Introducing
BARELY FAIR's
SPOTLIGHT
PROGRAM
BARELY FAIR is pleased to present SPOTLIGHT 2023 program, an extension of our on-going mission to bring awareness to Artist Run Project Spaces, emerging galleries, and the artists they work with.
The SPOTLIGHT program highlights individual spaces and the artists they bring to BARELY FAIR. The program updates this page with new spaces and artists regularly between now and the fair's Vernissage on April 14th. Follow us on instagram to be notified of program updates.
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BARELY FAIR is operated by Julius Caesar, an artist-run project space in Chicago. Established in 2008, the non-profit project space has an ever-evolving group of artists as co-directors. They are Josh Dihle, Tony Lewis, Roland Miller, and Kate Sierzputowski at present.
Kai Matsumiya, located in NYC's Lower East Side, operates with the belief that the contemporary art gallery has not caught up to the realities of art, with how art lives and breathes on its own time and terms. We extol experimentation for its own sake and encourage failure; for it is failure which promotes possibilities, opportunities, and a defense of dignity. The gallery represents a number of artists working in video, sculpture, photography, installation, and painting with vital conceptual foundations. The program celebrates artists who question even the most fundamental expectations that art or society has for you as a far more compelling emphasis than simply meeting them.
Elliott Jamal Robbins
Kai Matsumiya Gallery will present seven looped animated videos by Elliott Jamal Robbins. Each video is comprised of collaged materials or sumi ink drawings on paper enlivened through stop-motion techniques. Referencing early cinema and the advent of cartoon animation, Robbins employs an avatar figure cast in a constant state of observation. Loose, wet, immediate brushstrokes and the unframed edges of raw paper transfigure the maturing protagonist as he navigates symbolically and psychologically clashing events. Spread across three screens, viewers will be able to watch each work individually and juxtaposed. Says the artist:
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The central figure in my work takes his point of reference from an amalgam of types found in American visual culture. He retains a form that, at times echoes a stereotype, or minstrel by way of early tropes in cartoon imagery, though he is neither. His subjectivity is positioned at odds with his surroundings as well as negotiated against a viewer that might render him flattened, objectified, and overdetermined. In this way, ambiguity becomes a tool establishing a cognitive dissonance between what is seen and what is anticipated, allowing the subject to transition out of the realm of binaries into that of the self-referential, and metaphysical.
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Elliott Jamal Robbins (b. 1988) is a multi-media artist based near Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has held exhibitions at Kai Matsumiya (New York); Nagel Draxler (Germany); Weiss-Falk (Switzerland); Drawing Center (NY); Kunsthalle Kade (Amsterdam, Netherlands); Housing Gallery (NY); Phoenix Art Museum; Greene Naftali Gallery (NY); Flint Institute of the Arts; Martos Gallery (NY). In 2021, he received a Pollock-Krasner Grant and is the recipient of the Ecktenstein-Geigy award at Art Liste for excellence in the arts. He received his MFA from the University of Arizona (2017). His works have been reviewed in Art Forum, Hyperallergic, Contemporary Art Daily, and Time Out New York.
Foxy Production is a contemporary art gallery with a reputation for discovering and nurturing ground-breaking artists. Established in Brooklyn, New York, in 2003, the gallery is now located in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The gallery’s rigorous and risk-taking exhibition program comprises critically acclaimed solo exhibitions and specially curated group projects in a range of media.
Erin Calla Watson
For Barely Fair 2023, Chicago, Foxy Production presents a micro-installation by Erin Calla Watson comprising photographs and sculptures.
The installation furthers the artist’s ongoing interest in the emotional underpinnings of public images of private living zones. The anime character Hululu appears, in silhouette and in different poses, as if she had emerged from the scenes of a digitally rendered, monochromatic bedroom that surround her. Maintaining her two-dimensionality within a three-dimensional installation space, the character inhabits a liminal terrain imbued with alienation and desire.
