Nada house | governors island | new york

maya fuhr, alexa hatanaka, and shaheer zazai

May 8 – August 1, 2021

Patel Brown is proud to present a group exhibition featuring works by Maya Fuhr, Alexa Hatanaka, and Shaheer Zazai. Each artist’s unique practice is joined together by a common subject of textiles — be they represented in photography, digital art, or printmaking — to explore themes surrounding cultural identity and hybridity, the global circulation of textiles and textile heritage, and the intimacy of material culture as it intertwines with lived experience and transforms into new mediums of expression.

Maya Fuhr’s practice explores various facets of the art, fashion, and design worlds. With a focus on sculpture and photography, specifically analogue film, Fuhr’s dream-like aesthetic illuminates any chosen garment’s lived history and a sense of authenticity in her subjects — fraught with contradictions of beauty, exclusion, opulence, exploitation, and aspiration. Fuhr’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in London, Paris, New York, Tel Aviv, and Toronto at The Art Gallery of Ontario. In 2017, she was awarded the Magenta Foundation Photography Project Award, enabling her to continue her series Malleable Privilege, a timely inward-looking investigation into the artist’s relationship with fashion and its impact on the environment.

Alexa Hatanaka works primarily in relief printmaking, textile, and paper. She engages in time-intensive, historic processes that support her thinking around her Japanese-Canadian heritage in the scope and spirit of craft heirlooms, solidarity, individual and communal grit, cultural hybridity, and social justice. Individually and as part of collectives, Hatanaka has exhibited at the Guanlan International Printmaking Base (Shenzen, China), The Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada House (London, UK), the Toronto Biennial of Art, and the British Museum. In 2019 Hatanaka received the Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Fellowship from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She has forthcoming solo exhibitions at Patel Brown and AXENÉO7.

Shaheer Zazai’s practice focuses on exploring the development of cultural identity in the present geopolitical climate and diaspora. His digital works revolve around imagery drawn from traditional Afghan carpets that are rendered in Microsoft Word. Through mimicking carpet-making methods, Zazai creates his own designs in which every knot of carpet is translated into a typed character. Zazai is a recipient of Ontario Arts Council grants and he was a finalist for EQ Bank’s Emerging Digital Artist Award in 2018. Zazai has participated in solo and group exhibitions at the Capacity 3 Gallery, CAFKA Biennial 2019, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Double Happiness Projects, and Patel Brown.