the collector preview for this exhibition.

Opening & Live Artist Q&A
Lauren Rinaldi // Roxana Azar & Alex Kovacs: Opening Reception & Live Artist Q&A Recording:
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/6dRPCKP9rX9IG7Pj4k7FSI8HIbX0T6a8gyMX8qIIzEomWcnw-gGNMRXTtiV_UN7Q 

 About Alex Kovacs

Alex Kovacs (b. 1992) Graduated from Goucher College in 2014 with a degree in Studio Art focusing on printmaking and spent a year at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland between 2012-13. He recently had his first solo show at Resort Gallery in Baltimore titled Endless Vessel during the summer of 2019 and first show in NYC with Super Dutchess Gallery. His works combine stacked, angular, hand-built forms adorned with white grids, occasional icon/glyphs, and hanging chains. Both archaic and futuristic, his aesthetic draws from modernist design, Japanese architecture, and post-net fashion. He currently lives and works in Burlington, VT.

About Roxana Azar
Roxana Azar’s work utilizes photography, digital manipulation, and sculpture to create biomorphic objects and speculative artifacts influenced by science fiction, Persian miniatures, and the Memphis Group. Their new work includes holographic vases, furniture, and lucite florals with images of collaged greenhouses and gardens. By using vibrant and holographic NASA-engineered materials, a dynamic visual experience of both the image and object is created where there are color shifting shadows, transparency, and reflections all at once.

Azar has exhibited their work nationally and internationally. They have been published in Mossless, Papersafe, Vice, and Yen Magazine, as well as featured online in Elephant Magazine, Waterfall, It's Nice That, Sight Unseen, and the Paper Journal. Azar has an MFA in Photography from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Photography from Tyler School of Art.