Erin Calla Watson’s photography, sculpture and video channel a long tradition in the fields of visual art, literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, among others, where rooms are activated with a psycho-sexual charge, including the dark interiors of Dutch Golden Age paintings of licentious taverns; Virginia Woolf’s notion of a room being essential for a woman’s autonomy; and Walter Benjamin’s characterization of “the phantasmagoria of the interior,” the individual’s universe of illusion, their protection from the outside world. Benjamin’s description of the interior and its obverse, the harsh exterior world of work and conformity, has a direct line to the recent writings of Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai on how feelings are embedded in our personal aesthetics, and what the political consequences of this process are. Calla Watson highlights and disrupts this weaponizing of affect by appropriating private spaces shared on online manosphere platforms and pushing them through prisms of visual modification, including inserting popular cultural icons that are replete with sentiment, angst, and trauma: Bambi, for instance, is a central signifier of the destruction of childhood innocence when his mother is “murdered” by a hunter; Britney Spears represents a sensual ingenue trapped in a legal straitjacket instituted by her malevolent father; and the sinister Frank character from “Donnie Darko” embodies the disturbed mind of the film’s protagonist.
Calla Watson’s source images are often well-designed, if formulaic, contemporary rooms, perhaps ironically posted, although she has stated: “It’s equally as likely that the original image was posted sincerely…I chose the rooms for their ambiguity.” The space’s messiness and nebulosity, as well as the transformations and cultural interventions performed upon it by the artist, suggest we are witnessing a dreamscape where the repressed is expressed, or a screen where memories, reliable or unreliable, float across the surface. Not unlike Mike Kelley’s “Educational Complex,” his monochrome miniatures of every school he ever attended, Calla Watson’s works can be understood as architectural models, imbued with emotive psychic resonances that act as fissures in a social armature of convention and control.
Erin Calla Watson (Los Angeles, CA, 1993) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Calla Watson received a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Exhibitions include “Erin Calla Watson,” Foxy Production, New York; and In Lieu, Los Angeles, (both solo)(forthcoming 2023); “Ficciones,” Overduin & Co, Los Angeles; “Unto Dust,” Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris, France; “Video Store,” Foxy Production, New York (all 2023); “a somewhat thin line,” In Lieu, Los Angeles; “KYLE,” Larder, Los Angeles (both 2022); and “The Conspiracy of Art: Part II,” Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2019.)
56 Henry is a contemporary art gallery in New York's Chinatown. It is located at street level, and the gallery’s exhibitions are visible to the public twenty-four hours a day. The gallery opened a second location, 105 Henry in 2022.
Al Freeman
Al Freeman (b. 1981 in Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Floors at 56 Henry, NYC, in 2022, PAINTING at Carl Kostyal, London, in 2021, TOPS at Grice Bench, LA, in 2021, sweaty gray cotton tank top at 56 Henry, NYC, in 2020, Mössgron at Caryl Kostyal, London, in 2020, and Cubicle at 56 Henry, NYC, in 2020, Even More Comparisons at 56 Henry, NYC, in 2018, More Comparisons at 56 Henry, NYC, 2018, and Pillows at 56 Henry, NYC, from 2017-2018.
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Tif Sigfrids is a gallery based in Athens, Georgia. Founded in Los Angeles in 2013, the gallery represents artists based in New York, Los Angeles, and Europe. Alongside regular programming and participation in art fairs, the gallery has continually presented performances, be they musical, comedic, or otherwise.
Joe Sola
For Barely Fair, Tif Sigfrids is pleased to present a new group of paintings by Los Angeles based artist Joe Sola. The presentation comes after extensive collaboration with the artist including “Portraits: An Exhibition in Tif Sigfrids’ Ear” (2013), “A Painted Horse by Joe Sola (with Matthew Chambers, Sayre Gomez, Rudy K. Slobeck, and others” (2015), and “Watching TV With My Dealer” (2019), amongst others.
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Sola's diverse practice includes video work, painting, and performance.
In his video work Sola has jumped out of windows (Studio Visit, 2005), been run over by a team of high school football players from Ohio (Saint Henry Composition, 2001), and rode roller coasters with male porn stars (Riding with adult video performers, 2002). In performances he has had male fashion models make art (Male Fashion Models Make Conceptual Art, 2005-9) and talked about his drawings with female escorts, (Talking About My Drawings with Female Escorts, 2010) This will be his first exhibition comprised entirely of oil paintings.
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For Barely Fair, Sola has created nine new landscape paintings, ranging from 5/128 x 5/64” to 5/64 x 4/64 inches. Familiar California landscapes depicted in the work include Mount Baldy, visible on clear days from the artist's studio in Glassell Park. When looking at the swirling clouds and dotted night skies in Sola’s paintings, viewers are instantly transported to Southern California scene from which they stem.
