Salon 2017

September 2nd - September 30th, 2017

Opening Reception - September 9th, 5 - 7 PM

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Salon 2017 a group exhibition featuring work by Chie Fueki, Rachel Lachowicz, Abdul Mazid, Dakota Noot, Izhar Patkin, Jeanne Silverthorne, and Shirley Tse. Each artist is guided by a desire to decode and problematize visual and linguistic signs and symbols. The exhibition will be on view September 2nd through September 30th, 2017, with an opening reception on Saturday September 9th from 5-7pm.

Chie Fueki’s intricately patterned and detailed mixed media paintings have references to her multi cultural background (the artist was born in Japan, raised in Brazil, and received her MFA from Yale) while also exploring the artist’s critical interest in how information is decoded through texture, light, color and surface. Fueki begins each painting by staining Japanese Mulberry paper with colored inks, layering them with many washes of pigment and often using iridescent materials. Using a rubbing technique areas of pattern are rendered in graphite. Fueki then cuts, collages and mounts her work on wooden panels over which she applies glitter, colored pencil and dots of acrylic paint.

Rachel Lachowicz’s new series of eyeshadow paintings features imagery of flowers and draws on Kant’s analytic of the beautiful and Baudrillard’s conceptualization of simulacra. In this exhibition, Lachowicz presents viewers with a flower found in nature and one that exists only in the virtual space of online gaming—discerning real versus copy is almost impossible. The slippage between real and copy relates to Lachowicz’s career-long desire to dismantle binaries and rigid demarcations of gender, pushing toward more inclusive signifiers.

Abdul Mazid’s diamond shaped glitter paintings open up a conversation about the effects of structural and systemic power/knowledge. Using a multi-step silk screen process, the artist appropriates recognizable scenes then abstracts them with the application of glitter. Selecting his references carefully and intentionally, here, Mazid pulls imagery from two iconographies of global economic power: the New York Stock Exchange trading floor and the World Series of Poker tournament in Las Vegas.

Dakota Noot explores his own hybrid identity as he reconciles the relationship between his rural North Dakota roots with his Los Angeles-based life. Noot’s dynamic canvases are saturated with color and rich visual and linguistic signs and symbols. The artist presents his own portrait in various states: between man and woman, human and animal, abstract and figurative all the while suggesting the grotesque, the humorous and the pleasurable are one and the same.

Izhar Patkin’s paintings from his “Gardens for the Global City” series embodies the artist’s interest in cultural pluralism. These works employ a reverse painting method with the artist starting from the back pushing paint through the front of the wire mesh screen to achieve a carpet effect. Patkin’s paintings emphasize the artist’s hand and the physical act of painting while, at the same time, revealing his ambivalence toward globalization.

Jeanne Silverthorne’s cast rubber Venus Flytrap with Xeres Blue (Extinct) sets forth the artist’s preoccupation with death and desire. What might be mistaken for melancholy can also be read as imbued with vitality and humor. For Silverthorne, the seemingly mundane contents of the studio and its various states of disarray are rich sites for excavation.

Shirley Tse’s vibrant yellow sculpture titled Varicella Zoster occupies the west gallery as its title suggests with thousands of zip ties radiating from a single nucleus. True to her practice, Tse visualizes heterogeneity through sculpture and installation. From multiplicities of difference on the same plane to the negotiation of an integrated whole, Tse examines the semiotics of plastics and expands the language of movement using common objects to suspend subjectivity, destabilize categories, and call attention to the interstitial.

For more information please contact Alana Parpal: alana@shoshanawayne.com