Exhibitions
SEVEN SURFACES
The Red Arrow Gallery / 919 Gallatin Ave. July 15, 2023 - August 26, 2023
Desmond Lewis, Jean Negai, Lauren Gregory, Margaret Thompson, Nereida Patricia, Paul Collins, Wansoo Kim
Surface can be defined as the outer layer of an object, but it can also be used to indicate something that may not be what is outwardly exhibited. The surfaces where we eat, lay and live, shape and specify the spaces we occupy.
Seven Surfaces is a survey of the formal gestures and concepts being created by seven artists. Their material surfaces include found objects, cozy quilts, luscious glass beads, carved wood, carefully molded ceramics, pointillism, and earth rubbed into canvas. Underneath lies narratives of social injustice, cultural divides, body politics and intimacy, spirituality, and meditation. Seven Surfaces explores the meaning of surface through multiple forms.
Jean Nagai is a first-generation Japanese American artist and has spent the last few years working between New Mexico and California. He received a BA from The Evergreen State College in 2004 and his work has been shown mostly along the West coast. By engaging in a meditative process by which the sum of many individual dots accumulate to form a larger synergic whole, Jean’s work both creates and explores a spiritual microcosm and macrocosm that shifts between the physical, digital, and political landscape.
Nerida Patricia is a visual artist and poet based in Brooklyn, NY. Patricia’s practice spans sculpture, painting, and performance. Her work draws from Peruvian and Caribbean symbolism, as well as autobiographical fragments to explore gender, race, and sexual politics. She is most known for her highly detailed relief sculptures which are collaged with concrete and glass dust to create multilayered images in bas-relief that chronicle the transformation of the human and collective body in the face of marginalization. These mythologies relate physically to the human body yet abstract it and politicize the space between allegory and reflection. Nerida has studied at The New School and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Her work as been exhibited in venues such as Green Family Art Foundation, Houston; Murmurs Gallery, Los Angeles; DUPLEX, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Eric Firestone Gallery, New York; Monique Meloche, Chicago; Annka Kultrys Gallery, London; Museum of the Moving Image, Queens; and The Knockdown Center, Queens, among others.
Image: Margaret Thompson, Petrachor, 2023, Oil, wax, galisteo earth, chimayo chili, raw pigment on canvas, 38" x 27 "
