WINNIE SIDHARTA: PARALLEL ENCOUNTERS
Open September 8th, 6-8pm
On view at 230 Mulberry St New York, NY 10012
Weds-Sat: 10:30am-6:30pm
Sun-Tues: By Appointment
For sales inquiries, contact Alanna Miller at ajm@alannamiller.com
Alanna Miller is pleased to announce Winnie Sidharta’s solo show, Parallel Encounters, opening on September 8th from 6-8pm. This exhibition is a powerful ode to the strength of cultural memory in the wake of colonial violence. Sidharta accesses personal history and cultural consciousness to construct a hybrid Dutch-Chinese and Javanese image. The resulting body of work raises questions around the intersection of individual experience versus the record of history, and how these parallel encounters are subsequently understood across cultures.
Sidharta’s Delft tiles, a new avenue of exploration for the artist, confront the Dutch appropriation of Ming Dynasty Chinese Wan Li pottery and Javanese batik. The Dutch East India Company held colonial power over the people of Indonesia between 1602 and 1800. Concurrent was the Sino-Dutch conflicts, a series of colonial land and trade disputes between the invasive Dutch East India Company and the ruling Ming Dynasty. It was during this time that Delft tiles first began appearing in attribution to the Dutch city of Delft in the 1620s.
Winnie Sidharta creates a fragmented film-strip of collective memory through the lost narratives and family archives imbued in her work. Her tiles allow the living, mutable quality of the painted image to carry emotive scenes of grief and conflict, revealing the harrowing realities of Indonesian post-colonial trauma and the intrinsic human universalities that flash below the surface of her own cobalt vignettes.
Sidharta’s monochrome scenes expose the origins of Delft tiles and position them as tangible byproducts of the imperial impulse to mine a people for not only their land and natural resources, but also for their culture and spirit.
Complimenting the figurative imagery in her tilework, Sidharta’s abstract paintings are a similar exercise in extracting and memorializing her fleeting memories from early life growing up in the lush and beautiful Java, Indonesia. Altogether, Sidharta’s work considers assimilation, immigration, and how one informs the other. Her vibrant collages have the effect of lush foliage and her tiles archive a crucial personal recollection of life in Java, Indonesia. She extends a legacy of craftswomen and complex recollections of time, memory, and identity out from her layered canvasses and honors the strength of her ancestors in her intricately painted tiles.
ABOUT WINNIE SIDHARTA
Winnie Sidharta is a Chinese Indonesian painter based in Queens, New York. Sidharta works with handmade paper, raw pigments, and sculptural substrates to create her body of work that investigates collective cultural experience. Her collage, painting, drawing, and site-specific installation consider themes of assimilation, immigration, and how the parallel experiences inform each other. Most recently, Winnie Sidharta's work in Delft tiles allows the mutable, living quality of the painted image to carry emotive scenes of generational post-colonial trauma.
Sidharta has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, from Indonesia to China and across the United States, in California, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. She studied Visual Communication Design in Indonesia and Painting in Beijing, China. In 2010, she received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from The Ohio State University and later taught there before settling in New York City in 2014.
ABOUT ALANNA MILLER
With over ten years of experience as an art dealer working with private collectors and corporate hospitalities, Alanna Miller is opening a new gallery space at 230 Mulberry Street in New York City, bringing her art advisory expertise to the storefront. The gallery will function as a dynamic, thoughtful space dedicated to emerging art.
Alanna Miller received her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art and the Market from Christie's Education in New York. She was sales assistant to blue chip art advisor Kim Heirston and Sales Director of Artemisa Gallery in New York City, specializing in emerging and contemporary Latin American art. Following her time with Artemisa, she spent several years in the specialized business of fine art licensing with Bridgeman Images. Alanna Miller brings a uniquely and carefully honed perspective into the gallery.