night tending

The Yeh Art Gallery is pleased to present night tending, a group exhibition featuring artists GM Keaton, Ginevra Shay and Casey Tang. The artists brought together in night tending are subtle observers of bodies and ecologies. As translators and mediators, they give agency to environmental entities and disrupt anthropocentric worldviews. Keaton, Shay, and Tang illuminate the innumerable points at which we and our environments fold into one another—forgoing ego and cultivating a rich ecological-bodily consciousness which expands beyond any restrictive notion of self. Through works in video, neon, photography, plant and animal fibers, and clay, they encourage us to envision new ways of inhabiting our world and our bodies. Night tending is organized by artist and St. John’s University adjunct professor Ryan Syrell.


night tending

Obscuring distance and scale 
Garden and gardener
Hear the quiet lessons of things with nocturnal clarity
Caring in and for the night

Mourner-Night, instructor of loss
Submerses us in starry-dark sparkling interiority
       Invitation to expansiveness outside language
       puddling inscriptions

the plain of night
interwoven and indefinite
awash in plant-mineral-body
Points plainly offering new words

Night-hidden correspondence saps daylit logic
Constellations, unfixed as spores
—dewey and seeding and transitory


Artist’s Bio
GM Keaton is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Richmond, VA. Their practice weaves together queer and trans sentiment, ecology, animal, and material studies to explore the formative effects we have on one another. They earned their MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University, and their BFA at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. They have shown in galleries throughout the midwest and east coast including High Tide and Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Neon Heater in Findlay OH, and David Peterson Gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You will often see them with their companion dog, Laszlo.

Ginevra Shay's work engages a need for expansiveness in image engagement. Their practice holds modalities in imaginative immaterial image making, non-representational portraiture, photo-sculpture, and participatory conceptual work—images at the interse(x)tion of somatics, the experiential, and the present—to propose new means of seeing images and with images.

Ginevra has received a National Endowment for the Arts Our Town Award for Baltimore Living Archives and a Creativity Award from the State of Maryland for Phone Call presented by the Baltimore Museum of Art. Ginevra has shown their work in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally including: Houston Center for Photography, Center for Photography at Woodstock, NO/ Gallery, and LVL3 Gallery.  Ginevra has lectured and participated in panels at the Queens Museum, the Oakland Museum, the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the College Art Association's National Conference, and the Society For Photographic Education's National Conference.

Casey Tang is focused on various models of dynamic relationships and systems thinking paradigms and their utilization to perceive and understand phenomena operating at micro scales and how different ways of relationality and their effects diffuse through networks to structure the embedding organizing environment or the macro scale and vice versa. He is particularly interested in perception concerning planetary scale social-technical-ecological systems. Casey graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology. He is a recipient of the 2021 Digital Diasporas Research Fellowship at Chronus Art Center, 2018 Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu Fellowship, 2015 Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists, and 2013 New Vision Award from He Xiangning Art Museum.

He has exhibited in the US, Europe, and Asia. Including “Catalyst” at the Queens Museum, “CAFAM Future: Observer-Creator” at the Central Academy of Fine Art Museum, Beijing,and “LANDMARK” at Socrates Sculpture Park, a solo exhibition at Charpa Gallery, Spain, book project, First Sounds with Booklyn. His work is in various permanent institutional collections, including Stanford University, the Inelcom foundation, and the He Xiangning museum.

Ryan Syrell is a New York-based painter and educator who also writes about art. He received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2017, and his BFA from SUNY Purchase in 2006. Ryan teaches visual arts at St. John’s University.