Super-Stories

Grace Lang and Ramiro Davaro-Comas

Opening Reception July 11, 2-4pm

Show dates: July 9 - Aug 2

Super-Stories is a collaborative exhibition by artists Grace Lang and Ramiro Davaro-Comas. This series of work is influenced by the art education and student-led mural work that the artists do with children throughout the world. As artists and art educators, Lang and Davaro-Comas run Super-Stories, a non-profit makers space in Kinderhook, NY that focuses on material experimentation, choice-based art-making, and sustainable practices.

Within their space, the artists focus on a cyclical pattern of material usage, utilizing discarded student materials for their own work, as well as lending their own old materials back to the kids. The paintings in the series highlight the vibrant energy of children’s illustration and mark-making as they are brought to life on used drop cloths from school murals and the Super-Stories makers space. The pieces of cloth, stretched into canvases, contain the doodles and paint stains of countless kids’ experiments, spills, and marker tests. These works represent a fusion of imagination and confidence, which aims to highlight the unfiltered creativity that children bring to art—a boldness that is often tempered by age and experience. Both artists work within a vocabulary of iconography taken directly from student drawing sessions or from characters created in their youth.

The works on paper are a fusion of personal illustration and student gestural drawing. In her works, Lang revisits and reinterprets visual ideas and drawings from her childhood while weaving them into a world with newer characters and motifs related to her identity as a mother. Davaro-Comas’s works on paper are a mix of expressive student work and characters taken from collaborative mural projects that he has led with students from around the world.

The sculptures that Lang exhibits are creatures made from paper pulp and plaster, created during or inspired by workshops with children. In this work, Lang pushes the characters she is illustrating and painting to come off the page and become real life sculptural friends, following the same shapes and contours that students make during their work with clay, paper pulp and plaster.

In their work with children, both artists have seen how student drawings are not bound by the constraints of tradition or expectation. In their own resulting work, the overwhelming feelings are of joy and freedom.