Grenadine

Grenadine: Everyday Cupidity

August 20, 2023.

This show is an ode to the things that make my mouth water and my heart skip a beat. The otherwise mundane moments and objects; at lip-smacking, full saturation.

The makers in this show share an infatuation with the memories, stories, and emotions that our household things and everyday environments hold. And so, these objects are made with an adoration beyond love — deep red, thick like syrup.

Designed and Curated by Olivia Crosby In Collaboration with and Hosted by Enya Hennings in her Crown Heights Apartment.

Furniture & Ceramics by Olivia Crosby
Clothing Line Installation by Enya Hennings

Additional Contributions by:
Suzie Maez
Mel Moreland
Liv Ryan
Layal Srouji
Anna Laura Sullivan

Artist Bios:

OLIVIA CROSBY is a designer/maker based in Brooklyn NY with a background in sculpture and graphic design. After 3 years designing exhibits and museums, and a lifetime of messy hands, her work is focused on creating caring spaces for meaningful conversation. 
Playing ‘show and tell’ is still her favorite exercise to connect people. When creating spaces, systems, and objects she is curious about how our physical world holds our stories, memories, and emotions. She is infatuated with chairs, the people who sit on them, and the way we care for the people we share our lives with. This project is a love letter, inspired by all these incredible creative women and her heart is absolutely full as a result. Thank you so much for being here.

ENYA HENNINGS is the founder of Armscye, a secondhand store that aims to reorient you with the value of your clothing. During her time working at Ralph Lauren and Thom Browne, Enya has recognized the fashion industry’s reliance on manufacturing desire. Her work opposes fashion’s investment in newness for newness’s sake.
Her personal work is centered around examining the shifting dynamics in our relationship with clothing. By highlighting the stories behind secondhand and found garments, Enya’s work explores the role of a wardrobe as a conduit for meaning.

SUZIE MAEZ is a photographer who uses a unique lens to explore the peculiarities of the world around us, and perhaps even more distinctively, the people who make it up. She is drawn to life’s silly, unspoken moments, and with her camera as the conduit, she highlights them - Suzie makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar again. 
In that sense, she invites us into her idiosyncratic vision of the world and gives her viewers a humorous catharsis. Suzie not only explores the subjects she carefully chooses to capture but also the medium itself, which is reflected in her fascination with distortion. She challenges the bounds of typical portrait photography, and her singular profile presents a culmination of her endless interest in life’s adventures (quotidian and otherwise). 

ANNA-LAURA SULLIVAN is an artist who uses watercolors to commune with the mystery and paint the invisible. Her mission, both through art and in life, is to provide nourishing, encouraging, and whimsical support on our journeys back to self. By using nostalgic color palettes and hand-painted creatures, she hopes to offer a lovely vessel for messages of self-love and divine remembering. Anna-Laura’s drawings are jam jars full of forgotten moments and mundane experiences. By taking time to capture them, she reveals their true magical nature. Creating art for Anna-Laura is a source of great joy, meditation, and celebration of life and love, every time those two intertwine. Thank you for participating in the great unfolding with her.

MEL MORELAND is a painter with a background in fashion design. Her work focuses on examining our relationships with others as well as the relationship with ourselves, the routines we participate in, and how they change over time. Painting Her Nails looks at the idea of self care and how we are constantly working on ourselves, if only by going through the motions of a tradition.

LAYAL SROUJI is a Palestinian artist and designer whose practice aims to find futures within archives. Her practice aligns with an emerging critical attitude towards public information, one which has united Palestinians in skepticism. As the task of preserving Palestinian history was taken over by settler-colonial structures, information in archives became elastic - perpetually vulnerable to the will of the authority. The portrayal of Palestinians as viewed through public information was violent, and as an act of resistance, alternative archives and generational knowledge became the standard for truth.
These histories are instead abundant in the un-serious, petty, and often scandalous - which, as humans, we are far more tempted by. In Srouji’s practice, the focus on familial history has been an entry point for an exploration of how daily note-taking and planning is far more informative than what is curated. Most recently, her work has surrounded calendars as a form of asserting one’s daily presence, as well as a method of visualizing the future.

LIV RYAN is Brooklyn Born and based artist whose work explores the boundaries between mediums. With a primary focus in clothing design, Liv's knowledge of art, architecture and cooking has played a major role in the investigation of sculptural shapes, structure and subtle texture. Liv produces locally in Brooklyn, NY using sustainable, eco friendly fabrics and dyes.