Born 1992, Dallas, Texas

Sydney Williams (re)creates oversized geometric shapes in unexpected scale, abstracting them from purpose. Maternal arabesques are scaled to dominating proportions, and imaginative memory is tempered with influences of symbolic form.

Williams’ practice is best described as post-conceptual ceramics. Her works are born from the marriage of two exceedingly sovereign domains: Minimalist art and Ceramics. Philosophies are borrowed from conceptualists of the 1960’s and an art form traced back to the Neolithic age, roughly 10,000 years ago. Underlying concerns of ceramics center on the object’s functionality combined with an innate, natural connection to the human figure. The nomenclature of pottery, with vocabulary like ‘lip,’ ‘neck,’ and ‘feet,’ are anthropomorphically termed, (in)directly diagramming a student’s understanding of the practice. Specifically, Williams’ objects are positioned between an awareness of our body (similar to the Minimalist predisposition towards ‘theatricality’ outside of the Modernist narrative) and the (non) functionality of an object. However, the methodology of her chosen medium and the inspiration for her artworks are rooted with purpose. Can functional art be critical? How can we redefine the definition of art?

As she expands her practice into sculpture, she investigates what meaning objects have in relation to the figurative or biological. The lifelong Texan revisits principles that early childhood toys embody for cognitive development. Elemental and familiar shapes of toys transport us back to our initial moments of thinking with the body: movement, our first verbal utterances, hand dexterity, and other basic motor functions. Toys are a crucial mediator between the body and knowledge. Williams’ practice is a reflection on the indebtedness that the symbolic has for the “the kinetic functional stage of the semiotic” which “precedes the sign” in the philosophies of Julie Kristeva. Shapes and tools are a vehicle of learning outside the parameters of adult pedagogy, before we are introduced to the denotative meaning of language. Williams is interested in learning in conjunction with our body. The push and pull of these two modalities of semiotic and symbolic create different modes of articulation and expression. The artist explores these revolutionary possibilities Kristeva proposes with earth and stone: the oldest, most humble of all materials.

Sydney Wiliams holds a BFA in Ceramics from Texas Christian University. CYDONIA will host her first solo exhibition in December 2016.

The artist lives and works in Fort Worth, Texas.

Born 1984, Paris, France

Every work by Anouk Mercier is fantastical mise-en-scene The artist designs the stage of her art through fictive relics, large-scale backdrops, and ornate architectural trappings. References to decorative framing, devoid of tasteful function, are employed to mirror the role that architecture plays as framework for containing and understanding landscape. Pastel, surreal horizons hinting at futuristic, science-fiction potential dislocate complacent idylls from a beginning or ending. Heroic monuments are contrasted with derelict pillars and elements of decay. The crumbling monuments she creates symbolize the tension that erupts from subtle contradictions. These inconsistencies underscore the potency of the fragmentary nature of ruins and relics: her Romanticist obsession decontextualized.

Landscape art achieved its highest paradigm during the early 19th Century, whereby the Romantics depictions of nature and scenery aimed to capture notions of the sublime. Two centuries later, the French-English artist creates her own vision of utopias to understand the development of a subjective truth derived from notions of beauty. For her, recreating the sublime is a projected portrait of not only our individual sensibilities, but also a common history in the classics, which has provided a standard for an understanding of aesthetics, “high” culture, and art. As the contemporary art world expands its canon, what reconfigurations must be made to confirm or challenge outdated ideas of high culture and Modernism?

During her process, micro-political, socio-economic spirits surface and cannot be neatly packaged or re-interpreted even through commissioning pastiche elements of the Romantic era’s most noble intentions. Such discrepancies are key because Mercier’s utopias might be dystopic. Her universe brings forward an added layer of anxiety: what if the truth is only found in fragments, each fragment, of the past or the future, bringing a vision of an expanded, more accurate, trans-national, cosmopolitan perspective? Mercier’s practice calls for underhanded Critical Consciousness and the willingness to admit new perspectives, alternative information that often contradicts and challenges our own values, from the past and the present, but all for the future.

Anouk Mercier holds a BA from the University of the West England and studied Classical Drawing at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. Her most recent solo shows were in England and France. In 2016, she was invited to be Artist in Residence at the Musee Aguste Grasset in Varzy, France. In 2017, CYDONIA will mount Mercier’s premier American solo show in the United States entitled Parlour.

The artist lives and works in Bristol, England.

Born 1986, Mechelen, Belgium

Elise Eeraerts constructs large-scale installations and sculptures composed of modular units. The geometries of these units grow from the foundation of the stretched or modified cube, that stemmed from her first work. Mäntsälä, an irregular polygon, was physically excavated out of and made using earth. Each subsequent project is built upon traces, utterances, and fragments of a self-designed system aware of proportion and perspective. Eeraerts disrupts this neutrality of geometry through slight shifts in proportions, material, perspective, and space, enabling viewers to observe subtle changes in how one understands an object. Her success stems from a sensitivity to how architectonic surroundings inform the theoretical and concrete.