Joe Sola was born in Chicago in 1966 and received his MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, and many other publications. His work has been included in the recent exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and is in the collections of the Hammer Museum and the. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His work has been included in public exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Orange County Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, and at 365 S. Mission Rd.
Harlesden High Street is a BIPOC run experimental space founded with the mission of facilitating access between experimental/outsider artists and the traditional gallery system, hosting only people of colour and giving a platform to those who lack access, bridging social and cultural gaps against the homogeny found in contemporary art. In addition to our exhibition programme, we host a cultural outreach programme with an aim to reach audiences in ungentrified neighbourhoods who might be less likely to engage with typical gallery programming.
Andre Morgan
Andre Morgan has a formal practice as a street sweeper in Central London. Through his route, he makes many observations about the world from the perspective of a tall, black, male country and western music fan. His works are humorous and poetic, poking fun at neoliberal society and contemporary life whilst turning the mirror on his audience in mediums that range from watercolour and felt pen painting to airbrushed canvases where ghostly figures interact with slick inner city neighbourhoods in London.
Andre Morgan (b. 1993) is a long time collaborator with Harlesden High Street gallery, producing short films, animations and video games with his unique gift of providing voice over and writing material. He never went to art school and is self taught. Recent exhibitions include Cities Entwined II, at Paradise Row in London, 2022, Juneteenth at Liste in basel, 2022, and Dub Inna Babylon at Brent Biennial in London, 2022. Morgan has an upcoming show, Yard Sale, at Harlesden High Street's London location.
Founded in 2021, Scherben is an exhibition space based in Berlin. Its international program specializes in contemporary fine art with an emphasis on connecting emerging and established artists.
Kea Bolenz
Kea Bolenz lives in Berlin. Her work had recently exhibited at Kunstverein Salzburg, at the project space Pina in Vienna, at Scherben and at Fonda in Leipzig. She also curated the exhibition "Baroque Topologies" at Kunstverein Leipzig.
The focus of Kea Bolenz’s work is usually the female body, often in hybrid and hermaphroditic form. In composite scenes, these bodies are heavily distorted and shown in moments that alternate between shame and eroticism. By confronting us with our own expectations towards her, Kea Bolenz investigates the connections between civilization, compulsion and passion. And as voluminous bodies unfold into thin lines in Bolenz's work, we become observers of images embedded in our subconscious.
Die Kette Moabit
Die Kette Moabit is in a twilight zone of physical and digital space, exploring the intersection of Art, Architecture, Music and Literature. A vitrine forms the transmitter between its inside and outside while its satellites pop up randomly in this universe. The name refers to "Die Gläserne Kette", a community created by Bruno Taut in 1919 and composed mainly of architects. The medium of mutual exchange was a correspondence/circular letter in which prominent figures such as Walter Gropius or Hans Scharoun participated under pseudonyms. In intellectual kinship with this group, Die Kette searches for utopian obscurities that do not distinguish between design, architecture, or art. These finds are brought together in an eclectic manner and presented to an audience sometimes in digital, sometimes in physical form.
Die Kette was founded in 2016 and since than exhibited among others at Tokyo Art & Crafts Objects Expo together with XYZ Collective, Winterfest‚ and Exhibition of Arts & Crafts' at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen Colorado, 15 Orient in New York, Ludlow 38 in New York and Galerie Weissfalk in Basel Swiss.
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Good Weather is a contemporary art gallery from North Little Rock, Arkansas founded in 2011. The gallery formed through an innate familial approach and from a desire to seed, locate, and bring contemporary art discourse in and to Arkansas.
Jacob Goudreault
Jacob Goudreault (b. 1985 Cincinnati, Ohio) was born on Valentine’s Day and currently lives in Chicago, Illinois. He has had solo exhibitions with The Suburban (Oak Park, Illinois), Green Gallery West (Milwaukee), Bahamas Biennale (Detroit), Kate Werble Gallery (New York), Slung Leg (Chicago), The John Riepenhoff Experience at Good Weather (Little Rock), and Adds Donna (Chicago).
Nolan Jimbo is Barely Fair’s 2023 Guest Curator. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he is the Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where he curated the exhibitions Chicago Works: Gregory Bae, Interiors, and Endless and staged performances by Kioto Aoki, Kikù Hibino, and Devin T. Mays. Previously, he was a curatorial fellow at MASS MoCA.
