Press Release - Juxtapoz Clubhouse Miami

Muzae Sesay ”Interior Rhythm 001: Complicated Solitude” Acrylic, Oil Pastel, Graphite on Canvas. 18.5 x 22.5 Inches Framed. 2018. — Muzae Sesay
*”Interior Rhythm 001: Complicated Solitude”*
Acrylic, Oil Pastel, Graphite on Canvas.
18.5 x 22.5 Inches Framed.
2018.

pt.2 Gallery
Juxtapoz Clubhouse 2018
Downtown Miami, Florida

Opening Reception - December 5th to 9th.
info@part2gallery.com

pt.2 is excited to be returning to Downtown Miami this December to take part in Juxtapoz’s annual Clubhouse with collaborator Mana Contemporary. pt.2 will to be showing works by Ben Quinn, Brett Flanigan, Cannon Dill, Delphine Hennelly, Jean Nagai, Jordy Kerwick, Kellen Chasuk, Kelly Ording, Kenichi Hoshine, Kyle Lypka & Tyler Cross, Lena Gustafson, Muzae Sesay, Sam Spano, and Yetunde Olagbaju. To receive a preview of the exhibition contact info@part2gallery.com today. Opening reception is December 5th at 7pm and is on view through December 9th 10-10pm located at 44 se 1st Street in Downtown Miami.

Juxtapoz will curate 7 storefronts at 32—60 SE 1st Street, multiple art installations at the adjoining Flagler Station arcade at 48 East Flagler, as well as a full Mexico City group show and pop-up installation show at the location of last year’s Clubhouse, 200 East Flagler Street.

Learn more about each of the artists below.

BEN QUINN

Ben Quinn (b. 1991) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. He received a BFA from Columbus College of Art & Design and MFA from California College of the Arts. Quinn’s work deals mostly with post-psychedelic reflection and sensitivities to the supernatural through painting, sometimes accompanied by image and sound. Recent solo exhibitions include Cloaca Projects and Fused Space in San Francisco, Littman Gallery at Portland State University, and Massman Gallery in Oakland.

BRETT FLANIGAN

The impetus for this body of work is "the game". Games are a way for me to navigate a series of decisions through terms that I understand, because they are devised in ways that mirror my life. They can involve pattern, probability, logic, language, representation, or repetition. Some are funny or awkward. Although games can contain rules, they are not rules in themselves. They can accommodate dichotomy and cognitive dissonance. Any agitation or mistake can change the game or set a new game into motion. When a game can no longer be played, the information gained can be used to formulate a new game, and the process continues. It is a reductive process, which is repeated until I have created something that I no longer understand.

Brett Flanigan is an Oakland, CA based artist, working primarily in painting and sculpture. He holds a degree in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara which holds influence on his work and his approach to art making . He has been consistently exhibiting in work in the US and Europe since 2009. Flanigan has also recently completed a number of public artworks, including a mural in the Fine Arts building at the University of Nevada, Reno, as well as a large scale public sculpture in downtown Oakland.

CANNON DILL

Dill’s paintings range from exterior abstractions of corner stores to beautifully bleak landscapes taken from fuzzy memories of his life living in Oakland. The work is playful but serious, radiating an immensely consistent color palette which brings the viewer into Dill’s personal narrative. While the content remains very direct, the loose painterly application gives an addicting quality that keeps the viewer wanting to visually dissect the many layers of the story.

DELPHINE HENNELLY

Delphine Hennelly (b. 1979, Vancouver, B.C. Canada) Delphine received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2002. and her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Visual Arts at Rutgers University in New Jersey in 2017. Delphine recently participated in a three person show at St. Charles Projects in Baltimore, MD and will be participating in an upcoming group show at Mother gallery in Beacon, New York, and a two person show with Milo Moyer-Battick at Harpy Gallery in New Jersey. Delphine’s work has appeared in several publications including The Winter Edition, Issue 6, 2018, Art Maze Mag, and Nut Publication. Her work will also be appearing in the New American Paintings Northeast Issue #134 out sometime late Spring 2018. Delphine is a three time recipient of The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award.

Using the weave of tapestries as an infrastructure from which to form a gestural pattern, I embrace the lenticular effect of the pattern that develops and coincidentally the interlacing quality of a seemingly digitized image. The idea of tapestries and screen technology as apparatus’ for viewing becomes a meaningful aspect of the paintings and provides a lattice, so to speak, from which much of my formal decisions are made. Replacing thread for the brushstroke, it is the parts of the tapestry that are frayed that become interesting to me, the effect of looking at something worn by the ages is a quality I am trying to replicate. I paint breaks in the otherwise overall systematic linear pattern creating an image that becomes digitized, broken up, worn with wear and tear, glitchy. Although the resulting image does not move and shift when viewed at different angles, an allusion to lenticular printing changes the entire depth of field. Furthermore, the painted weave of tapestries lending itself to a digital raster effect or the effect of interlaced video suddenly gives way to an image with a shallow depth of space, implied as though behind a kind of screenal interference. The figure now receding inwards from the surface of the canvas rather than protruding outwards from the surface provides an image that truly embeds itself within the drawing.

