The Now: Materiality
April 24 – June 7, 2025
Opening Reception: April 24 at 6pm
Upcoming: ART TALKS: May 7 & 8 at 6pm – Stay tuned for more details
Pen + Brush is excited to announce the opening of our spring exhibition, The Now: Materiality, the fifth iteration of our NOW exhibitions—an ongoing series spotlighting artists who are shaping the visual and conceptual language of our time. These artists are the ones to watch—whose work pulses with urgency, insight, and consideration.
The Now: Materiality brings together three artists: Anindita Dutta, Iliana Emilia Garcia, Alida Wilkinson who are working through materials—treating the contents of form, medium, and process as sites of inquiry, voice, story, resistance, and return. Here, materials are not passive tools but active collaborators in the process of making. The simplicity of clay, the human body, and the readymade chair—each elemental in form and also, deeply familiar—offers a universal language. Stripped of excess, these materials and symbols carry weight beyond their surface, inviting reflection on memory, presence, and transformation. In these hands, the ordinary becomes profound—an offering of depth, grace, and clarity through their works.
Anindita Dutta is known for her work with clay, as both material and metaphor. Using her body, and the bodies of others, Dutta performs as she pushes, pulls, and draws onto life-sized sculptural installations of wet clay. Through her chosen material, clay, she references the ultimate return of all living things to the earth from which they originated. Save for photographic images, videos, and reliefs, Dutta’s works are washed away after each performance. This ephemerality resists traditional connotations of “permanence” and embraces transformation. In her hands, clay becomes a site of erosion, memory, and rebirth—holding traces of the body while allowing meaning to shift and soften. Her forms suggest not conclusions, but thresholds—points of departure, return, and re-imagination.
Iliana Emilia Garcia creates a compelling visual language through her repeated use of the chair. Through a single object depicted in her drawn and painted surfaces. Garcia’s readymade sculptures and installations express and explore memory, emotion, and tradition through the symbolic use of this everyday object. Serving as both anchor and storyteller, the chair becomes a recurring motif representing stability, ancestry, and the emotional weight of what we carry. Her work layers domestic materials, emotionally charged symbols, and personal iconography to create visual archives of migration, resilience, and legacy. In Garcia’s installations and paintings, objects become vessels of remembrance – re-contextualized through the “eye/heart of the beholder”—reminding us that meaning is not fixed but formed through emotional and cultural intimacy.
Alida Wilkinson is recognized for the use of translucent layered materials in her compilations of bodies to express the nuances and multitudes that we each contain within our many selves. Wilkinson deconstructs and interrogates traditions of human figure and landscape depiction and propels them forward in her surfaces. Using new mediums, such as mylar and ink, in nontraditional ways to convey complexity and vulnerability of the human state as well as the ever-evolving physical landscape. Through the interplay of crisp outlines and fluid, unpredictable interiors, she creates a delicate tension between control and chaos in her paintings. Suspended in space, her figures sway gently, becoming living, breathing presences that invite viewers into intimate relationship—and begging questions of the subjects, their creator, and the viewer. Her works neither objectify nor glorify; they allow bodies to simply be.
The Now: Materiality challenges us to see material not just as form, but as language—and to enter into a deeper dialogue with the stories it holds. This exhibition is not about fixed identities or static forms—it is an invitation to witness. To see how, in the hands of artists, material doesn’t just support meaning—it becomes it.
Details of Detail of Alida Wilkinson, Unfurl (IX), 2019, Ink on mylar layers, 40” x 96” and iliana emilia Garcia, Memory is a blurb, 2024, Indigo, acrylic, charcoal and silkscreen on canvas, 60×60