Ed Oh
Screenshot, Ed Oh’s project for Barely Fair 2023, adopts the format of a video game terminal. In Oh’s hands, the sleekness of gaming technology gives way to the visceral tactility of found objects: gogi bones stand in for remote controls, hemp fiber functions as a cord, and a plastic water jug operates as a keyboard shelf. Frayed yet resilient, each of these materials bears traces of deterioration, as if they are outdated tools from a bygone era or relics from a prehistoric past. Here, the agedness of Oh’s assemblage clashes with the futurity associated with gaming, alluding to the inevitable forces of time and decay on even the most “advanced” forms of technology, as well as the spaces designed to accommodate them.
The gaming terminal format in Screenshot references the PC bang, or “PC room,” an archetypal internet café that emerged in South Korea during the 1990s and subsequently appeared within Korean American neighborhoods throughout the United States. Comprised of individual terminals installed side-by-side and divided by partitions, PC bangs offer gamers the possibility of becoming fully immersed within a virtual world while being in the physical presence of others, modeling a rare form of sociality premised on simultaneous isolation and connectivity. However, due to the spread of wireless internet and home gaming, PC bangs have become increasingly rare within the United States, particularly in Oh’s hometown of Los Angeles. The fraying materials of Screenshot allude to the increasingly forgotten and obsolete nature of these gathering spaces, yet the project retains the senses of play and improvisation at the heart of gaming culture and Oh’s work at large.
Throughout his practice, Oh toys with systems of value, abstracting the worth and utility of everyday objects like intercoms, printers, and curry blocks. In Screenshot, he continues this impulse through the recontextualization of bones, plastic, and hemp fiber into the realms of visual art and technology, but he also plays with the value of drawing, populating the terminal “screen” with intricate graphite renderings of StarCraft scenes. This move translates the high-definition graphics and saturated colors of the game into the black-and-white language of drawing, one of the most rudimentary forms of communication technology and the basis of artmaking. Constructing a gaming terminal using the makeshift materials of found objects and drawing, Screenshot captures a once emergent form of network culture within a state of flux, playing with the cycles of capitalist time that insist upon newness, produce waste, and render commodities obsolete.
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-Nolan Jimbo
Operating from his studio in Chicago, Ed Oh (b. 1992) is a visual artist from Los Angeles. Oh's work concretizes terminals between material and virtual spaces. His drawings, paintings, and sculptures carry mystic tones found in today’s abstract orthodoxies of interfaced technology, language, and image. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Riverside.
Founded in 2019 by Isimeme “Easy” Otabor, Anthony Gallery focuses on emerging and established contemporary artists. Located in the Fulton River District of Chicago, the gallery presents solo and group exhibitions while fostering artistic collaborations and partnerships. Anthony Gallery’s mission is to create bridges for more inclusion and opportunity within the arts, and to host artists from around the world.
Eri Wakiyama
Eri Wakiyama was born in Fukuoka, Japan, before moving to California’s Bay Area during her early childhood. By 2005, Wakiyama relocated to New York City to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Fashion Design at Parsons School of Design. Through her vast experience with major fashion houses throughout her education and career such as Miu Miu, Calvin Klein, Supreme, ALYX, and Heaven by Marc Jacobs, Wakiyama’s oeuvre reflects a mixture of perspectives, practice, and skills that embody her distinctive style of abstracted portraiture. Wakiyama’s artistic practice challenges conventional applications of technique and color to produce a style that is uniquely hers. As an artist who developed a distinct style through self-teaching, Wakiyama defies what is “right” and “wrong” in art, instead embracing a practice that expands and confronts restrictions. Wakiyama holds an artistic attitude that emphasizes the beauty of a carefree, unsteady, or “childlike” approach to artmaking—denying technical rules to explore a breadth of topics and styles.
Since its initial founding in 2011 as an artist-led project space and adjacent studios, Cob has committed itself to embolden and nurture UK emerging talent. Cob gallery began representing artists and attending international art fairs in 2016 continuing its dedication to young or mid-career artists with its gallery programme that presents contemporary voices in traditional mediums such as painting and drawing. With a strong curatorial backbone, Cob’s core programming centres around a roster of UK-based artists; whilst simultaneously inviting international practitioners to exhibit in London, often as their UK debut. Cob supports artists through experimental off-site projects and installations, editions and publications.
