Foundations 2025
Sasha Baskin, Kelly Dzioba, Jing Huang, Colin Pezzano, Tara Thacker
July 14 - August 8, 2025
Gravers Lane Gallery is proud to announce its participation in Artsy’s Foundations Art Fair 2025, a curated digital showcase dedicated to championing emerging artists. Running from July 14 to August 8, 2025, this prestigious event highlights forward-thinking galleries committed to shaping the future of contemporary art.
For this year’s Foundations Fair, Gravers Lane Gallery will present five exceptional artists whose innovative practices embody the gallery’s commitment to material integrity, narrative depth, and cross-disciplinary excellence. The selected artists—Jing Huang, Tara Thacker, Colin Pezzano, Kelly Dzioba, and Sasha Baskin—represent the next wave of Contemporary Craft, exploring timeless techniques alongside unconventional materials to investigate identity, memory, process, and cultural meaning. Explore ceramic landscapes and beaded formalism, each work embodying the power of the handmade in a rapidly changing world.
From ceramic installations that evoke the layered ambiguity of migration (Huang), to hand-built woodwork that visualizes the passage of time and personal history (Pezzano), to beadwork that dazzles with color, camp, and critique (Dzioba), these artists offer a visceral experience of craft reimagined. Baskin’s layered digital works reinterpret reality television as contemporary mythmaking, while Thacker’s feather-inspired ceramics blur boundaries between material, memory, and transformation.
“Each of these artists brings a unique perspective and mastery of material that aligns with our mission to support deeply intentional, process-based practices,” says Chloe Le Pichon, Director of Gravers Lane Gallery. “This presentation at Foundations celebrates the future of craft and the stories we shape through it.”
Sasha Baskin
About the Artist
Sasha Baskin uses traditional weaving and lacemaking processes in combination with source imagery from reality television to consider how shows like “The Bachelor” and “Love is Blind” function as a modern mythological system and the creation of new gods and goddesses. Trained in classical drawing, Baskin received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2014. Transitioning to craft and studying weaving, natural dyes, and lacemaking processes, she received her Master of Fine Arts in Craft and Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2018.
Her exhibition record includes The Baltimore Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, Blue Spiral 1 Gallery in Asheville, NC, and the Visual Arts Center in Austin, TX. Baskin was a 2018-2019 Artist in Residence at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and a 2020 and 2022 Penland Winter Resident. Her teaching record includes undergraduate coursework at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Johns Hopkins University, Stevenson University, and Virginia Commonwealth University as well as workshops at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, John C Campbell Folk School, and Penland School of Craft. Baskin currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland.
Artist Statement
When I watch reality television I see a mythological tableau of cocktail dresses and hair extensions. What is reality television but another attempt to represent human interaction? To study beauty, love, drama, and competition: to entertain and distract through drama? Each season is the Iliad and the Odyssey in high heels and hair extensions.
We do this over and over again. We tell the same stories in new ways. My work examines this repetitive structure, this drive to create repetitive mythologies and simulated versions of reality.
I pull screenshots from reality television dating shows “The Bachelor”and “Love is Blind” and take reference from renaissance mythological paintings. This work involves deep research into pop culture and an examination of reality tv like a classical text. I weave screenshots like chapters in an Hero’s Journey and overlay digital patterns and lace grids to create veiled goddesses out of reality television starlets.
Kelly Dzioba
About The Artist
Kelly Dzioba, a Connecticut based textile artist, received her BFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia in Craft & Material Studies. A former Resident Artist at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, she is the recipient of the Peters Valley School of Craft Artist Fellowship, the Lenore Tawney Scholarship, and the William F. Daley Fellowship for study at Haystack Mountain School of Craft. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad at The Textile Center in Minneapolis, MN, The Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY, High Tide Project Space in Philadelphia, PA, the Seoul Art Center Hangaram Design Museum in Seoul, South Korea, and Gallery Gao Shan in Helsinki, Finland.
Artist Statement
My work is an investigation of textiles as a form of process art. Applying universal elements of textile methods, I make recursive objects based on an accumulating gesture or connection. Similar to the act of weaving, patterns and structure are dictated by the rules of the process. Through the guiding principles of the grid I am able to find common motifs and access familiar aspects of material culture: gem cuts, athletic stripes, studded collars, and patchwork quilts. I converse in the visual languages of minimalism, geometric abstraction, textile tradition and kitsch handicraft as a means of taunting the hierarchy of art and craft.
