CONCORD, MASS.- Lucy Lacoste Gallery is presenting Vibe Shift, July 16 – August 13, 2022, featuring five young ceramic artists on the rise: Chanakarn Semachai, Grace Tessein, Kristy Moreno, Isaac Scott and Sydnie Jimenez. Dealing with issues of identity; self expression as protest; the dismantling of patriarchal systems; life and death; and multiculturalism these artists are looking towards the future to build something totally new.

Chanakarn Semachai or Punch, is an artist from Thailand who focuses on identity and multiculturalism in her work. Punch is interested in creating color filters by layering colored plexiglass over clay. Her work has been shown internationally, including in Thailand, Taiwan, Germany, and the United States. Recently, she was awarded 2022 NCECA Emerging Artist and in the same year she earned the Emerging Artist Award through Ceramics Monthly. Punch received her MFA in ceramics from Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. She is currently a faculty member at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand, where she teaches full-time creative ceramics.

“We should embrace our differences and find ways to live with it. I would like to send a message through my art that encourages people to accept that everybody is unique and that is what makes people special as individuals.”

Grace Tessein writes that her current work is an “examination of the glimmer of life that remains after death. As I move through spaces, I look for traces, fragments, and what remains in order to understand what was once passing over the same ground, breathing the same air as I do.”

Grace received her MFA in ceramics from Louisiana State University and a BFA in Ceramics and Painting with a minor in Art History from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Grace is the 2022 Salad Days Artist at Watershed Studio in Maine.

Kristy Moreno has created expressly for this show a body of work that focuses on the imagined personas of radicalized future ancestors. The hand built ceramic forms are of fictional characters often resembling feminine personalities paused in space and time. As part of her practice, she examines the essence of these future communities using body languages and attitudes to further explore themes of rage, empathy, and curiosity. In 2020 she received her BFA in Studio Arts, with an emphasis in Ceramics from California State University. Kristy is currently am Artist in Residence at the Archie Bray in Montana.

“I’d like to imagine that these future ancestors survived by decolonizing their way out of patriarchal systems. They are no longer conditioned to believe that they have to live in someone else’s reality that is deemed worthy of living.

Isaac Scott is a ceramic artist and curator, who currently lives in Philadelphia, PA. He writes that his work is “rooted in observation. Reflecting, absorbing, and reinterpreting the world in which he lives.” Isaac received his MFA in Ceramic Art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in 2021. His ceramic work has been exhibited around the country including Design Miami Podium in 2020. His photographs of the 2020 Uprising in Philadelphia were featured in the June 22ndth, 2020 issue of the New Yorker. In August of 2020 Isaac completed his first mural alongside collaborators Gerald A. Brown and Roberto Lugo. The Stay Golden mural is located at 33rd and W Diamond St. in Philadelphia, PA.

“Exploring my neighborhood in North Philly, I began to capture the dilapidated buildings, graffiti, and decaying infrastructure. I found it to be both disturbing and beautiful. The feeling that, ‘there was once something thriving here but went terribly wrong,’ is one that has stayed with me since arriving in North Philly.”

Sydnie Jimenez centers much of her work around the representation of black/ brown youth and selfexpression as a form of protest, self-care, and power within community. Born in Orlando, FL (b. 1997) she spent most of her childhood in north Georgia from which she draws inspiration. Sydnie is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and is a recipient of the Windgate Fellowship (2020). Currently, she is doing a yearlong residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana. Sydnie will be having her second major show with Lucy Lacoste in March of 2023.

“With the rebellious and suspicious nature of my figures I want to show the ‘tough’ or ‘angry, mean, and bitchy’ demeanors in which especially black and brown femmes take on or are projected onto as a defense mechanism combatting an unwelcoming society.”