Athena Fund awardees

Vivian Lu & Rose Qi: Don't Look At Me

Opening Reception: Friday, May 1, 2026, 5-8pm

Don’t Look At Me is an interactive installation in which a life-cast wax sculpture is progressively destroyed by the attention of its viewers. When a viewer looks at the body, the observed area will be melted. The wax softens, deforms, and melts away. The sculpture does not reset. Over the course of an exhibition, it becomes an accumulation of every gaze: a topography of collective attention recorded in material loss.

The interaction requires nothing of the viewer but what they already do: look at a body. No conscious decision to participate, yet the system is already running by tracking the viewer. The viewer becomes both agent and subject of the same apparatus. In a surveillance system, there is no stable position outside it. You observe, you are observed, and you observe yourself. The distinction between the two is temporary, never structural.

Misa Yo: The Shape of Many

Opening Reception: Friday, May 1, 2026, 5-8pm

The Shape of Many explores how repetition transforms into form, questioning when accumulation is perceived as unity and when labor becomes invisible. Working across bronze, wood, glass, and ceramics, the exhibition brings together small, repeated gestures that build into larger sculptural installations

Individual units merge into cohesive structures, where traces of making remain embedded but not immediately apparent. Bronze surfaces record touch through natural patination, while wood and clay extend into continuous, line-like forms that shift between drawing and structure in space.

By allowing labor to recede beneath the surface, the work invites a slower encounter, where perception evolves over time. The exhibition also reflects on material histories and the presence of women within physically and traditionally male dominated practices. Through subtle, tactile experiences, The Shape of Many encourages viewers to reconsider how value, effort, and form are recognized and understood.

Miya Hannan: Resonance

Opening Reception: Friday, May 1, 2026, 5-8pm

I view the world as composed of layers and linkages of history—a chain of lives and events that lead from one to the next. I believe that landscapes hold honest records of these histories. Using images of nature and physical objects as storytellers, my work seeks to preserve the stories of people and histories that are nearly forgotten or at risk of being lost. In Japan, where I grew up, the souls of the dead are believed to live on, spirits exist within nature, and the land retains its destiny. People inherit the histories of the land on which they live. I am interested in the relationship between humanity and the information embedded in nature.

Burning, which appears in many Japanese rituals, including cremation, transforms physical forms into something transient. The Law of Conservation of Mass states that matter may change form but can neither be created nor destroyed. Similarly, the dead remain with the living in the form of memory, story, knowledge, and genetic code. The dead continue to exist around us, creating layers of history that shape the present. My work depicts my view of death as another form of being alive.

Glen Martin Taylor: THE DILEMNA OF BEING HUMAN

Opening Reception: Friday, August 2, 2024, 5-8pm

My work explores the brokenness in trying to be a person, the messy mending of healing, and the dilemma of being human. My work is my interpretation of the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi.

Nichole Maury: LANDMARKS

Opening Reception: Friday, August 2, 2024, 5-8pm

I have developed a complicated, and sometimes contentious, relationship with the idea of home. A life interrupted by frequent movement, especially as a child, has left me with memories that are often uneven and ill-defined. Sometimes there are only fragments, a steep hill, an ugly red-patterned carpet, the sound of plastic on the windows in winter. Home was never a place of permanence or stability. Instead, I found comfort in the classroom, with its clearly defined rules and predictable routines. I performed these requisite and seemingly infinite acts of repetition, these rituals, stretched out on a faded flower comforter in my bedroom or tucked into some quiet corner of the house.