Jaye Moon 2025 NYFA Hall of Fame Inductee
NYFA’s 2025 Hall of Fame Benefit will be held on Tuesday, March 18, at Gotham Hall to celebrate the notable work of NYFA Artist Honorees Jaye Moon and JT Rogers, alongside Patron of the Arts and Partner at Makeable LLC, Cristina Enriquez-Bocobo, and Commissioner Laurie Cumbo, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, for their inspiring contributions to the arts.
Since the 1990s, Jaye Moon has been crafting interactive braille paintings using LEGO bricks. Moon has used LEGO as an artistic medium to create works emphasizing inclusivity and tactile engagement. In particular, her LEGO braille paintings demonstrate her innovative approach to accessible art. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Museum in New York, the Nam June Paik Art Center, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, and the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art in Korea. Moon holds an MFA degree in sculpture from Pratt Institute and is represented by Jennifer Baahng Gallery in New York and Seoul.
Artist:
Jaye Moon is included in the New York Foundation for the Arts exhibition
Lives and works in Newport, Rhode Island
ARTIST BIO
Sue McNally (b. 1967) is a painter based in Newport, Rhode Island, with a creative practice spanning locations in Rhode Island and southeastern Utah. Raised in New England, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Rhode Island in 1990 and a Master of Fine Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1995. McNally has held prestigious residencies including the Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence position at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. Her work has also been supported by residencies at Carrizozo AIR (New Mexico), McCanna House/North Dakota Museum of Art, Tamarind Institute, Crater Lake National Park, Ucross Foundation, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her artwork is in prominent public and private collections, such as the Addison Gallery of American Art, North Dakota Museum of Art, Tamarind Institute Archive, Worcester Art Museum, RISD Museum, and Newport Art Museum.
Sue McNally has painted landscapes for over 30 years. Through decades of travel and expeditions across the United States, she has developed a deep personal connection to the American landscape. Her work reflects a passionate intensity, vibrant expression, and luminous quality, all skillfully balanced with realism. Depicting mountains, wind, and water, with a delicate ferocity and a sense of playful disorder, she investigates the inherent shapes and proportions of the natural world.Â
In 2010, Sue McNally embarked on an artistic endeavor, “This Land is My Land,” later named the States paintings. Reflecting her experiences and observations of the American landscape, this journey has produced over forty large-scale paintings and murals. It is ongoing, with each piece representing one of the fifty states. The works, incorporating specific and locatable on-site photographs, exemplify her meticulous attention to detail. They convey a sense of grandeur and the enduring beauty of the terrain, replicating impressions as if viewers are standing in her place. Aiming to further explore abstraction, around 2016 and 2017, these works rely on memory as their reference point. Distorted forms, measured shapes, and pictorial harmony express the internal structure of the landscape, showcasing an abstract and elusive quality. The State paintings encapsulate McNally’s aspiration to transform viewed vistas into landscape paintings through the interplay of forms and colors while appropriately scaling nature.
Since 2020, the work has displayed a richer undergrowth of imagery and a delicate transparency that authentically reflects interpretations of experiences rather than merely physical reality. It draws inspiration from Charles E. Burchfield’s romantic and fantastical delineations of nature and Philip Guston’s efforts to harmonize surrealism, abstraction, and figuration. This evolution has been challenging and invigorating. Rich in regal, seasonal, and phantasmagorical elements, the rebellious features unite different structures in the painted images.
Sue McNally is a painter of the scenic and a poet of visual prose. Her landscapes are hallucinatory, cryptic, and mesmerizing. Ghostly turquoise, magenta curtains, and phantasmal yellows in magnified natural forms evoke a striking sense of monumentality. Each mystical and transcendental palette is carefully chosen to meet the specific demands of the structures in the picture planes. They are the invented landscapes and the enduring myths of the terrain — embodiments of the American sublime immortalized in paint. They emphasize that the fleeting beauty of the American land, as it lives on in our minds, is worthy of our reverence. The most essential form of cultural literacy is to read our environment.
Yooah Park’s Void in Writing is installed in the ATRIUM in Hannam. It is a sculptural mobile made of laser-cut stainless steel suspended by piano strings, soaring 20 feet tall and cascading to the floor. Void in Writing critically analyzes the fundamental nature of communication, raising important questions about its significance when communicative acts devolve into empty gestures. The work investigates the implications of language that lacks meaning, prompting a reevaluation of what constitutes effective communication.
