After a year of incredible craftsmanship, experimentation, and community programming, please join SoMad as our inaugural artist-in-residence exhibition comes to an end on Friday, November 22nd! We will begin with two short documentary films on each series’ process: one highlighting David Aliperti’s Mother Tree, and the other on Soraya Zaman’s Prime. Esther, The Bipedal Entity—drag artist, historian, and friend of SoMad—will then moderate an artist talk with the two of them.  We’ll cap off the night with a celebration of the artists’ accomplishments with snacks, drinks, and dancing.

In his art practice, David Aliperti explores how time spent and communal effort in the making of the artwork can serve to slow down the pace of the viewer’s visual experience. His current series titled Mother Tree includes sculptures molded by hand from repurposed paper paste, a foam composite that is very lightweight yet buildable. This material choice enables new, gravity defying, flora to ascend almost weightlessly. These sculptures require many hours of meditative handwork; to sculpt the numerous individual petals, leaves and stems that come together to form the whole of each sculpture. Aliperti loves traces of that handwork via fingerprints and nail marks to remain.

The process of making this work is intentionally labor intensive and slow. Aliperti wants the viewer to be challenged by the notion that a small object can contain so many hours of labor. His process emphasizes the value of human connection. Aliperti explores cycles of life, death, rebirth and reconfiguration in his work. He views the human imprint as both tangible and ephemeral. In these patterns of repetition, he finds universality; that systems repeat on micro and macro scales across all forms of life. Aliperti takes comfort in this transience. His work is not a monument to a sole maker but rather an encapsulation of communal effort and time spent together. The work is also an invitation to the viewer; to create on their own terms and to join with others collaboratively.

The SoMad artist residency has provided Zaman the opportunity to fix their practice to a single space. Granted with both time and space, Zaman has been able not only to play and explore but also to hone in on the genre of still life photography. Still life photography often represents subjects at their “prime” and most “beautiful": a flower at peak bloom, fruit at its most luscious. However, Zaman’s innate curiosity led them to a study of finding the beauty and vulnerability within the unseen moments, the rot and decay, the distorted and refracted. Zaman introduces a tension between preservation and decay.

With the combination of a crystal bath solution and epoxy resin, each photograph is individually manipulated and worked to produce an entirely unique image. The photographs emerge adorned in crystals. Emulsion layers are stretched and transformed. These sculptural photographs take on new layers of complexity, furthering Zaman’s exploration of time, decay, vulnerability and preservation. Zaman asks the viewer to question: What is the prime of beauty? Can we be comfortable enough to let things sit and be studied? Is there space to transform outside of the expected?