A Walk in the Woods

Opening Reception June 5th from 6-9 PM.

Featuring alumni from the UrbanGlass studio artist program, A Walk in the Woods brings three makers together, whose work blends glass with natural materials and processes. On a deeper level, the work in this exhibition addresses underlying themes of mental health, humanitarian displacement, motherhood and life cycles and so much more. 

Nooshin Rostami works with a glossary of materials and terms: light, shadows, reflections, structures, landscape, space, and place. They refer to these vocabularies within many different contexts both physical and metaphorical, to point to ways of seeing and connecting outside of textual or verbal language. Sarah Vaughn utilizes balance and contemplative forms to "speak to the desire to find harmony and a sense of order" using a material often associated with breakage and fragility. Tomoko Abe is driven by a collaborative process with the materials she decides on. Ranging from paper and print to ceramic and glass, with a little of everything in between, Abe observes the intangibility of natural elements and reflects those back into the act of making. 

About the Artists

Nooshin Rostami is an artist, designer, and educator. They landed in New York from Tehran, Iran in 2009 and never made it back. This “flip of a coin” experience of displacement became the essence of Rostami’s exploration of identity, home, and place. Rostami received an MFA from Brooklyn College CUNY in NY (2011) and has exhibited, and performed their work in solo and group settings internationally including California Museum of Photography - UCR ARTS (2019), Jardines de Mexico (2019), BRIC Arts Media (2019), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions - LACE (2018), Queens Museum (2018), and Flux Factory (2015). Since 2014 they have participated in residencies both locally and internationally.

Sarah Vaughn primarily uses cast and cold-formed processes to exploit the preconceived perception of glass as a material to help articulate the topics being explored, asking the viewer to question the material being used and how it changes their notion of what they see. Vaughn holds degrees from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Rochester Institute of Technology. Over the years she has worked in studios across the country and has participated in residency programs at The Works Museum, University of Oregon, and Glass Wheel Studio. She has spent numerous summers at the infamous Pilchuck Glass School, where she has met some of her best friends and realized some of her best ideas. In the fall of 2021, Sarah moved to the Penland School of Craft as an Artist in Resident.

Tomoko Abe is largely interested in exploring art forms that allow spontaneous collaboration with materials, embracing that each medium has a unique character, and often demands a specific artistic process or combination with other materials. Abe has lived in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom, before settling in the greater New York area. Abe graduated with First Class Honors from the Bachelor’s program at the Edinburgh College of Art, during which she received an ERASMUS scholarship to study at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Salamanca, Spain. She has been expanding her range of media at institutions such as Clay art center (NY), Dieu Donne paper making studio (NY), and has been artist in residence at Bullseye Glass (NY) in 2018 and at UrbanGlass (NY) in 2020. Her work has been featured in publications including 500 Raku, The New York Times, and Ceramics Art + Perception.

About the Curators

Abram Deslauriers is a visual, sound and performance artist based in San Francisco.  Deslauriers earned his MFA in Craft/Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and studied at University of Washington as an undergrad in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts. His art explores identity, being, perception and the pursuit of expressing the authentic self. Deslauriers is a founding member of a collective known as Flock the Optic [FtheO]. By massive output of art spectacles tied to performative interventions, FtheO brings folks of all ages together to activate art.

Meg Wachs is a New York City-based artist and curator whose personal and professional practice aims to bridge the gaps in material practices. Having graduated with a BFA in Metal from SUNY New Paltz and an MFA in Craft/Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University, her studio practice consists of bringing a slew of materials to her jeweler's bench and trying to make sense of them in a wearable way through the lens of a metalsmith. A process-driven maker, she is not focused on any singular result but embrace the experimentation of a marriage of materials.

Event Images