Victor Seaward
Victor Seaward (B. 1988, Kuala Lumpur) has lived and worked in London since graduating from the Royal College of Art with an MA in painting. Recent solo shows include "Holy Bark" at Zabludowicz Collection in London, "Still Life" at Galerie Fabian Lang in Zurich, "Nebelmeer" at Recent Activity in Birmingham, "Vanitas" at Rectory Projects in London, and "Isabelline and Other Colours" at Lily Brooke, London.
Victor Seaward’s work is rooted in materiality, technological manufacture, and the agency of objects. Mining a broad spectrum of material culture, Seaward juxtaposes utilitarian materials with high-tech manufactured components and objects of historical significance - in order to investigate authorship, commodity, and the fluid nature of time and permanence.
Murmurs is an art space located in DTLA focused on championing experimental and emerging art practices. Murmurs exists to challenge what is expected of an art gallery by providing a new model of a multifaceted platform for modalities of expression that have the power to transform reality.
Benjamin Asam Kellogg
Benjamin Asam Kellogg (b. 1991 in Long Island, NY) attended The Cooper Union. Kellogg lives and works in New York. Recent solo & duo exhibitions include Hidden Pathways at Murmurs, Los Angeles (2023); die Schlange unter der Blume at Bistro 21, Leipzig DE (2021); House of Hours at Murmurs, Los Angeles (2020); The Prophecy Club at MX Gallery, New York (2019); The Window of the Breath Which Lets in the Divine w/ Brigid Moore at Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York (2018); THE PERFECT STORM at Société, Berlin DE (2016); Afterlife Are Belong To Me w/ Bunny Rogers at Sandy Brown Gallery, Berlin DE (2014); Kiss The Ring at Macie Gransion Gallery, New York (2014); and Pathways to Cineland at Sandy Brown Gallery, Berlin DE (2013). Selected group exhibitions include A la Recherche de Toujours at Palais des Beaux Arts, Paris FR (2021); Tokas Project Vol. 3 at TOKAS Hongo, Tokyo JP (2020); The Struggle for Change at Murmurs, Los Angeles (2020); I'll see you in the ether curated by Johnny Negron at Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2019); When I was a child... at MX Gallery, New York (2018); Desert Pour Toujours at Collection Libéréé in the Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas NV (2018); and August and Everything Afterat Plymouth Rock, Zurich SUI (2018). Kellogg’s work has been featured in Cultured Magazine, Hyperallergic, Mousse Magazine, PIN-UP Magazine, and Texte Zur Kunst.
Benjamin Asam Kellogg’s presentation for Barely Fair 2023 is a 1:12 scale sculptural installation entitled Sanctus Stone. Sanctus Stone is comprised of sculptures, paintings, and relics from antiquity exploring humanity's pursuit to harness and consequently worship the eternal flame. The installation is designed to be a temple of fire, reminiscent of agiaries built as places of worship. In the few fire temples which still exist today, sacred fires that have remained lit for centuries continue to blaze, protected within an inner chamber.
Kellogg's work draws from the architectural and symbolic history of an elite and secretive class, borrowing from the crests, engravings, and cryptic ornamentation of facades. In his work, Kellogg applies the logic and vernacular of the semiotician, following tenuous but poetic connections between the entertainment industry, religious or occult institutions, and political organizations. Whether or not a particular connection can be proven is secondary to the kernel of truth that lies in the impulse to seek it. At the heart of his practice is a longing, or a prayer, for an essential truth that may never be told.
MASSIMODECARLO gallery was founded in 1987. It switfly stood out on the international artistic scene for its bold, counter-current choices: the gallery focused on lesser-known artists in Italy such as John Armleder, Olivier Mosset, Steven Parrino and Carsten Höller. In the following years, the gallery program expanded to include prominent young artists of the time such as Alighiero Boetti, Cady Noland, Rudolf Stingel, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
For over 30 years, MASSIMODECARLO has played a fundamental role in the contemporary art scene by promoting a vital dialogue between artists and national and international institutions, as well as relationships with other galleries, critics, curators and collectors.
MASSIMODECARLO works with an extraordinary variety of artists across mediums, from painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, photography, and performance to video. Over the years, the gallery’s artists have gained international recognition, showing their work in galleries, museums and biennials across the world and by accessing outstanding public and private collections.
The gallery now has locations in Milan, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Beijing and a virtual space called VSpace.
