Exhibition - Eight: This is How to Come Home

EIGHT is a group exhibition highlighting the collected artworks of Vox Populi’s New Member cohort: Ali Ruffner, Cayla Lockwood, Chenxi Shao, Cynthia Zhou, Eugenio Salas, Evan Greensweig, Gregory Donell Parker, and Victor Vieira-Branco. Since joining Vox in 2023, the new members have spent the last six months in a collective homecoming. Transforming four spaces via multimodal installation, they gently carve their names into the doorposts, open all the windows, hiding their talismans and loose change safely beneath the floorboards of the gallery. In gratitude, the group presents EIGHT: This Is How To Come Home.

ARTIST BIOS
ALI RUFRANO-RUFFNER (she/they), is a visual artist, sculptor, muralist, fabricator, social activist, educator, and troublemaker living and working between Brooklyn and Philly. Ali’s sculptural work combines her real urban environment with imaginary ones to help us radically envision worlds where we can really care about each other. Ali is influenced by graffiti, glamor, hip-hop, funk, techno, magic, the internet, and her friends – fusing these elements with found, fabricated, and handmade objects. Ali is continuously interested in highlighting and working within overlooked areas and materials in order to celebrate marginalized people, thoughts, and spaces.

This year, Rufrano-Ruffner is collaborating with the Metro Transit Authority to build Concrete Jungle (NY,NY), an installation that will creatively reimagine a dilapidated retail site at The 81st Street–Museum of Natural History station in one of the most trafficked subway stations in NYC. In 2023, Rufrano-Ruffner worked as a mural artist on The Climate Justice in Lenapehoking mural (Philadelphia), and fabricated sculptures for the internationally recognized project Otherworld (Philadelphia – USA Today’s ‘10 Best New Attractions’). In 2022, she received a RADical ImPAct Grant to develop long-term engagement with students to build A Monument to Pittsburgh Youth (Pittsburgh).

Ali currently lives and works between Philadelphia and Brooklyn with The Brooklyn Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Mural Arts Philadelphia, and Vox Populi. She holds a M.Ed in Art Education + Community Arts Practices from Tyler School of Art + Architecture, a BFA in Sculpture, and a BA in Gender Studies from the University of Delaware. She continues to work towards her goals of creating equitable public art that actualizes the imaginary practices within all of us.

CAYLA LOCKWOOD is an artist and graphic designer based in Philadelphia. She creates fake companies as an art practice to investigate how capitalism is embedded in our lives and creates absurd expectations and behaviors. These experiential works incorporate installation, graphic design, printmaking, video, and performance. From 2017–2021 she was an artist in residence at Flux Factory in New York City, where she worked on a number of collaborative projects in NYC, Denmark, Finland and Ukraine. She is currently an artist member at Vox Populi, a graphic designer for the University of Pennsylvania and organizes workshops in printmaking and paper arts.

CHENXI SHAO (she/ they) is a Chinese artist and ecological researcher who resides in Philadelphia. Her artistic expression delve into exploring issues of dynamic identity, social equality and environment? bridging the realms of sculpture and animation. Chenxi holds degrees in Plant Genetics and Breeding (B.A.), Interface Ecology (Ph.D.), and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. They receives the Monument Lab MFA Fellowship at the Center for Public Art and Space in 2023.

Shao’s artistic practice revolved around marginalization, vulnerability and ecology through the lens of dynamic identity. They explore the tension between Chinese collectivism, ethical and social herarchy, modernity, and individual humanism and Taoist view. Their contributions have been globally showcased at various venues including Philadelphia City Hall, RBSA Gallery, the Fringe Arts, Flux Factory, Galleries at Moore, Vox Populi Gallery, Yavapai College Art Gallery, Worthless Studios, Atelier, Galleries at Delaware County Community College, and Jianshexiang Gallery.

CYNTHIA ZHOU is an artist, designer, and poet based in Philadelphia. Working primarily in oil paint and printmaking, her work is concerned with myth-making and the mind-body relationship. She repurposes familiar symmetrical signs—inkblot tests, brain scans, and childhood board games—as a vocabulary to map out the psychological landscape. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, New Museum Los Gatos, Euphrat Museum in Cupertino, Parsons School of Design in New York City, and more. In 2022, Zhou held a solo exhibition in the Philomathean Gallery in Philadelphia. She is a National YoungArts Foundation Winner, an Adobe Creative Jam Finalist, and was recognized at the White House as a 2019 Presidential Scholar in the Arts. She holds a BA in Design from the University of Pennsylvania and received the Best in Show Award for the 2023 Design Thesis Exhibition.

EUGENIO SALAS is a self-taught Mexican-Canadian artist based in Lënapehòkink, the ancestral homelands of the Lenape peoples, also known as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Disrupting social roles and dynamics and looking to explore the symbolic spaces that unfold, Salas’ practice involves collaborative process-based projects. Salas carries out participatory performative actions employing media, print and cooking.

His previous projects include baking and animating hundreds of doughnuts in a stop-motion animation to work through his experience in the fast-food industry (Snack Pack), building aTunnel inside a gallery with a non-status construction worker and the exhibition curator, creating a parcel delivery system to exchange personal objects between Brazilians in Toronto and their families back home (YYZGRU Express), and baking a 22-foot long cake (The Supercake) in collaboration with immigrant women with whom he worked at a cake factory.

EVAN/ EVE GREENSWEIG (They/Them) is a Jewish self taught abstract painter, and designer from the Philadelphia area working primarily with oil and wax on wood or canvas. Their practice revolves around the murky mire that is abstraction and Philosophy. Evan’s work encompasses motion, textural depth, and esoteric symbolism to convey a momentary glimpse of beauty within the tragedy and magnificence of forest fire, nurturing ash within blanketing smoke, yawning fissures from which smoke bellows, mysticism, strange encounters, and solemnity. They are currently a member at Vox Populi In Philadelphia and collect porcelain and ceramic dog figurines. In July of 2019 they were struck by lightning. Additionally they are a member of an esoteric secret society of Philadelphia painters, have a degree in Philosophy from Temple University, and have a thriving studio practice out of the Paper Mill in Kensington.

GREGORY DONELL PARKER (he/him) is a poet and literary artist querying black optimism, preservation, afroqueer limerence, our godly abandonment, ritual gathering, and social language in the panoptic sense. He is currently based in Philadelphia, PA, bringing his poetry and prose into conversation with bookbinding, letterpress, printmaking, zine craft, video portraiture, sculpture, food, and detritus. He received his B.A. in Visual Anthropology from Temple University in 2021 and served as Technical director of Babel Poetry Collective. His work has been published in APIARY, Cosmonauts Ave, and Palette Poetry. He was a P(h)EW Micro Grant recipient + artist in residence at the Pearlstein Gallery, Center For Book Arts scholarship recipient, and is currently a member of Vox Populi. His artist tongue forms in the scholarship of his elders, technical masters of form and living.

VICTOR VIEIRA-BRANCO is a vibraphonist, improviser, and blue-collar composer-performer, based in Philadelphia, with much of his life spent in São Paulo, Brazil. He currently leads a trio called Bark Culture, as well as performing and contributing to other situations often. Interested in energy, abstraction, and memory.