Main Space
Round Peg, Square Hole: 
Natalie Beall & Scott Vander Veen
Curated by Clare Britt and Leeza Meksin
October 26 through December 15, 2024

Opening Reception: 
Saturday, October 26th, 6-8 PM

Closing Reception:
Sunday Dec 15th, 4-6 pm

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Round Peg, Square Hole, a two person show featuring works by Natalie Beall and Scott Vander Veen in the main gallery, curated by OyG co-directors, the artists Clare Britt and Leeza Meksin.  The exhibition will be on view October 26 through December 15, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, October 26, 6-8 PM.

Round Peg, Square Hole brings together the works of two Upstate New York artists: Natalie Beall and Scott Vander Veen, whose works form an exquisite conversation about utility, performance, gender and inventiveness, bringing to mind the philosophical ideas about the value and the queering of “use”, explored by the British-Australian theorist Sara Ahmed.

Natalie Beall creates wall hanging objects which are both paintings and sculptures that investigate functionality, domesticity and fantasy. She also creates paper collages that are precise and symmetrical, incorporating attributes of usefulness such as grids, hooks and holes. Together they reference a world of seemingly utilitarian objects that are unable or unwilling to perform as intended, and instead engage in a delicate and playful masquerade. Through transforming source imagery associated with the domestic while humorously reconfiguring it, Beall embraces a lineage of traditionally feminine and often overlooked artifacts that hold a psychic and emotional charge.

Scott Vander Veen’s multidisciplinary practice utilizes a wide array of materials such as wood, paper, clothing, latex, glue, grommets, plaster, rubber drain plugs, misappropriated text, zippers, and found photographs. For this show, the artist presents a series of screen-like, free-standing forms that eschew the conventional divide between decorative and useful. These materially omnivorous objects challenge our preconceived notions of how a painting or a sculpture might behave, suggesting that multivalence is not merely possible, but essential. Like Beall, Vander Veen is preoccupied with questions of utility in art, exploring how form directs function and how queering that function is an act of resistance and pleasure.

BIOS
Natalie Beall (b. 1981, Atlanta, GA) invents new forms containing traces of functionality and fantasy. She earned her BFA from the University of Georgia and her MFA from Columbia University. Her most recent solo exhibition, Pastimes, took place in 2023 at Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York. Beall has participated in exhibitions at Fridman Gallery, Good Naked Gallery, Standard Space, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, and the Wassaic Project, among other venues. Residencies include the Women’s Studio Workshop, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Lighthouse Works, the Cooper Union, and the Lower East Side Printshop. Beall is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts and a 2023 NYSCA Individual Artist Commission Awardee. She lives and works in Salt Point, New York.

Scott Vander Veen is an artist whose work spans the disciplines of painting and sculpture. He received a BFA from Bard College and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. He has also spent time at Penland School of Craft as a Core Fellow, and at Ox-Bow School of Art as a Leroy-Neiman Fellow. His work was most recently shown at Stowaway in Los Angeles and has also been exhibited at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, the RISD Museum, Ortega Y Gasset, Andrew Reed Gallery, New York Studio School, Queens University Gallery, Finlandia University Gallery, and the Penland Gallery, among others. He lives and works in the Hudson Valley of New York. 

Clare Britt joined OyG Projects in 2013 as a founding co-director. She curated the first solo exhibition of photographic work with Chicago artist Kelly Kaczynski Yes; Or As If. She co curated the group exhibition Code Switch with co-director Lauren Whearty, curated the group show Shadow of the Gradient, and curated the exhibition entitled Apparitions with artist Alicia Smith, co curated Swallowed Into the Soft Underbelly with Tiffany Smith and artists Kat Ryals and Kate Stone, curated Time Isn't After Us with artist Shelley Smith, and Stillness is The Move by Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson. Clare has been instrumental in creating virtual content for the gallery including starting the YouTube Channel and creating content for the virtual space.  She spearheaded Rendezvous, an interactive virtual experience that serves as a platform for creative exchange between artists with co-director Tiffany Smith. Clare started interviewing artists in the Flat File Program in a casual studio visit on Friday’s on OyG’s Instagram Live channel. Clare is a freelance photographer and lives in Chicago, IL and works all over the country creating art and telling visual stories of the people she encounters along the way. 

Leeza Meksin is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, public art and multiples. Her work investigates parallels between conventions of painting, architecture and our bodies. Meksin has created site-specific installations for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, CLEA RSKY, NYC, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, National Academy of Design, NYC, The Uptown Triennial at The Lenfest Center for the Arts, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, The Kitchen, NYC, BRIC Media Arts, Regina Rex and Brandeis University. In 2015 Meksin received the emerging artist grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and in 2021 she was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA artist fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work. In 2019 Meksin was the artist in residence at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. Her work has been featured in Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and The Village Voice. In 2022, Turret Tops and Before, a book featuring 15 years of her artistic practice, was published by Space Sisters Press. In 2013 Meksin co-founded Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery that she continues to co-direct. Meksin’s curatorial projects have been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail and Two Coats of Paint. Meksin joined the faculty at Cornell University where she is currently the Director of the MFA program in Creative Visual Arts.