Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar Award Recipient
Congratulations to University of New Mexico MFA Candidate Ranran Fan on receiving Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar Award! The Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar (EVAS) series offers professional space for a Master of Fine Art graduate student for their final thesis show. The culminating exhibition launches them into their profession as an artist. With the series, we underscore exceptional artists attending regional institutions while highlighting Albuquerque’s innovative contemporary art scene.
Ranran Fan (b. China) is an artist currently based in the US, working in photography, installation, and performance. Ranran earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BS in Biology in Hong Kong, and is pursuing an MFA at the University of New Mexico Studio Art. Her work has been exhibited internationally including Academy Art Museum, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe Art Institute, Tamarind Institute, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (China), and Incheon Marine Asia Photography and Video Festival (Korea). Ranran has been nominated as a SITE Scholar at SITE Santa Fe (2020). She received several awards including Student Award for Innovations in Imaging at Society for Photographic Education (U.S., 2019), and the Shiseido Photographer Prize at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (China, 2018).
Across the Room From Each Other
We are pleased to present the catalog for hazel batrezchavez and mk’s incredible exhibition Across the Room From Each Other. The catalog features a forward by sheri crider and an essay by Alicia Inez Guzmán. This book was made possible by Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar Award and the Urban Enhancement Trust Fund.
SV Randall: Antonym
Antonym
SV Randall
December 10, 2021 – January 14, 2022
Opening Reception: Friday, December 10, from 5-7 pm
Sanitary Tortilla Factory presents Antonym by SV Randall. Rendering a speculative system of senses as sculptural objects, Antonym examines ocularcentrism and the estranged mechanisms of perception.
The eye reaches out for objects like a lantern, crawling at first, then illuminating, then apparition, entire atmospheres reconstructed, unfurling from contorted knots, tendon to tendril, all limbs and limits reverberating, ricochet, a bell in everything, even absence. This is a site of interface and interference between organ and object.
SV Randall creates work which encompasses a range of media including sculpture, installation, painting, and performance that address the various ways in which objects mutate in nature and function across time. He explores how we situate ourselves in the world; principally highlighting larger issues of social visibility, class structures, technological obsolesce, and spatial politics. In his latest exhibition, SV explores speculative receptors of contact between the individual and the outside world.
ARTIST BIO:
SV Randall is an interdisciplinary artist from Buffalo, NY. He received his MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from VCU and his BFA from Alfred University. His work has been exhibited at David & Schweitzer Contemporary, Brooklyn, NY; the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX; Ditch Projects, Eugene, OR; and the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. SV is the recipient of the Toby Devin Lewis Fellowship Award and has most recently participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME), Sculpture Space (Utica, NY), the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (Roswell, NM). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Texas at Dallas.
HERE
Nikesha Breeze, Collette Marie, Cynthia Cook, Erin Currier, Jodie Herrera, Caroline Liu, Joanna Keane Lopez, Tigre Mashaal-Lively, Anita Rodriguez, Cara Romero, Rose B. Simpson, and Maye Torres
November 5 – 30, 2021
Opening Reception: Friday, November 5th, 5-9pm
open Thursdays + Fridays 12-5pm and by appointment
Masks Required at all events
Sanitary Tortilla Factory presents, HERE, an exhibition curated by Jodie Herrera, centering around New Mexican womxn and non-binary artists of color. This exhibition was created to celebrate the great talent and impact that these important artists have contributed. They have been “Here” and will continue to show up with a remarkable and undeniable presence, not only in the visual arts community but in our creative histories of this region and beyond.
Adaptive Immunity
Toni Gentilli
Adaptive Immunity
October 1 – 30, 2021
Opening Reception: October 1, 5 – 7 pm
Sanitary Tortilla Factory presents, Adaptive Immunity, an exhibition by Toni Gentilli that renders the entanglement of human and environmental health, specifically the disproportionate impacts of autoimmunity on women and other chronic conditions linked to ecosystem degradation, through a compendium of naturally dyed textiles, weavings, paintings, sculptures, chlorophyll prints and botanical hydrosols.
Over the past five years Gentilli has worked almost exclusively with cottonwood trees as both subject and material. In the Middle Rio Grande Valley where she lives, the majority of cottonwoods are in decline and struggling to regenerate due to disruption of the flood cycle and riparian ecology. Moreover, extended droughts resulting from climate change are causing weakened immune systems in cottonwoods, and so they increasingly fall victim to fungal infection and other environmental stressors. Beyond living among them, Gentilli feels a deep kinship with Rio Grande cottonwood trees because she has a chronic case of Coccidioidomycosis, also known as Valley Fever, a pulmonary infection caused by microscopic soil-dwelling fungus endemic to the Southwestern United States. Coccidioidomycosis is on the rise due to global warming, intensified dust storms, and desertification, and further fueled by sprawling urban expansion, industrialized agriculture, and other disruption of soil ecosystems.
Gentilli’s continued reflection on these issues has led her to understand that the climate crisis is a shared immunological plight which upsets longstanding notions of humans apart from nature, self and other, and individuals with discrete bodies versus interdependent communities of organisms. Her adaptive response has been to conscientiously reinsert herself into the web of connection between people, plants, the Earth’s regulatory systems and our mutual wellbeing, and she invites you to join her on this journey toward collective healing.