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
ARTIST BIO
Ru Marshall (b. 1960) is a nonbinary visual artist and writer. They have painted and employed photographic processes on mirrored surfaces for over twenty-five years—vinyl, glass, fabric, and Dibond. These reflective images shift and change depending on the position of the viewer and the quality of the light, capturing the fleeting and interactive nature of perception and the natural and urban landscape seen in passing from car and train windows. In Marshall’s most recent work, they explore our compromised experience of nature in a time of environmental catastrophe. For the last seven years, they have been developing an improvisational dance practice and recently completed work on Interlope, dance/video project which took place in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and which explored gender, the interaction between human and organic gestures, and our search for solace in a natural world we have failed to respect.
Marshall has had exhibitions of their visual work at Participant Inc., Triple Candie, The New Orlean Contemporary Arts Center, Thread Waxing Space, The Brooklyn Museum, Centro Cultural Rector Ricardo Rojas, The Drawing Center, Maryland Art Place, White Columns, and numerous other venues in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. They have received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale, The Banff Centre, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Marshall’s novel, A Separate Reality, a queer coming-of-age tale set in Phoenix, Arizona, was released by Carroll & Graf (2006) and nominated for a Lambda Book Award. American Trickster, their forthcoming biography of the faux anthropologist and cult leader Carlos Castaneda, will be released by Red Hen Press in 2026 and has been optioned for film/TV by Hybrid Cienma. They have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for their short fiction, appearing in N + 1 online, The Evergreen Review, The Barcelona Review, The Kenyon Review, Your Impossible Voice, Another Chicago Magazine, and numerous other publications. They attended the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated from Wesleyan University.
CREDIT: A. Farm, Tra My Nguyen, Luke Schneider, Alec Phuoc Thuong
Performance, Presentation, & Discussion
by Ru Marshall and Lyon Nguyen
January 11, 2025, A. Farm in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
A. Farm presented “Performance, Presentation & Discussion,” featuring resident artist, gallery artist and writer Ru Marshall, and choreographer Lyon Nguyen, at Amanaki Saigon Boutique Hotel, Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, on January 11, 2025. This event was part of Ru’s ongoing project-in-progress, Interlope. Inspired in part by Argentine philosopher and dancer Marie Bardet’s “The Cultivation of Gestures,” Interlope investigates the meaning of gesture in visual arts and dance. It also explored how movement-quotidian and artistic-is informed by our relationship to nature — in particular, trees. There was a brief performance by Lyon Nguyen and a presentation of Ru Marshall’s drawings (based partly on their collaboration with Nguyen), followed by a discussion between the two artists
TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE
September 3 – November 2, 2024
JENNIFER BAAHNG Hannam
21-18 Hannam-daero 20-gil
Yongsan-gu, Seoul
South Korea 04419
IN THE ATRIUM
VOID IN WRITING
September 3 – November 2, 2024
JENNIFER BAAHNG Hannam
21-18 Hannam-daero 20-gil
Yongsan-gu, Seoul
South Korea 04419
In celebrating its 20th anniversary, JENNIFER BAAHNG is making a significant mark. The gallery is opening its first Asia galleries, in Seoul, featuring TRANSPACIFIC: Perfect Lovers and Love Difference. This exhibition, presented in two parts at two locations, is a testament to two decades of artistic excellence. It showcases over a hundred boundary-leaping, subtle, playful, and political works presented by a diverse group of twelve artists and one poet, each with their own unique perspective. Perfect Lovers, opening September 5 at JENNIFER BAAHNG Gangnam, is an intimate space of vast intrigue, debuting polyphonic collectives of love, alienation, and the absurdism of ideal love. Love Difference, opening September 3 at JENNIFER BAAHNG Hannam, explores creative differences, alluding to Manet, Warhol, and the art of loneliness. While New York is its home, JENNIFER BAAHNG is expanding its horizons, pivoting to the Pacific to share expertise and resources to develop the collective in Contemporary Art.
Perfect Lovers, installed in the Gangnam district of Seoul, attends to splendid superficiality and yields a rich psychological weave. It is refreshingly sensuous and seeks flexible interpretations: Rather than assert an identity or contest a social order, Kevin Melchionne steps into an imaginary space he aspires to but cannot fully inhabit; Jaye Moon reworked Félix González-Torres’s “Perfect Lovers” with a clock face in numerical Braille; the celebrated Mr. repurposed a found snowboard with iconic Japanese manga adolescent couples; quandaries of love are seen through the prism of the omnipotent Picasso; stories in first-person narrative are found in Janet Taylor Pickett’s “Pride and Insouciance.” TRANSPACIFIC: Perfect Lovers takes on the confines of adorning life.