What is the identity of an object? How does one know something given the elusive nature of perception? Concerned with how objects come to be and what properties are apparent either in use, materiality, or form, Eeraerts’s practice functions as philosophical inquiry. The artist likens her practice as a series of abstract moments and actions that eventually manifest to the senses, and clarifies that such objects already exist in the mind.

Eeraerts merges the epistemological framework of geometry with primarily raw or natural materials, and in doing so, the artist articulates the seemingly immeasurable space existing between what is self evident and what cannot be obtained through the senses. Hard, angular objects that appear as stone exhibit unexpected integrity, being made of solidified oils. The land-artist’s most dense and ambitious ideas have been expressed humbly, using different types of soil. By the same token, Eeraerts’ documentation reveal techniques conjuring a sort of sublimation, working in tandem with her practice. Photo and video communicate duration and more specifically, the shifting identity of an object: its transformation. Objects are consequences of physical realities, and alchemical changes of material compositions are taut with symbolism. Her incandescent mind is exhibited best when viewers sense that tension between illusionism and verity, as we are transported back to the fundamental and paradoxical possibility that exists between human culture and matter. We are able to reconsider relationships of our natural and social worlds, possibilities of manifestation contrasted to that which appears devoid of intention.

Elise Eeraerts holds and MFA from the Sint-Lukas University College of Art and Design in Brussels. She was awarded Master Scholar diploma from the Institute fur Raumexperimente in Berlin, where she was funded by the esteemed DAAD (German Exchange) Scholarship. In 2016, she was the Winner of Arte Laguna Prize in the Land-Art Division in Venice, Italy and has also been awarded numerous grants from the Flemish Ministry of Culture. Most recently, she was a resident at Thread in Senegal, sponsored by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. She has exhibited throughout Belgium, in Finland, Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Japan. In 2017, CYDONIA will mount her first American solo exhibition.

The artist lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.

Born 1988 in Dordrecht, The Netherlands

The only possible way to classify Sybren Renema’s practice is to list the things he loves: explorers, natural history, dinosaurs, adventure, and music. His style is most palpable in subject matter. Renema’s resistance towards labels and categories within contemporary art is a recent art historical development. As it is the responsibility of every generation of artists to define and redefine what art is, the self-described Romantic has Modernist governance. Renema’s practice exists at art’s edges. His process of working flourishes from the heart of all discoveries: curiosity.

The Glaswegian works in limitless mediums. His art appears slight in manipulations of material but is always cemented with dense research. Renema’s process is unique in that reading is integral to production. His writings are infectiously compelling, filled with humor, philosophical musings, and laced with anecdotes from a glorious bedrock of classics, scientific knowledge and superfluous factual data. His practice often reveals uncanny knowledge of Colonialist historical facts or his penchant for Romanticism. He articulates the intellectual movement’s impact on our lives in the 21st century. Majestic mountain ranges are reconfigured by the artist through a simple inversion, as he conjures the soulful searching found in landscape paintings from two centuries earlier. A video performance documents the artist attempting to replicate artistic process, while he attempts to go bowling in a most tenacious ocean. Indeed, Renema is a rare case.

CYDONIA invited Renema to produce a text for its inaugural exhibition Ex-Y in September 2014, which investigated Captain Scott’s treacherous journey into the South Pole, the mythical status of Bas Jan Ader, whilst trying to make sense of contemporary masculinity. Renema is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague. The artist was the youngest student to have been accepted to the Glasgow School of Art and the youngest to graduate, when he earned his MFA in 2011. The artist has exhibited in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, China, and the States. His first book, based on David Livingstone’s mythology and relics, You Took the Part That was Once my Heart was awarded support by Creative Scotland and subsequently sold-out. Renema has recorded several albums of experimental saxophone, and he has toured with numerous bands around Europe.

The artist lives and works in Glasgow.

Born 1946, Fayetteville, TN, USA

For Frances Bagley, the human figure is never fully present or clearly illustrated. Her sculptures are echoes of the figure. In form and material, the body always is the point of reference because it is a universal point of human empathy.

While her objects implicate the human form, which harken back to a repertoire of classical sculpture, our innate connection with the body is destabilized through her use of abstraction. Similar to the scaffolding used for her stone and marble-stacked sculptures, Bagley’s metal structures visibly support her foam figures and resin casts. Her support constructions, however, are visually balanced and therefore, conceptually-equalized. These deliberate creative decisions disrupt our perception, making us sensitive to what we see and more importantly, what we sense.

The artist often inverts relationships using materials that link the body to decontextualized but symbolic parts of our anatomy. An empty female torso made of woven wicker material recalls the basket-weaving process but in form, suggests the vessels of pottery making. Meaning is created through process and is embedded within materials and visual iconography. Human hair is meticulously woven to create a minimalist grid or an elaborately beautiful but unsettling braided rug. Again and again, metaphors of physique are teased out; phenomenological processes are sublimated. We recognize how inherent the body is to how we know and learn because the body is inextricably married to meaning.