Tony Lewis
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Lewis has quickly established himself in the contemporary art world by forming a distinct visual vocabulary that integrates poetry and text with the properties of abstraction, and his monochromatic drawings pull from various visual and written sources, ranging from the personal to the political. Separating, rearranging, and erasing text, he shifts the way we move through language to open up new and unexpected readings.
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Tony Lewis’s practice focuses on the relationship between semiotics and language to confront such social and political topics as race, power, communication, and labor. Lewis creates drawings using graphite, pencil and paper, mediums the artist uses to trace and create abstract narratives and reflections on the notion of the gestural. By pushing the boundaries of drawing and the possibilities of abstraction, he expands the use of the “material” of language.
-Melissa Chiu, Director of Hirshhorn Museum
Tony Lewis was born in 1986 in Los Angeles. He currently lives and works in Chicago. His solo exhibitions include: LACMA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2023, forthcoming); Sing Plunder, Think Gentle Damage, Maintain Tomorrow, Et al., MASSIMODECARLO, London (2021); Tony Lewis Anthology 2014–2016, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (2018); Plunder, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, USA (2017); Alms Comity and Plunder, Museo Marino Marini, Florence (2016); Art Basel Unlimited, Art Basel, Basel (2015); Tony Lewis: nomenclature movement free pressure power weight, MOCA Cleveland, Cleveland (2015). His work has been included in recent group shows at Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2022); ArtSonjeCenter, Seoul, South Korea (2022); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2021; 2020); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2016). Lewis participated the 2014 iteration of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY and was the recipient of the 2017–2018 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.
GROVE works to exhibit a diverse range of international artists working across a variety of media to deliver an incisive and daring program. Additionally, GROVE researches and enacts viable alternatives to systemic impediments which impact the global art world. Areas of research focus include the long-term financial stability of artists, mutual aid within artist-driven communities, and the art industry's intersection with climate change.
Filippo A.L. Cegani
Filippo A.L. Cegani (b. 1993) graduated from Camberwell University in 2019 with a BA, and he currently lives and works in Italy. Recent solo exhibitions include Daniel Benjamin Gallery, and recent group shows include Hasbrook galleries, Candysnake gallery, Safe space, Goodmother gallery, Saint Maison gallery, and Bellevue Art Museum.
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I started painting very early, and I’ve always been fascinated by airbrushes — since my childhood. Carousels in Italy are entirely hand-painted with airbrushes, and I think I still find that plasticky aesthetic in my current painting.
The common theme recurring in my practice is the indirect projection of violence and pain, and the unironic attraction we all have towards them. I think I’m too timid to actually portray violence in itself, but I generally find great satisfaction in painting pieces of meat and bdsm accessories. I feel like I use these elements as metaphors: meat as a past trace of violence that becomes inviting through cooking, whereas bdsm gear signifies future violence, the act of using it becoming attractive through the control and care of the two parties involved.
I think the common denominator between the two, and my fascination towards them, is the contraposition between the pain suffered by the animal and the pain that will be suffered by the person, and the greater cause they both serve: bringing people together, either through consuming the meat or the sexual act.
Still, they remain deeply personal: while I feel distanced from my work, even I can see how each painting reflects my personal life.
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TATJANA PIETERS is an international gallery for contemporary art, located in a unique 400 m2 space in the emerging harbour area of Ghent. The gallery brings museum-like exhibitions with artists from different parts of the world and combines the promotion of young undiscovered Belgian and foreign talent with that of renowned older artists. Experimentation, the broadening of the mind, and social awareness are what drive this operation.
CHARLES DEGEYTER
Charles Degeyter (BE, 1994) is an artist working and living in Ghent, Belgium. The series of Pet Sarcophagi, which started in 2019, was Degeyter’s first proposition as an alternative approach to transience. The first contact with death is often the passing of a beloved pet as a child. An animal that grew up outside its natural context, of which the previous generations were domesticated for years, dies. The question arises whether the animal within its artificial context showed any kinship with its wild counterpart. The ultimate transformation of a pet into a toy that a child can cherish after its death seemed a logical continuation of the animal’s reason for existence. Degeyter has created sarcophagi for domesticated birds and mammals before, and is now for the first time proposing a series for fish.
