"About four years ago I followed an emailed invitation to an art gallery in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, not entirely expecting to find curious, provocative, contemporary work in that neighborhood, but I did. Now I return regularly to find that art again and again at FiveMyles gallery.
I may not have otherwise come to know Heather Holden, Shervone Neckles, Deborah Singletary, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Francks Deceus and Roya Amigh. I received that solicitation at a time when I was just starting out as a staff writer for Hyperallergic, learning the contours of the New York City art scene. I was drawn to FiveMyles — the oldest still-running gallery in Crown Heights — by images of an exhibition of drawings by Amigh, “In my sleep I migrate back,” in 2017. I witnessed combinations of glued sheets of lace, dried flowers, cardboard, and translucent, handmade paper interspersed with pieces of thread glued onto these substrates to form words and human figures. It was a revelation to see these materials that might make up a teenager’s keepsake journal placed in intuitive combinations that told stories which were fragmentary and intimate, yet also evocative of the history of the artist’s Persian ancestors. It is not an accident that this type of work is shown here."
