Tigercrow Collective: Cat Gunn, Kirstyn Hom, Heige Kim, Jun!yi Min, and Naomi Nadreau

July 13 - August 17

Opening reception:
5 - 8 p.m. Saturday, July 13.

Gallery hours:
11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday

From the gallery:
BEST PRACTICE is excited to announce the opening of and Elsewhere, the first exhibition of the work of Tigercrow Collective (Cat Gunn, Kirstyn Hom, Heige Kim, Jun!yi Min, and naomi nadreau). While the images, videos and sculptures included in this presentation all originate from each artist’s studio, the margins between these works blur opening up occasions for collaboration in the gallery.

About the exhibition:
'and Elsewhere' is Tigercrow Collective’s first exhibition together, which ruminates on experiences of longing for home. The word home is not particular, but home is always with elsewhere. Simultaneously specific and ambiguous, “elsewhere” invokes the notion of a place anywhere and here, recalling displacement, precarity, and Asian diasporic memory. Utilizing singular and collaborative artworks, the collective seeks places of refuge through objects that hold memory, materials that preserve touch, and references to ever-changing landscapes. The installation begins to connect these points of belonging to trace a transitory narrative together.  

About the collective:
Tigercrow Collective is a group of artists who hold space to meditate on experiences around collective memory, materiality, relationships to landscape, and mapping of the self. Formed in 2023, after meeting in the Visual Arts MFA program at UC San Diego, the group emerged in response to the rise of anti-asian sentiment and violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. While navigating grief and recovering connections to their roots, they experienced limiting institutional support. In turn, the group started gathering to process these issues through storytelling, collaborative writing exercises, and conversation.Tigercrow Collective strives to not only preserve the varying entry points to how they identify, but also learn from each other’s art practice to explore new ways of existing.  

About the artists:
Cat Gunn (b. 1993) is an interdisciplinary artist from Baltimore. Using the altar as a site of investigation, Gunn stages arrangements of ceramic sculptures, photographs, plants, found objects, and ancestral offerings to explore untold familial histories, diasporic memory, and queerness. Gunn received their MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego. They received their MA in Professional Studies (Art History Concentration) and BFA in Painting from Towson University. Gunn has been in recent group exhibitions at Vielmetter in Los Angeles and ICA in San Diego among others. Gunn co-founded Harvest & Gather, an experimental, nomadic curatorial project run in San Diego.  www.catgunn.com

Kirstyn Hom is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersection of language and textiles. She utilizes long durational craft methods alongside sculpture and installation to expose moments of layering and erasure in the building of a text. Hom’s practice works through memory and loss, and sees textiles as a way to locate what cannot be easily translated in words yet acutely felt in the body. She received her BA in Art Practice at UC Berkeley, and MFA in Visual Arts at UC San Diego. Hom’s work has been included in exhibitions at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego; Open Windows Cooperative, San Francisco, CA; and the Betsy Lueke Creative Arts Center, Burbank, CA, among others.  www.kirstynhom.com

Heige Kim (b. 1969, Seoul, Korea) is a transdisciplinary artist working with videos and installations to investigate location-specific environmental and ecological issues. She critically explores landscapes regarded as toxic and reflects on how our human-centric relationship with our environment produces relational imbalance. After receiving her MFA from UC San Diego in 2023, Kim returned to South Korea on a Fulbright grant for ten months to learn about environmentally sustainable rice cultivation methods that support multi-species co-existence and Korean native rice varieties. Her collaborative installation with two geochemists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was featured at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego. Her recent works were included in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, Vielmetter, Los Angeles, the Boiler in New York, and Two Rooms in San Diego.  www.heejinkim.work

Jun!yi Min (she/her) is a performance artist, video artist, curator, and educator from Singapore living and working in San Diego. She recently graduated from her MFA in Visual Arts at University of California San Diego. Jun!’s works ruminate on death, rebirth and belonging through the endurance practice, a practice of waiting for a different future. She received a grant to perform at the Qualcomm Institute in 2022, and the Russel Grant from UCSD in 2024. Recently in 2023, Jun! performed and curated Queering the Table at Mingei Museum and Material Intimacies at Bread and Salt at San Diego. She is currently a fellow at the 69th Flaherty Film Seminar: To Commune.  

Naomi Nadreau is a sculptor working with discarded man-made materials, ceramics, metals and natural materials to entangle our reality through methods of Science Fiction of estrangement and acupuncture meridians. They connect the slippage of reality through material and fiction, meridians and the elements, and how their bi-racial identity is an experience of being in a constant state of in-between and nowhere. They recently graduated with an MFA in Visual Arts from University of California, San Diego. They have participated in exhibitions at Espacio Negativo Gallery, Guadalajara; Pangee Gallery, Montreal; Phase Gallery, Los Angeles. They have co-curated at Vielmetter Greenhouse Gallery and curated APT5 in Los Angeles. www.naomisquared.com 

Related links:
Best Practice: website | Instagram