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At the age of 18, during his studies of design engineering in Kortrijk, Degeyter started out his career in the field of modern rock / pop art by creating illustrations and serigraphs for influential music groups such as Queens of the Stone Age, Nine Inch Nails and the Melvins. Although he gained international recognition, Degeyter felt restricted by the limits of the medium and the niche world he operated in. Hence the shift towards personal work in which he explores complex themes such as natural history, cultural anthropology and childhood. Where a lot of artists root their work in 20th century art history, Degeyter his work draws reference from a larger history of human artistic production. References are made to prehistoric art in his series of fossil plaques by constructing an archaeology of his childhood drawings. The series of pet sarcophagi on the other hand is rooted in a deep fascination with burial rites and offerings in ancient Egypt. By making these historical references, Degeyter often blurs past into present and present into past, making ancient objects, rituals and events highly topical.
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Schooled as an industrial designer, he often makes use of innovative production techniques such as 3D printing, laser-cutting and CNC milling as a way to execute his concepts without restricting them.
In 2023 and 2024 Degeyter will participate in group shows at Ballroom Project, Antwerp (BE), GUM, Ghent (BE) and Speelmanskapel, Brugge (BE). Other exhibitions include Finis Terrae, Antwerp (BE), Going Down, Austin (US), The Crawling Space, Ghent (BE), LOSS, Zottegem (BE), Sint-Baafs Cathedral, Ghent (BE), PASS curated by Kris Martin & Jan hoet jr., Vlaamse Ardennen (BE), Verbeke Foundation, Kemzeke (BE) and No Pop No Up by Jan Hoet jr., Ghent (BE).
Mae Alphonse Dessauvage
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My work depicts fragile scenes based on both religious iconography and my transgender experience. Looking to medieval panel paintings dislocated from their time and place, I re-define their iconography to create new intimate narratives about femininity. The lonely figures in my work exist in a state of ambiguity, investigating abstracted artifacts of the past. With hesitant glances, timid expressions, and delicate gestures, the androgynous bodies that populate my paintings are lost in planar spaces of ambiguous depths. Enshrined in architectural frames, the scenes are enclosed and inward looking, reflecting both a spatial and psychological interiority. Rather than depicting images with a fixed, theological meaning I am searching for psychological spaces with open-ended, subconscious meanings. In this manner, I use iconography not as a canonical model but as a framework to explore gender dysphoria and anxieties surrounding history.
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Mae Alphonse Dessauvage is an artist working between Queens, NY and Gent, Belgium. She received her B.A. from Columbia University in 2017 and her M.Arch from Harvard University in 2021. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Tatjana Pieters Gallery, Kirkland Gallery and Artspace Richmond. She has been an artist in residence at Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn and PADA studios, Lisbon. Most recently, she exhibited her solo show entitled "Oh, The Ripe Air!" at Tatjana Pieters Gallery in Gent, Belgium.
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Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe
Soccer Club Club seems delighted to be returning to Barley Fair, Chicago's preeminent miniature art fair, organized by Julius Caesar Gallery. This year we will exhibit a single work by New York artists Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman:
NIGHT NURSE SAFARI (Slang of the Technocrat) (2023), is a single sculpture that continues Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s ongoing sculpture series of plant/mineral hybrid organisms. This new work, presented by Soccer Club Club at Barely Fair, marks a new stage in the evolution of this series. The plant/mineral structure has conjoined with an industrial apparatus used in organic chemistry. This new hybrid object is reminiscent of an architectural model whilst simultaneously suggesting a science fiction reality wherein bizarro nature merges with the mechanisms of industrial production.
Since 2007, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe have been collaborating on a series of large-scale, maze-like architectural installations. Their explorations of architecture as immersive sculpture draw on historical and fictional narratives surrounding industrial society and its emergent countercultures. Their joint practice has led to solo exhibitions at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark; Museo Maat, Lisbon, Portugal; Art Basel Unlimited, Basel, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Deitch Projects, NYC; Marlborough Gallery, NY & London; as well as numerous biennials and group exhibitions worldwide. In December 2022, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark opened a permanent installation titled Colony Howl.
Founded in 2004 by John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, Corbett vs. Dempsey is an art gallery with an associated record label, book imprint, and historical archive, specializing in contemporary art, art in Chicago, and improvised and experimental music.
