Mixed Nuts

From ceramics to paintings, Mixed Nuts has something for everyone. 6ft Ap’art Gallery invites you to a show of mixed-medium art that walks the line between playful and nutty. Join us Friday for a VIP opening with beer and wine or visit us Saturday for open hours and if you’re hankering for more, book an appointment on Sunday for a private viewing. (DM to book: @6ftapartgallery)

The show will include work from David Hollingsworth, Himeka Murai, Jenny Hersh, Emilia Olsen, Elizabeth Schweizer, Maggie Moran, Aaron Hughes and Michael Peters.

David Hollingsworth moved to NYC to study graphic design in 2000, but his creative interests had been 3-Dimensional since childhood. During his 9-year career as a sign maker, David began taking ceramics lessons in Queens in 2009 and fell in love with the craft immediately. Since 2016, he has been able to focus on ceramics, and is now the manager of Mud Matters, a community ceramics studio in Hell’s Kitchen. After many years of designing and making solely functional objects, David pivoted to sculptural work that retains a functional aspect. For the past 3 years he has been focusing on a series of Creature sculptures. The first were made while he completed a ceramics apprenticeship with Dawn Soltysiak on a farm in Michigan. David says the process of making them is like playing with a child’s construction toy; individual pieces are made and then assembled, often without much of a plan, and what emerges is a mixture of sweet and scary, just like childhood.

Himeka Murai is a Japanese visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. After studying first art history in Tokyo and then design in NYC, she began painting during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in New York City, using materials she could easily access in the quarantine environment. Murai debuted her first body of work in the summer of 2022 at Studio 9D in Chelsea, New York, and has since participated in various group shows across her two home cities: New York City and Tokyo. Murai has an AAS from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in NYC, with a focus in Communications Design (2021), and a BLA in Art History and Cultural Heritage from the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan (2019). In 2023, Murai was selected for the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, which culminated in a group exhibition at the New York Live Arts in Manhattan.

Jenny Hersh is an artist and educator currently based in New England. Over the course of the past nine years she has not lived in one place for longer than nine months. This perpetual movement has created amorphous and overlapping timelines with rare moments of pause. Her work explores the relationship between memory and impermanence; the way transience informs the need for grounding, the impulse towards storytelling and the quality of our reconstructions when we have forgotten yet seek to remember. From her many moves comes her source imagery; thousands of photos taken every year, within communities, in different homes, in landscapes both new and old. These photos serve as artifacts, traces, and threads of continuity spanning nearly a decade. With them she creates prints and sculptures that are altars to memory, preserving and honoring years of patterns, characters and places. Her work also interrogates the value of accuracy in memory, as she often fuses dissonant images to create new stories and fresh reverberations across time.

Emilia Olsen is primarily a figurative painter who’s experimented with artist books, drawing, site specific installation, and hand drawn animation. Olsen believes that to tell a true story, one must tell the one that they know. Her practice is to tell what she knows in the way she knows how. The work features a personal array of symbolism; female nudes, pseudo self portraits, odalisques, skulls, bathers, ocean themes, and table settings. These images extend further into their own worlds. Renaissance works are a main reference point, along with a conceptual adolescence eventually influenced by Post-War Abstract Expressionism, and many contemporary figurative painters. This visual language manifests in reaction to daily rituals around mental health maintenance; personal documentation via journaling, photography, quick video recordings, and sketching; reading and research, especially of poetry and mythology; and the examination of personal experiences, memories. Each part of the ritual nudges the next. Olsen is heavily inspired by writers like bell hooks, jamie hood, Frank O’Hara, Maggie Nelson, who write things better said in their words, that speak to the inevitability of death, love, heartbreak, joy, grief. This relates to the artist’s ethos that all those big things are all connected, that they meet in the middle of an in-between, the twilights, the velvety nights, the way the light changes, the dreamlike, the hazy and the half asleep. Olsen reduces big emotions into a visual projection, the one happening around you when everything is happening. They are meant to symbolize the everyday moments, what happens in your periphery, however regular the scene. How some details loom bigger than others. How mythology is told. 

Elizabeth Schweizer is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. Her interdisciplinary practice moves between drawing and textile techniques such as weaving and knitting; investigating the relationship between fine art and craft, performance and utility, and two and three dimensions. Elizabeth’s work is both a practice in self-awareness and an exploration of color and material, engaging a dialogue through humor and personal narrative.

Maggie G. Moran is a Brooklyn based painter who focuses on the continuation of line and patterns in space, translated onto a two-dimensional surface. Moran describes herself as an intuitive painter of invisible forces and vibrations that, in their repetition, dictate our individual reality. Her work spans across both abstract and figurative genres. For Moran, painting is about trusting the process itself; a specific emotion or a color chord can serve as a starting point that she then allows to develop into a composition naturally. Moran works with layers of transparent oils, though occasionally she experiments with materials like tape, wax, or epoxy. Her paintings demonstrate that she has a keen eye for color and composition, and also handles line masterfully. She enjoys the fact that each viewer sees something different in her work. The artist believes that paintings are akin to clouds that are always transforming into new shapes. Moran has dedicated her career to art. She studied Studio Art at Lehigh University and has worked as a Curator, Art Consultant, Gallery Director and now works at Christie’s Auction House.

Aaron Hughes was born in Texas near the border of Mexico. Aaron moved to New York City at the age of 19 to attend the School of Visual Arts. He currently lives in Greenpoint Brooklyn where he paints and makes animated films. 

Michael Peters was born in Nova Scotia, Canada and received his BFA at NSCAD University.

6ft Ap’art

6ft Ap’art Gallery is a Brooklyn pop-up apartment gallery supporting emerging artists.