My current body of work is the result of haptic discovery and material learning, taking a single gesture- twisting strands of party bead necklaces together until they snap into a tension-held connection- and upon that action building an extensive vocabulary of processes. Working with party beads allows me to bring camp and visual decadence to formalism while exploring themes of value, taste, &
consumption. At the root of this work is the need to find comfort and self-soothing in the obsessive nature of making and to find sensory stimulation in the enticing luster of these woven objects.
Jing Huang
About The Artist
Born and raised in Guilin, China, Jing Huang is a ceramic artist currently living and working in Charlotte, North Carolina. She received degrees from Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute in China (BA, Ceramic Art, 2012), Sheridan College in Canada (Diploma, Crafts and Design - Ceramics, 2015), and Alfred University in the US (MFA, Ceramic Art, 2020).
Jing has lectured, curated exhibitions, conducted workshops and exhibited extensively throughout the US, Canada, China and the UK. The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), and Ceramics Monthly Magazine featured Jing as an Emerging Artist in 2023. Jing’s work is included in private and public collections including the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), Alfred Ceramic Art Museum (Alfred, US), Yingge Ceramics Museum (Taipei, Taiwan), Durham University Oriental Museum (Durham, UK), and Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections Museum (Manchester, UK).
Artist Statement
If the distance between China and North America is 7723 km, then what is the distance between the previous me and the current me? If there are 12 hours between home and here, what time is it now? When a new life meets an old one, that moment draws me close. Tasting newness and oldness at the same time, I become the distance and difference; I am there, here, then, now. In my recent work, I explore nature, identity, sense of place, and cultural displacement. Comparing and utilizing the elements and values from the East and the West, I trace my past, find my position. Living and moving among cultures, histories, languages, and assumptions always brings more – a question or an answer? My work is comprised of multiple layers of ceramic materials and possibilities, suspended and fired on stilts, flowing down and pooling naturally in response to the topography and gravity. I hand-build my sculptures part by part and assemble them together to achieve an unknown structure and landscape. During this experimental and highly unpredictable process of making, firing, and installing, the position of my work has shifted and changed, becoming a new work of art. The scene of my work now looks ambiguous - it is neither the picture of my hometown nor the view of here. It is something extracted from a recollection of experience and imagination; it comes from a person who appreciates the past and embraces the possibilities of the future.
Colin Pezzano
About The Artist
Colin Pezzano, born in 1992, is a woodworker and printmaker based in South Philadelphia. His practice combines digital and hand processes to infuse humor, pathos, and memory into his chosen materials. With over a decade of working experience in academia and fabrication, Colin blends conceptual thinking with technical experimentation.
During his career Pezzano has participated in group shows, juried exhibitions, and attended residencies in the USA and Sweden. He maintains his practice in his basement studio.
Artist Statement
My practice is defined by my history and the history of my craft. I find inspiration in the significance of objects we surround ourselves with and the spaces they occupy. I build objects based on the narrative of memory, focused on the introspective. The objects accumulate and become spaces and sets. These scenes, communicate between the past, present, and future. They are influenced by the structure of graphic novels. Specifically “blood in the gutter”, or the connections between the panels that enable the viewer to participate in the story and dictate the pacing of events.
I find the process of creation to be like a meditation – as in becoming immersed in the experience and resolving what each work communicates. I think of material as memory and process as the passage of time. By repeating the processes, we continue a dialogue our ancestors have started. By relying on woodworking processes, I connect my actions and memories to the traditions of my predecessors.
Craft is ritual and material is memory.
Tara Thacker
About The Artist
Tara Thacker is a visual artist specializing in ceramic sculptures and large-scale wall pieces composed of thousands of individual components. Her work emphasizes fluidity and softness, challenging conventional perceptions of the material.
Thacker pursued her passion for ceramics at Virginia Commonwealth University, earning her BFA and later her MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle. While maintaining an active studio practice, she also worked in arts administration as Visual Arts Director of the Vermont Studio Center as well as holding positions in academia including Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Northern Vermont University and currently as a guest faculty member in the graduate ceramics program at UMass Dartmouth.
She resides and creates in central North Carolina.
Artist Statement
At the heart of my artwork is a love of materiality and fascination with transformation. I am absorbed in a labor-intensive process. Each part is unique, serving as an architectural component, combined in various ways to discover their visual behavior. I aim to transcend initial forms and create unforeseen surfaces, drawing connections between observation and memory.
Clay is my chosen material for its tactile beauty, malleability, and technical challenges. My intention is to make works that do not immediately appear to be ceramic, often seeming soft or fabric-like instead and also eliciting a desire to touch.
Inspired by the avian world, my current work explores repetition of form and material transformation, creating layered, tactile works referencing bird wing structures and specifically flight feathers (Remiges and Retrices).