Jimmy Wright
Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present a selection of printworks and a bronze sculpture by Jimmy Wright. Featuring a suite of tiny etchings, each one 2 x 2 1/2 inches, created in 1967, the exhibition hearkens to Wright's studies with innovative print instructor Vera Berdich at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Each of the figurative images contains a little mystery – a disembodied hand with a fan, an armless torso, a face lurking behind a car door – all exquisitely executed at miniature scale. On the booth's back wall, a slightly larger print from four years later depicts an empty hotel, suggesting these small stories might take place in its mise en scène. And at center stage, from 1971, sits a bronze figure of a woman's head in a single stiletto, the supple heel transformed into a subtle pair of buttocks. Jimmy Wright is a New York-based artist who works primarily as a painter and in pastels. His show Down Home at Corbett vs. Dempsey hangs concurrently with this Barely Fair presentation.
Jimmy Wright (b. 1944, Kentucky) has lived and worked in New York since the early 1970s. After growing up in rural Kentucky, Wright moved to Chicago to study at the Art Institute of Chicago where he became close friends with members of The False Image group. In 1974, he moved to New York and began a rich body of work that documented the flourishing queer landscape of gay bathhouses and bars throughout Manhattan. By the early 1980s, Wright was painting images that confronted the complexities of his southern childhood. Then, following his partner’s HIV diagnosis in 1988, he began a series of poignantly monumental sunflower oil paintings and floral pastel drawings, that have earned him an international reputation. Recent solo exhibitions include Down Home at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, Flowers for Ken at Fierman, NY and LA 73 – NY 74 at M&B Gallery, Los Angeles. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Speed Art Museum, KY; the Center for Book and Paper Arts, Columbia College, Chicago; The Springfield Art Museum, MO, among other institutions. In 2018 he was named Academician of the National Academy of Design.
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Titled after a Seinfeld episode where Jerry’s girlfriend attempts to open a pickle jar and fix a bike in the buff, it is with levity and sincerity that Good Naked’s programming hovers around the intimate and awkward. The focus is on work that engages tactility, humor, movement, and play. Curated by Jaqueline Cedar, Good Naked's exhibition program is responsive and generative, prioritizing space for new voices and dialogue amongst contemporary artists.
Flor Flores
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Hi, my name is Flor. I am a transdisciplinary artist & poet. My works are proposals for queer belongings & new modes of expressing & relating to one another. Some themes & subjects in my works are: Flowers as a stand-in for myself (Flor); Kiki, a queer monarch butterfly that loves the discotheque–Kiki is also a framework for collaborations, Kiki is also now an experimental publishing project; “X” an Epic poem about the letter X, as in Latinx & its other uses as a gesture of erasure, inclusion, voidance, & as a placeholder for a language that is yet to come.
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Recent “Solo” exhibitions at Everybody Gallery, Chicago Artists Coalition, ADDS DONNA, BAR4000. Flores has been featured in reviews and publications such as Artmaze, Sixty Inches From Center, New American Paintings, Newcity Art, Chicago Artist Writers, and Monsters & Dust.
Cody Tumblin
Cody Tumblin lives and works in Chicago, IL where he received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. His work has been exhibited in the US and abroad, recent solo and two-person exhibitions include the WNDR Museum, Chicago Athletic Association, Hans Gallery, Devening Projects, Mild Climate, Skylab, Good Enough, and SPF 15. Tumblin is a 2020 Newcity Breakout Artist, Hopper Prize Finalist and his work has been published in Art Maze, Tatter Quarterly, Vast Magazine, and Hunted Projects.
Zebadiah Keneally
Zebadiah Keneally (b.1984), also known as Hamburger Vampire, is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City, his drawings offset by painting sculpture, video, performance and book projects. When asked to describe his work he says, “Lunch is very important.” His intricate vignettes use metaphor, humor, and symbolism to create compelling visual narratives. Zebadiah presented his first solo show in 2016 and has published his drawings with a long list of independent publishers. His work can also be found in the collections of the MoMA Library, the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library Special Collections. Apartamento published his debut graphic novel, All the Things I Know, in 2022.
Megan Greene (b. 1976, Buffalo) makes drawings that are both precise and improvisational. She uses the language of landscape, horizon, landform, atmosphere, flora, etc., to allude to unseen spaces or conditions. Her drawings are intentionally incoherent as any form of true representation, detached from when and where, and all laws of nature. She earned a BFA from the University of Notre Dame and an MFA from Rutgers University. Her most recent solo exhibition was held at Regards in Chicago, where she lives and works.
