The Armory Show | Hilma’s Ghost: Dannielle Tegeder + Sharmistha Ray

September 9—12, 2021

The Armory Show 2021
Javits Center, New York City, New York
September 9-12, 2021

Booth F7

Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray | ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT

Carrie Secrist Gallery is pleased to participate in the 2021 presentation of The Armory Show with New York-based gallery artist Dannielle Tegeder in collaboration with New York-based Sharmistha Ray, both co-founder’s of the feminist artist collective Hilma’s Ghost.

Carrie Secrist Gallery is participating in the Focus section of The Armory Show, organized by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, the Chief Curator of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. In summary, the 2021 theme considers the future as a spectrum – the future next year, in 100 years, local or celestial – using the challenges and monumental changes experienced in 2020 as a catalyst. This year’s theme looks to artists to shape the future and imagine realities beyond our current condition while exploring the possibility that exists in future imaginations, communities, governments, economies, and environments.

ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT by Hilma’s Ghost is a collaborative drawing project between Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray. Together, the artists created an abstract Tarot deck that responds to the original Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck, which is not only the most popular deck in distribution in the world today, but also, the starting point for American Tarot. Illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, that deck harbors the occult belief systems that prevailed in both America and Europe throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is commonly held to be the first deck used solely for the purposes of divination. More than a century later, Brooklyn-based artists, Tegeder and Ray, have taken an abstract lens to the cards’ rich symbolism to interpret their signs and symbols to generate divinatory meanings that can be unlocked through an interpretation of abstract forms.

HILMA’S GHOST COLLECTIVE:

Hilma’s Ghost, a feminist artist collective, was co-founded by Brooklyn-based artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray in 2020. The collective seeks to address existing art historical gaps by cultivating a global network of women, nonbinary, and trans practitioners whose work addresses spirituality. Hilma af Klint’s groundbreaking exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2018 served as a reckoning for art history’s blindspots, especially for women artists considered too ‘mystical’ for the conservative art world. Named after af Klint, Hilma’s Ghost believes that western heteropatriarchal societies maintain a false binary between spirituality and science. This bias serves to overlook womxn artists whose explorations of ancient and pre-modern knowledge systems is a source of personal strength and aesthetic innovation. Following a year of lockdowns and social distancing, Hilma’s Ghost acts as a restorative project that uplifts these voices and makes them visible. Learn more about Hilma’s Ghost and this project here.

Sharmistha Ray is an artist, art critic, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. For two decades, their work has explored subjective experience through the lens of queerness, language, and memory. Ray’s core practice consists of drawing, but also includes painting, sculpture, video installation, and photography. They have exhibited their work in solo exhibitions in Mumbai, New York, and Singapore, and shown in group exhibitions and art fairs in the U.S. and abroad. They are the recipient of a Joan Mitchell MFA Grant, and received their MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute. Currently, they teach in the MFA programs at Parsons School of Design and School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dannielle Tegeder is an artist and professor at The City University of New York at Lehman College. For the past fifteen years, her work has explored abstraction through the lens of systems, architecture, and utopianism. While the core of her practice is paintings and drawings, she also works in large-scale installation, mobiles, video, sound, and animation and has done a number of collaborations with composers, dancers, and writers. In March 2020 Tegeder founded The Pandemic Salon, a community-centric project intended to dismantle the hierarchical structures of institutional discussion, which showcases topics related to the pandemic by bringing together creative minds in an informal, online environment that has connected over 600 participants from 40 countries.

Carrie Secrist Gallery and Hilma’s Ghost will be hosting additional programming during The Armory Show in-person and online. Please visit our website and follow our Instagram (@carriesecristgallery) for live updates about programming during the fair.