Love Difference, installed in the Hannam district of Seoul with a palette of soft concrete in tandem with stark white walls with rich tonal nuances, presents clashing, flourishing, and playful works with a contemporary edge, a material wonder. While the installation feels ethereal, the format lends itself to a vivid, grand fantasy of love: R.C. Baker uses a copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico, in “Holy of Holies,” for which Andy Warhol was credited as the album’s producer; Brandon Ballengée’s “Frameworks of Absence” meticulously embodies the extinct species’ haunting absence; John Cage, a leading figure of the post-war avant-garde, is featured through a set of thirteen Ryoku, created with the principles of an ancient Chinese divination text, the I Ching; going beyond collaboration to a kind of conspiratorial imagination, Laura Bell and Ian Ganassi’s “The Corpses” has evolved into more than two decades of personal and material call-and-response, with a new batch of collages usually in progress or transit; Ru Marshall’s iPhone photo of a bodega in Brooklyn captures fleeting inquiries of interactive perception; Björn Meyer-Ebrecht’s old book covers are raising expectations, holding authority, hiding secrets, and promising a visionary spirit—remnants from the proverbial “junkyard of history”; Jaye Moon’s “Get That Money” uses 9,216 Lego bricks to reconstruct K-Rap lyrics by Okasian into Braille in number codes; in Janet Taylor Pickett’s “The Liminal,” a voice chimes with Manet’s Olympia. TRANSPACIFIC: Love Difference reminds us that love is all-inclusive.
Yooah Park’s “Void in Writing” is installed in the ATRIUM in Hannam. The piece is a sculptural mobile made of laser-cut stainless steel suspended by piano strings, soaring 20 feet tall and cascading to the floor. This monumental presentation intrigues and piques the audience’s desire to walk around and contemplate it, enriching TRANSPACIFIC’s rich tapestry of contemporary art.
TRANSPACIFIC embarks on a tour, cites the intricacies, and amps up the romance, love, and deliberate insouciance. Playing out riotously in the soul and body of each work in myriad ways, the exhibition sets up methodical beats so that every work resonates. The show moves forward in a vibrant, varied way that brings different perspectives to the tenets of the unexpected. With sensuality and drama, Perfect Lovers is the good, the mad, and the quirky brought together into fantastical stories. Love Difference is profoundly thoughtful and cleverly argued. JENNIFER BAAHNG’s inaugural exhibition in Asia, TRANSPACIFIC, is a tale of love, in two cities, in Seoul.
TRANSPACIFIC: PERFECT LOVERS
September 5 – October 19, 2024
JENNIFER BAAHNG Gangnam
20 Seolleung-ro 119-gil
Gangnam-gu, Seoul
South Korea, 06100
Kevin Melchionne, Jaye Moon, Mr., Picasso, Janet Taylor Pickett
In celebrating its 20th anniversary, JENNIFER BAAHNG is making a significant mark. The gallery is opening its first Asia galleries, in Seoul, featuring TRANSPACIFIC: Perfect Lovers and Love Difference. This exhibition, presented in two parts at two locations, is a testament to two decades of artistic excellence. It showcases over a hundred boundary-leaping, subtle, playful, and political works presented by a diverse group of twelve artists and one poet, each with their own unique perspective. Perfect Lovers, opening September 5 at JENNIFER BAAHNG Gangnam, is an intimate space of vast intrigue, debuting polyphonic collectives of love, alienation, and the absurdism of ideal love. Love Difference, opening September 3 at JENNIFER BAAHNG Hannam, explores creative differences, alluding to Manet, Warhol, and the art of loneliness. While New York is its home, JENNIFER BAAHNG is expanding its horizons, pivoting to the Pacific to share expertise and resources to develop the collective in Contemporary Art.
Perfect Lovers, installed in the Gangnam district of Seoul, attends to splendid superficiality and yields a rich psychological weave. It is refreshingly sensuous and seeks flexible interpretations: Rather than assert an identity or contest a social order, Kevin Melchionne steps into an imaginary space he aspires to but cannot fully inhabit; Jaye Moon reworked Felix Gonzales’s “Perfect Lovers” with a clock face in numerical Braille; the celebrated Mr. repurposed a found snowboard with iconic Japanese manga adolescent couples; quandaries of love are seen through the prism of the omnipotent Picasso; stories in first-person narrative are found in Janet Taylor Pickett’s “Pride and Insouciance.” TRANSPACIFIC: Perfect Lovers takes on the confines of adorning life.
