Buttery Spread encourages visitors to expand the ways they relate to what they eat

Brew House Arts is excited to announce our newest exhibition, Buttery Spread, curated by Emma Honcharski and Chas Wagner. As our first collaborative duo, Honcharski and Wagner present an exhibition that is sensory, playful, exploratory, and non-transactional. They invite visitors to spend time with a collection of whimsical, food-related artworks, and have also transformed part of the gallery into a reading room, where visitors can enjoy a collection of food-related books, zines, and magazines. By creating a space that brings together art, food, and books, the curators hope to inspire conversation about what it means to build relationships—to share a meal with a neighbor, or share a book with a friend.

The show will be on view at the Brew House Gallery from November 9 to December 30, with an opening reception on November 9 from 6:00 to 8:30 pm.

Click here to read the full Press Release.

Caroline Yoo

Caroline Yoo is an interdisciplinary artist who was born and raised in the United States to Korean immigrants. Through her art practice of performance, social practice, intimate gatherings, and video installations, Yoo uses translation as a tool to map forgotten histories–to reveal psychological shadows haunting the diaspora–and perform contemporary translations of rituals for the living. She is a co-founder and leader of JADED PGH, Hwa Records, and Han Diaspora Group, artist collectives focused on the Asian diaspora experience.

Yoo graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2023. She has performed, exhibited, and produced at Carnegie Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; University of Michigan Ann Arbor; McDonough Museum of Art; University of Southern California; LA Art Show; Kelly Strayhorn Theater and more.

Tracing the edges of hidden and silenced perspectives of the past to inform the personal and political of the present, Yoo visualizes narratives using multiple voices in tension with each other to highlight the complicated structures of empire and power unraveling imperial illusions through geopolitical poetry.

In her social practice, Caroline strives for radical existence through the acknowledgment of space, time, labor, mentors, and peers as building blocks needed to envision place and space as alternative learning models for kinship, debates, manifesting resistive art, dreaming wild, processing unheard traumas, or plant grounds for new futures.

What do you hope to accomplish in the Distillery Residency?

My most recent works have all been about ghost-hunting for the forgotten women, the women who desired to dream, the women who were too loud, the women that rebelled in Korean and Korean diaspora history. Continuing with the themes of hunting through discarded archives—personal and political—to transmute violent female mythologies, family history, and re-perform voices of the past to engage in a more feminist present and future, I am currently researching the first Korean American born in Hawaii in 1903; her name: Alice Hyun.

Using the public archives of Alice’s family, tracing her existence in the US military working as a linguist during World War II and her later believed alliance with the North Korean government, I am creating a new video installation based on performance, that will explore the complicated nature of nationalism, land, and empire in the Korean-American diaspora.

I am also excited to sit down with my new footage from my visit to a contemporary shrine for an ancient forgotten goddess called MAGO, located in South Korea. All the footage is taken on my infrared camera as I further my research of performing my body with violent technology as a method to engage and resist with the politics of visibility and the relationship of the body to the surveillance states we live in.

Where can we see your work?

To find out more about Caroline and to see more of her work, check out:

Website: www.carolineyoo.com
Instagram: @cyoophotography

Hwa Records: @hwarecords
JADED PGH: @jadedpgh

Caroline will also have a solo exhibition of new work at Bunker Projects, from Jan 5 – Feb 16, 2024, where she will be exhibiting her new work about Alice Hyun and Alice in Wonderland.

Brew House Arts is proud to announce that we are piloting a national artist residency program this fall. In partnership with The Roll Up CLT – a host organization previously based in Charlotte, NC that enables visiting artists to work in new environments with funding support, mentorship, resources and community – the new residency at Brew House Arts will bring a visiting artist together with local Pittsburgh based artists to encourage collaboration and exchange.

The inaugural 2023 Brew House Arts resident is multidisciplinary artist, advocate and maker Seitu Jones. Based in St. Paul, Minnesota, Jones works between the arts and public spheres, channeling the spirit of radical social movements into experiences that foster critical conversations and nurture more just and vibrant communities from the soil up. He is recognized as a dynamic collaborator and a creative force for civic engagement. Throughout the first two weeks of October, Seitu will activate Brew House Gallery as his experimental studio production and fabrication space.

We will host a public Artist Talk at the Brew House Gallery on Wednesday, October 11, 2023 at 7:00pm when Seitu will share some insight into his practice, process and his plans while visiting Pittsburgh.

Click here to read the full Press Release.

Joshua Challen Ice

Joshua is an artist working with traditional and non-traditional gallery spaces such as SPACE Gallery, Carlow University, The Sculpture Center, and The Royal Danish Academy, among others. This has offered opportunities to experiment with many different formats and methods. His practice is rooted in an improvisational way of thinking, designing and building. Early artistic pursuits in improvisational music-making created a framework to apply to physical sculpture, and this idea creates a practice without limits on medium. Joshua graduated from Point Park University with a BFA in Lighting Design and Entertainment Technology. He worked as an Exhibitions Manager at Mattress Factory before becoming a full-time artist, and uses his exhibitions training to create fully-immersive works.

Joshua’s body of work explores the idea of “the surreal everyday”: examining construction materials and domestic items and reinterpreting how they may affect our lives. A heavy focus on foundational elements of composition, texture, and lighting create a platform on which material and process motivate the form and function of Ice’s work. Assemblages of reclaimed construction mediums joined by high-tech light and video components probe both our past and present, creating traversable territories and moments in time. Juxtaposing things like recovered windows and scaffolding with flashing lights and live camera feeds—material maintenance merges with the maintenance of one’s self, offering endless landscapes to survey and investigate through the lens of freshly built future worlds.

What do you hope to accomplish in the Distillery Residency?

While I’m excited to have a framework to create alongside other artists, learn with the mentors, and grow my practice through the community, I also plan to cultivate a relationship with the Brew House building itself. Understanding how it’s utilized, maintained, neglected and celebrated. Investigating which service pipes are being used and which are relics of the past. I hope to then respond and intersect my work with the building, either drawing attention to unnoticed parts of the building and exemplifying their utilitarian implementation or integrate the installation seamlessly with the original craftspersonship, working to expand upon the work that has already been done. All of this is an attempt to call attention to the labor and care involved in constructing and maintaining a space like Brew House.

What do you do outside of art?

I am a person that likes to stay busy! When I’m away from my practice I enjoy riding my bike around the city, camping with my wonderful partner, making music, dancing, building furniture and making improvements to my living spaces. When I calm down, you can find me underneath a blanket and our 3 cats, usually asleep.

Where can we see your work?

To find out more about Joshua and to see more of his work, take a look at:

Website: www.joshuachallenice.com
Instagram: @joshuachallenice