Philadelphia, PA - Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia is pleased to present Geometry, an exhibition featuring the work of Nancy Baker, Julia Bland, Lindsey Landfried, Kayla Mattes, Alex Paik, and Caroline Santa. Mathematical geometry is concerned with the size, shape, positions of figures, and qualities of space; geometric forms and their transformations build the substance of architectural design. This exhibition brings together six artists who construct a type of architecture through an individual, steadfast, noble gesture. These geometries transcend their basic unit, whether through the repetition of a form, a mark or fold, or the meditation of the over/under act of weaving.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Nancy Baker builds intricate, universe-like, paper constructions and installations which feel similarly large and small, strong and fragile. Baker finds “solace in the geometry of fundamentals … she interweaves mathematical data in her constructions that speak to her need for stasis and a reliable reality.” Nancy Baker earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY. Her work has been widely exhibited throughout the US, including ODETTA Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; Front Room Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; Mark Moore Gallery, CA; Winkleman Gallery, NYC; Schema Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Greenhill Center, Greensboro, NC; Jancar Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; NC Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; 1708 Gallery, Richmond VA; Heriard Cimino Gallery in NOLA; and Lump Gallery, Raleigh, NC. Nancy Baker has received numerous awards, including two North Carolina Artists Fellowships, a Tennessee Individual Artist Fellowship, and an NEA Southern Arts Fellowship. Baker was awarded a commission with MTA Arts and Design for two train stations in Brooklyn, which was fabricated in stainless steel and was recently commissioned to create a new work for Karen Brooks Hopkins, the Director of Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Julia Bland’s works incorporate painting and weaving, developing the structures and patterns that bind disparate elements into a whole. Through weaving, cutting, sewing, dying, and painting, the surface becomes a visible record of her evolving, multi-faceted process. “Weaving and painting are two kinds of binding: the warp to the weft, the image to the object. Geometry is a kind of grammar; process is a kind of syntax. Logic is pervasive, it fails, and it persists.”

Bland’s solo exhibitions include Ways To Cross at Lighthouse Works and Underbelly at Helena Anrather in 2018, Things to Say at Night at 17 Essex in 2017, and If You Want To Be Free at On Stellar Rays in 2015. Reviews of her work have appeared in The New York Times, Art in America, Art Critical, Modern Painters, The New Yorker, The Villager, Artefuse, Hyperalleric, and Sculpture Magazine. She has been an artist in residence at MacDowell, The Shandaken Project: Storm King, The Sharpe- Walentas Space Program, Yaddo, Lighthouse Works, The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received awards including The Milton and Sally Avery fellowship from Yaddo, the Carol Scholsberg Memorial Prize, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust Travel Fellowship, and The Florence Leif Award for Excellence in Painting. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2012.

The mark making of Lindsey Landfried’s folded works on paper evokes an ephemeral handwriting like binary code or weaving. “Folds incorporate a patina of space, shifting vantage points or perspectival spaces. The marks, incessant and reverent writing, or obsessive and mechanized weaving, are on once stable, marred, noisy, staccato, and inconsistent.” Lindsey Landfried lives and works in State College, PA. Her work has been exhibited at Momenta Art, Temporary Storage, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, SPACE Gallery of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Mississippi State University, and Space 4 Art: San Diego. Landfried was a 2014-15 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner award and a 2013 fellow of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst for artistic practice. She has completed residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Takt Kunstraum Tapir Berlin. Featured in New American Paintings and winner of the 2015 jurors award at the UNC Asheville Works on Paper Biennial, she is represented by KWADRAT Berlin and Galleri Urbane Dallas Texas.

Kayla Mattes’ luscious tapestries explore systems of organization in contemporary life, and the ephemerality of digital culture. “I submit myself to the grid-like structure of the loom, but break down –and occasionally play with – its preconceived assumptions of utility or the decorative… Whether I’m simply dismantling the rectangle, or subverting tradition through the contemporary imagery and language that I depict within the weave, I embrace the power of textiles to communicate. In the end, what materializes is a series of layered visual systems—organized yet unruly, witty and absurd.” Kayla Mattes is a visual artist working across disciplines including weaving, sculpture and installation. She archives the ephemeral vernacular of digital culture through the interconnected threads of tapestry. She also works collaboratively in the socially engaged collective, BESTTEST. Recent exhibitions include PØST, (Los Angeles, CA), FISK Gallery (Portland, OR), LVL3 (Chicago, IL), Disjecta Contemporary Art Center (Portland, OR), Border Patrol Gallery (Portland, ME) and Hunter College (NYC). Her work has been featured in Maake Magazine, Vice’s Creators, Rhizome, and Sculpture Magazine and will be included in Weavers: Contemporary Makers on the Loom, an upcoming book written by Katie Tregidden and published by Ludion. She received a BFA in Textiles at Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Alex Paik’s paper based installations are at once effortless and awe-inspiring. Each piece is temporary, and can be reconfigured. Paik’s work has a strong connection to the architectural build up and break down of contrapuntal music. He uses “repetition not so much as a compositional device, but more as a way to explore and develop the possibilities of each unit. Or, to borrow Glenn Gould’s description of Bach’s late fugues, to “give the impression of an infinitely expanding universe.” Alex Paik is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work has been shown at galleries and art fairs nationally and internationally. He is the founder and Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces; Curator of Satellite Art Show, an alternative art fair in Miami; and Chief Curator at Trestle Gallery, a non- profit arts organization in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Caroline Santa’s works on paper drawings and paintings are incremental installations or interchangeable parts that can be reworked and recontextualized, much like text or language. “Like Schwitters’ Merzbau, I think about my work as existing in its current scale or expanding into larger architectural environments, enveloping a viewer’s personal or mental space.” Based in Philadelphia, Caroline Santa has an M.F.A. from The University of Pennsylvania and is a recipient of The Charles Addams Prize. She has exhibited her work throughout the northeast in Philadelphia and New York, as well as in San Antonio, TX at The Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum. Internationally, Caroline was an artist in residence at the Lucy Tejada Center of Culture in Pereira, Colombia, where she had a solo exhibition. Caroline is a founding member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Caroline recently collaborated with the Grammy Award winning choir The Crossing and composer Joshua Stamper to create a multimedia installation in The Icebox, Philadelphia’s largest uninterrupted gallery space.