×





    Beyond Identity

    July 23 -September 1, 2022

    Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce the group exhibition Beyond Identity on view from July 23 to September 1, 2022, featuring the work of Julie Buffalohead, Nick Cave, Theresa Chromati, Duggie Fields, Loie Hollowell, Lila de Magalhaes, and GaHee Park. Comprising sumptuous painting and bold sculpture, the show explores the body, physical affection, and the fluidity of corporeal connection. Together, the works find joy in our mammalian roots and unexpected intimacies. They share diverse jouissances that skirt around the confining social rules of sex and gender, seeking nothing less than bodily autonomy and romantic freedom. A new performance by Sebastian Hernández will take place on Saturday, August 20, 5–6PM at the gallery.

    Large-scale assemblage sculptures in Nick Cave’s Rescues (2013–14) series display found ceramic dogs enveloped amongst dream-like backdrops of metal flowers and ceramic birds. Seated like royalty on ornate thrones, Cave’s rescued animals act as the keepers and guardians of their own worlds; forgotten and discarded objects are majestically transformed into symbols of actualization and liberation from servitude.

    Commanding both pattern and texture, paintings by GaHee Park place her subjects in tension with their flattened environments. Couple in a Field (2022) is a clever inversion of traditional portraiture, showing a voyeuristic scene of a naked heterosexual couple merging with each other to become one. Dream with Still Life (2022) probes the labor involved in feminized self-imaging; the subject’s head rests on a table, tired and smiling, repelling any concrete or finalized interpretation from the viewer’s gaze.

    Julie Buffalohead’s oil paintings explore love, death, and motherhood through a variety of interdependent creatures: humans, coyotes, bobcats, rabbits, skunks, and birds, among others. In these works, lone indigenous women share nest-like homes with Native American animals, creating resilient communities, which integrate European mirrors and colonial teacups in ways that amplify their social and spiritual powers. Punctuating the scenes are Plains Indian tribal motifs such as ribbon patterns and clan animal symbols that are emblematic of both resistance and peaceful coexistence.
    Theresa Chromati’s works are painterly renderings of her own inner world. Through vibrant abstraction, she explores the multiplicity of race and gender, where swirling compositions go beyond a singular being towards different modes of existence. Integral to the compositions are various phallic flourishes and sculptural embellishments by which Chromati embraces and celebrates a hard but gentle masculine principle.
    The late British artist Duggie Fields was flamboyantly queer in a way that excluded him from being taken seriously during his lifetime. The art world has finally caught up to his gender-fluid experiments in colorful surrealist Pop and the painter is having his moment. In Ball of Confusion (1993) and Circular Circulation (1994), Fields plays mischievously with the human body, subverting binaries, suggesting amusing polymorphous perversities, entering trans debates at their inception.
    Radiant bas relief paintings by Loie Hollowell explore breasts as sources of love and otherworldly nourishment. Sensuous and stellar, works like Around the Clock and 12, 4, 7 and 10 (both 2022) consist of orbs cast from the breasts of the artist and her friends. Their circular formation is reminiscent of clocks, stars on flags, planetary orbits, and lunar cycles. Evoking a matriarchal nation with its own time markers, these Hollowell pieces go deep on a body part essential to human survival and evolution.

    Lila de Magalhaes’s delicately dyed and embroidered stretched textiles depict tender cosmologies. Psychedelic and celestial, her compositions are part Hieronymus Bosch, part Fantasia, where writhing insects, mammals and plants mischievously intertwine in cosmic menageries. De Magalhaes’s pale palette and gauzy lines veil any obscenity and heighten the works’ spirited fairytale quality.

    On Saturday, August 20, Sebastian Hernández will present a new performance at the gallery in conjunction with the exhibition. Wielding a multidisciplinary approach ranging from movement, to sculpture, to photography, their work investigates the social hegemonies of the visible through queer Mexican and Chicano narratives.