Fundamentally, her practice is not overtly feminist. Works are not created for political action nor armed with a social agenda. Bagley sets the stage where there is no longer a protagonist for the story because the status of her human figure is subverted. The universal symbol of humanity is male, but within her works, the female form plays a more ambiguous role.

Frances Bagley holds an MFA from the University of North Texas. Since 1980, she has exhibited extensively all over the United States as well as Japan and Brazil. Her works have been collected in institutions including the Dallas Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, the El Paso Museum of Art along with corporate collections such as American Airlines and Pepsi-Co. In 2008, she was the first American to be awarded at the Kajima Sculpture Exhibition in Tokyo, Japan.

The artist lives and works in Dallas, Texas.

Born 1980, Norwich, NY, USA

Ryan Burghard’s practice begins by investigating the materiality of the mundane. He is interested in how seemingly simple imagery and objects accrue meaning, therefore transitioning into signs, symbols, and signifiers. This moment of shifting identity is at the core of his practice. Burghard references Speculative Realism along with Baudrillard’s treatise Simulacra and Simulation, which examines how objects gain value and the position enabling meaning to be generated. Through this lens, meaning is derived from relationships.

Weaving through a variety of mediums, forms, and techniques, the artist wants the viewer to cross-examine and reflect on objects we often ignore in our everyday lives. By altering artifacts, using an unconventional medium shift or by manipulating a composition, our experience with what is familiar changes. We find humor in clever juxtapositions: an image of a row of seated, smiling men in suits echoes the straight, repetitive lines found in an advertisement for pantyhose. Burghard’s style is crystallized when we recognize the strict parameters of their execution: the artist’s touch is nearly invisible. He depends on found objects and pre-existing materials to communicate. Uncanny resemblances are found in human gesture and the repetition of forms. Through these resemblances, unrelated imagery can marry.

In November 2015, CYDONIA will present Burghard’s fourth major exhibition entitled Where You End and I Begin: Relational Dialectics. The multi-media show examines the phenomenological, social, emotional and physical elements within relationships as a way of understanding the condition of identity. When a union is formed, at what point does an individual identity end and another begin? When we understand each other through our bonds, what exists in these bonds? Is it difference or similarity that defines identity?

Burghard holds an MA and MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has had numerous exhibitions throughout the United States and has exhibited internationally in Canada and Australia.

The artist lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Born 1985 in Hinsdale, IL, USA

Alan and Michael Fleming’s practice is marked by their desire to merge and condense the physical act with cerebral action. For the brothers, how we engage with our bodies is not separate from how we master ideas and understand the world. Bodily movement is and can be one with our thoughts. Though their practice is notably influenced by Bruce Nauman, the meister of conceptual post-studio practice, the artists distinguish themselves by referencing their unique context of being twins. By going back to their relationship as a foundation, they investigate what it means to look at the world around us as a series of relationships.

This turn in perspective rests within the nature of Cartesian dualism and in particular, the mind-body split. Their inquiries operate in gaps created by dualism and make visible bonds between seemingly divorced faculties of human understanding. Within their spatial interventions, these faculties become intermeshed. By combining phenomenological sensibilities with methodical application, they unite the nuances of the physical and cerebral to where they are no longer autonomous but interdependent.

Always in a state of curiosity and good humor, these exercises of empathy and support reveal that codependence is not only crucial but also celebrated. While drawing from elements of dance and acrobatics, they use their bodies in a manner that is distinct and separate from the virtuosic styles of these pursuits. The variation lies in the application of these elements to form a series of procedures for experimentation, exercises that test the potential of the body as a medium of examination of our relationship to surrounding architecture.

While their interventions start from a set of operations and tasks, it is tempered by their sensitivity to know their surroundings and each other. They balance off, mimic, and interlock with each other; physical feats are not possible without one another. They use their empathy as brothers and collaborators as a tool for investigating where these sensibilities apply. The Flemings’ understanding extends into their sculptures and videos that typically serve as artifacts of these exercises. As a result, they take on role of surrogates wherein each object represents each brother by their execution of a task.

This anthropomorphism accounts for inherent differences in conjunction with the way in which they correlate to one another. Through applying empathy as a critical tool, they examine what actually exists between individuals, faculties, or objects. Empathy is where one begins to understand one another and develop the ability to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences in the world around us.

In 2010, Alan and Michael Fleming received their MFAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which they attended together. They have exhibited and performed extensively throughout the United States and in Denmark, Germany, Scotland, the Ukraine, and Brazil. The winner of numerous awards, the twins were awarded fellowships to the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn in 2012, and the Artist in the Marketplace Program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2011. Their last solo show, Studio Audience, was at Cindy Rucker Gallery in New York.

The artists live and work in Brooklyn, New York