“Meet the Artist” with Andina Marie Osorio and Avion Pearce

On Thursday, August 22, we welcome Andina Marie Osorio and Avion Pearce (current Woodstock AIRs) to “Meet the Artist” night at CPW. In Andina Marie Osorio’s practice, pictures are tethered together in time, that carry the weight of other ways of knowing, and a time that evokes other ways of being. Nostalgia functions to reveal a longing for a past that might have lingered in someone else’s memory, now resurfaced. Connecting through a network of visual markers that perform the juxtaposition of the intimate and mundane, to articulate a visual language for understanding queerness.

Merging analog techniques with political purpose and a poetic sensibility, Pearce creates a visual world that lives between reality and dreams. Born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to Guyanese parents, they were inspired by Abelardo Morell’s use of the camera obscura technique, and by the artists Ming Smith, Roy DeCarava, and Graciela Iturbide, each of whom innovated with light, motion, and ambiance. Pearce’s work inhabits multiple registers, and explores photography’s potential to chart the interplay between time and the body. Survival, in Pearce’s work, is about being both soft and strong.

This event will be live-streamed on CPW’s YouTube page at 6pm. Join us every Thursday evening at CPW, when we host illuminating talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, to hear about artistic processes, and to meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 474 Broadway in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served. “Meet the Artist” is made possible by a generous grant from the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation.

Andina Marie Osorio is an Afro-Caribbean artist born in the Bronx and is currently based between Brooklyn, NY and New Haven, Connecticut. 

Osorio’s  practice utilizes photography and image based installations to examine the genealogical analogies of domestic space and lineage – in relation to her Puerto Rican heritage and her queer identity. Her practice employs self portraiture, archival familial photographs, installation, assemblage, appropriation and soft sculptures. Osorio’s practice exposes juxtapositions in the liminal spaces between generations, genders, and sexualities. Her interior photographs of domestic spaces transform into pictorial collages that question how to make a portrait without a physical body. In her installations, the ephemera and materials used incite incidental memories and activate ancestral energies that reference the feminine domestic setting. Osorio explores her understanding of the queer image through her personal recollections of voyeurism and re-creating performances or gestures she yearns to memorialize. 

She is a recipient of the  City Artist Corps Grant of New York City and the DRABL Artist Grant. Osorio was one of 50 artists to participate in the ForFreedoms AWAKENING Billboard Campaign in 2020. Her work has been shown at the LES Gallery at The Clemente and Webber Gallery in LA. She has been featured in Musee Magazine, Port Magazine and Elephant Magazine. In 2024, Osorio was awarded residencies at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Fire Island Artist Residency and Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. 

Osorio is a recent Yale MFA Graduate. 

Avion Pearce’s work  explores the use of photography as a conveyor of many truths, both in a historical context and in this present moment. They often use created environments, costumes, props, and found objects to stage narrative scenes that attempt to fill in blanks left in western pictorial histories. The characters of these narratives are immersed in the routines of the day to day, engaged in moments of tenderness, bliss, fury, melancholy and quiet introspection. Avion Pearce studied photography at Parsons the New School for Design and has an MFA from the Yale School of Art. They received a BFA Photography Scholarship from Parsons, and they are a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship recipient. Their work has been shown at Ryan Lee Gallery, Aperture, and Hudson Opera House, and has been commissioned by New York magazine, W, Crack, Netflix, and the New York Times. They are the 2024 Aperture Portfolio Prize winner.