My palette is pastel suggesting a playful levity, furthermore, the gendered proclivity pastel colors perpetuate is of interest to me in my wish to subvert such tropes. Flower garlands to decorate but also to act as a foil, - to distract; stones locking a picture plane in place like possible paper weights, a pair of pastoral lovers: all these motifs, along with colors I choose, work in service to formally build a ligature from which to hang the image. Within this framework the use of repetition and decoration, either masking or unmasking, offers a multiplicity of possible interpretations. In a text by Amy Goldin published in Artforum in 1975 titled Patterns, Grids, and Painting; Amy Goldin states: “Pattern is basically antithetical to the iconic image, for the nature of pattern implicitly denies the importance of singularity, purity, and absolute precision.” This quote perfectly exemplifies my interest in using repetitive motifs but more pointedly explains much of the reasoning behind my choice in duplicating the figure. Golden further writes: “to see the same image over and over again in a variety of situations disengages the control of context and erodes meaning.” By playing with repetition I enjoy seeing how far I can subvert the iconic image from it’s singular contextual meaning while retaining some residue of the power an iconic image can hold. Perhaps I am attempting to have my cake and eat it too. None the less, it is the tension that lies in this dichotomy that has become fruitful in my wish to pursue figurative/pictorial inventiveness.

JEAN NAGAI

Jean Nagai is a artist/muralist (b.1979 Seattle, WA) and currently living in Los Angeles. He received an associates degrees in photography from the Bellevue College in ’00 and a BA from The Evergreen State College in ’04 and his work has been shown in the Pacific Northwest and other places across the US.

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.

JORDY KERWICK

“Raw. Worn. Beaten, but loved. Life, stripped bare. Amid the chaos of family life lies a feeling of safety and comfort that I try to replicate in my work. Drawing on my collection of imagery of cultural markings and people, places and things, I like to explore beauty in its most organic and real state; stripping back the layers to reveal a subject in its most truthful state.”

Kellen Chasuk ”No Control” Acrylic and Flashe on Canvas. 18 x 20 Inches. 2018. — Kellen Chasuk
*”No Control”*
Acrylic and Flashe on Canvas.
18 x 20 Inches. 2018.

KELLEN CHASUK

Kellen Chasuk’s (b.1995) lives and works in Oakland, CA. Her studio practice is a reflection of daily life and its accumulated anxieties explored through a humorous lense. She continues to experiment with a variety of media while pursuing her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute with a focus in Painting. Her first solo exhibition Plastic Flowers opened January 2018 at Stephanie Chefas Projects in Portland, OR.

KELLY ORDING

My work encompasses a broad palette and wide range of media: from muted to vibrant colors and tones, from pen and ink drawings to paintings, murals, and public installations. Each piece employs intuition and intention to explore the limits of minimalism, abstraction and representation. Beginning with a dyeing process, each piece undergoes a dynamic natural process I follow by hand, setting up and capturing the conversation between the artist and the artwork. Additionally, the use of negative space is central to the dichotomies of surrender and control, illusion and memory, expression and restraint. I’m especially interested in ways simple repetition, geometric patterns, and mathematical marking or mapping contain an inherent capacity to evoke represented subjects in the viewer. The works included in the exhibition focus on the use of color, shapes, and repetitive mark-making to show the passage of time. In many of these pieces, the line becomes a marker of time, similar to the visual evidence of time seen in sedimentary rocks or old growth tree stumps. These pieces are the evidence of both the artist’s hand as well as nature’s inevitable processes in the passage of time.

Based in Oakland, California, Kelly Ording has exhibited her work both in the U.S. and Internationally since graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000. In addition to her works on paper, canvas and collages, Ording has created several large scale public works and murals. Her public works and murals can be seen in San Francisco’s landmark Clarion Alley, Unity Plaza in San Francisco, Facebook Headquarters, Genentech, as well as other locations throughout the Bay Area and Internationally. Her work is included in several collections; such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art collection, the San Francisco Arts Commission Public and Civic Art Collection, the Alameda County Collection, JP Morgan Chase Collection and the Ellie Mae Collection, to name a few. She recently returned from traveling in Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia with the Bagkit/Arise Project in association with Clarion Alley Mural Project and Indonesia Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta. Ording is the recipient of the 2018 Sustainable Arts Foundation Award. She currently devotes all her time to her artwork and her family with fellow artist, Jet Martinez.

KENICHI HOSHINE

Kenichi Hoshine is a Tokyo, Japan-born artist who is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY. His work has been featured in New American Paintings, and he has exhibited work in Harpy Gallery and others.