Love Difference, installed in the Hannam district of Seoul with a palette of soft concrete in tandem with stark white walls with rich tonal nuances, presents clashing, flourishing, and playful works with a contemporary edge. While the installation feels ethereal, the format lends itself to a vivid, grand fantasy of love: R.C. Baker uses a copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico, in “Holy of Holies,” for which Andy Warhol was credited as the album’s producer; Brandon BallengĂ©e’s “Frameworks of Absence” meticulously embodies the extinct species’ haunting absence; John Cage, a leading figure of the post-war avant-garde, is featured through a set of thirteen Ryoku, created with the principles of an ancient Chinese divination text, the I Ching; going beyond collaboration to a kind of conspiratorial imagination, Laura Bell and Ian Ganassi’s “The Corpses” has evolved into more than two decades of personal and material call-and-response, with a new batch of collages usually in progress or transit; Ru Marshall’s iPhone photo of a bodega in Brooklyn captures fleeting inquiries of interactive perception; Björn Meyer-Ebrecht’s old book covers are raising expectations, holding authority, hiding secrets, and promising a visionary spirit—remnants from the proverbial “junkyard of history”; Jaye Moon’s “Get That Money” uses 9,216 Lego bricks to reconstruct K-Rap lyrics by Okasian into Braille in number codes; in Janet Taylor Pickett’s “The Liminal,” a voice chimes with Manet’s “Olympia.” TRANSPACIFIC: Love Difference reminds us that love is all-inclusive.
Yooah Park’s “Void in Writing” is installed in the ATRIUM in Hannam. The piece is a sculptural mobile made of laser-cut stainless steel suspended by piano strings, soaring 20 feet tall and cascading to the floor. This monumental presentation intrigues and piques the audience’s desire to walk around and contemplate it, enriching TRANSPACIFIC’s rich tapestry of contemporary art.
TRANSPACIFIC embarks on a tour, cites the intricacies, and amps up the romance, love, and deliberate insouciance. Playing out riotously in the soul and on the body of each work in myriad ways, the exhibition sets up methodical beats so that every work resonates. The show moves forward in a vibrant, varied way that brings different perspectives to the tenets of the unexpected. With sensuality and drama, Perfect Lovers is the good, the mad, and the quirky brought together into fantastical stories. Love Difference is profoundly thoughtful and cleverly argued. JENNIFER BAAHNG’s inaugural exhibition in Asia, TRANSPACIFIC, is a tale of love, in two cities, in Seoul.
Lives and works in New Rochelle, New York
ARTIST BIO
Kevin Melchionne (b.1964) grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. He earned a B.A. from Hunter College of the City University of New York, focusing on Hunter’s philosophy department, which boasted a group of scholars in continental philosophy. Melchionne’s studies were broad and rich, studied Heidegger, Kant, Wittgenstein, Freud, and the French post-structuralists. He traveled to Italy and spent years in Paris, attending the lectures of Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze and reading many modern French literature, including Maurice Blanchot and Edmond Jabès. Returning from Paris, he entered the graduate program in philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where the heat of continental philosophy slowly gave way to the light of the Anglo-American tradition and ultimately earned a Ph.D. He wrote a dissertation on aesthetics entitled “Cultivation: Art and Aesthetics in Everyday Life.”Â
Melchionne has been painting for over forty years, depicting couples and families in rooms with their pets and art. The couple, though not always in sync, share a palpable bond. They turn towards each other in a bid for acknowledgment or are suspended in uncertain tension. These scenes unfold against lush backgrounds of intricately rendered wallpaper, evocative of 17th-century Dutch painting. Modern but not modernist, these interiors also function as a polemic to the long exile of the great decorating traditions from contemporary art discourse. Melchionne paints a novel emotional space that his characters inhabit, familiar and enigmatic.
Melchionne’s distinctive intellectual itinerary holds implications for his artistic sensibility. He eschews what gets called “theory” in the art world. He paints characters in situations with literary, art, historical, and political allusions. Although his paintings may reach for the elusive or ambiguous, they do so without the portentous trappings of contemporary artistic discourse. They are simple in expression yet complex in what is offered. Melchionne suspects that something affirmative is slowly nurtured in us when we allow this approach. A warmth and gratefulness for other traditions and artists, past and present, grows in us. Modest acts of reculturation —small recoveries of these artists and traditions—help us to see them as friendly, not oppressive. This practice, Kevin Melchionne hopes, points us toward a broader cultural reconstruction.