Kyle Lypka and Tyler Cross ”Jokes About Helium” Ceramic, Glaze, Stain. 14 x 16 x 7 Inches. 2018. — Kyle Lypka and Tyler Cross
*”Jokes About Helium”*
Ceramic, Glaze, Stain.
14 x 16 x 7 Inches. 2018.

KYLE LYPKA & TYLER CROSS

"Each sculpture is the result of us living out our relationship through making art with one another. It involves trust, conversations, arguments, and compromises. Working with one another allows us to bounce ideas back and forth and keeps the work in constant flux and change until it is complete. We have found that in many ways, working together feels better than working alone"

Kyle Lypka and Tyler Cross have been together since 2013, and began making art together in 2016.

LENA GUSTAFSON

Lena's recent work uses bright colors and large female figures at the center of each image. She uses repeated visual symbolism such as flags, water, plant life, color, and repeated gestures to communicate different stories within the body. Often times the line that separates the figure from her environment are blurred.

Traditionally the female form has been used as a symbol to indulge others' fantasies, dreams, and fascinations. Lena is interested not in what can be projected onto it, but instead what lies to be awoken within the body itself. She is interested in the idea of body memory and aims to visualize what this would look like if we could see it. Rather than the figure itself it is the stored information within the figure as well as its surroundings that interests Lena. By engaging with the history of representation of the female form, Lena contemplates new narratives for which the female body can understand itself.

Muzae Sesay ”Interior Rhythm 002: Complicated Solitude” Acrylic, Oil Pastel, Graphite on Canvas. 18.5 x 22.5 Inches Framed. 2018. — Muzae Sesay
*”Interior Rhythm 002: Complicated Solitude”*
Acrylic, Oil Pastel, Graphite on Canvas.
18.5 x 22.5 Inches Framed.
2018.

MUZAE SESAY
Muzae Sesay - (b. 1989 in Long Beach, California) is a visual artist currently based in Oakland, California. He received his BA in Sociology at San Francisco State University (2015).

I'm interested in analyzing the fragmentation and validity of memory through the recollection of home and community. I find investigating domestic environments to be like looking at the root to question the flower. Sometimes through painting I discuss the struggle of trying to accurately remember a space from the past; small aspects or vignettes shift and blend together without a clear picture of the space as a whole. Sometimes I play with manipulating memory through a process of implanting a fake consciousness of a fake space; remembering how it felt to be somewhere that physically exists nowhere. Other paintings come from a practice of empathy; imagining someone else’s memory and what that might feel like. The subject and viewpoint of the work is free of the confines of time and space; often paintings are from a memory of a space from as it might be remembered in the future. All approaches demonstrate a critical lens on memory; how fluid and individualistic we can be and yet how it completely shapes the world we collectively live in.

Like the variations of how and what we choose to internalize, each guest visiting these paintings is encouraged to take on a unique perspective on how to interpret the composition. Opposed to an acute recollection of facts; focusing on atmosphere, color and rhythm reflects how we feel about specific memories. In painting as in thought, the emotional takeaway ends up surpassing the clarity of direct representation. Thus the guest is compelled to understand the space, question it's dimensionality, dive inside and walk around.

SAM SPANO

Sam Spano (b. 1987) is a visual artist based in Oakland, California. Pulling images from real life experiences and a range of photographic source material, Spano creates stylized paintings and drawings that frequently feature women, men, animals and food. Expressively rendered with a particular focus on bold colors, composition and surface texture, the people in his paintings are often caught in the middle of introspective solitary moments, mundane daily activities, or surreal dream worlds. Animals are featured as playful and loyal companions, psychological projections of the figures in the paintings, or avatars for the artist himself. Food is represented in unusual but sensually colored still lives where the inanimate seems to have an emotional life all its own. Consistently, Spano’s work is humorous and romantic, resting in the place where the mundane becomes the fantastic.

YETUNDE OLAGBAJU

Yetunde Olagbaju is a multidisciplinary artist, currently residing in Oakland, CA. Through their work, they concern themselves with time travel, space, source, ancestry, healing and the human relationship to the Blackness of the universe. Through moving and static images, sound, and ritual they aim to sort through how we, as human beings, orient ourselves within our own existence. By creating work that exists within and expands upon nonlinear time, they seek to: create meaningful exchange of narratives, explore methods of emotion-based storytelling and archiving, all while cultivating a more empathetic and healing world.

They are currently Lead Curator in residence at SOMArts Cultural Center and are pursuing an MFA at Mills College. They have displayed work in spaces like Oakland Museum of California, New Image Gallery, Southern Exposure, SOMArts Cultural Center, and The New School. They have collaborated with institutions such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Facebook HQ, Museum of the African Diaspora, CounterPulse and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

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Press Release - Juxtapoz Clubhouse Miami