Vagabond Shoes
Curator: Benjamin Klein
McBride Contemporain is delighted to announce Vagabond Shoes, this season’s latest installment in the gallery’s ongoing summertime engagement with artists living and working in New York City. A group show featuring the work of nine strong artists, this exhibition showcases a discreet survey of styles, tendencies and pathways now wending themselves through the galleries and artist-run centers of what is still viewable as the world’s capital of contemporary art. Focusing on highly individualized practices, Vagabond Shoes aims to demonstrate not only what the viewer might see these days in New York City, but what is coming up.
Lauren Clay works at the intersection of painting and sculpture, creating works that install on the wall as pictures, but also interact with it as highly particular objects. Her imagery and atmosphere delve into a numinous realm of spiritual possibility and playful exuberance.
Lauren Comito is a painter exploring a pictorial language that is equal parts quirky fun and deadly serious. A highly skilled technician, her strange and beautiful paintings create figure/ground relationships and character driven symbolic realms of funnily dark, bewitching weirdness and open possibilities.
Nicholas Moenich’s canvases present a brush with a non-Euclidian world of abstract geometries, possible neural networks and fragments of imagery and design. Combining DIY and punk sources as equally as modernist ideas sourced from futurism and surrealism, they read as both utopian and dystopian, places and things, real and unreal.
Lucas Moran’s visually powerful paintings of trees seen from below, called "violently foreshortened" angles, read almost as much as vine-like all-over abstractions, and formalist figure/ground studies, as landscapes. Naturalistic colour likewise seems to heighten the electric skies and looming presence of the trees, in these equally symbolic and realistic, gripping works.
Opal Mae Ong’s work is highly characteristic, and always technically assured and immaculately finished, but no two images in her painting and drawing practice ever seem to repeat the same kind of imagery. In her exhibited drawing, a complex web of emotions and ideas about grief are enacted in cooly dramatic form, recalling a huge variety of death imagery from around the world, while maintaining a profound and sincere quality of genuine human longing.
Eun-Ha Paek’s sculptural works propose a world of characters and objects that exist on a preternatural edge, a potential world unto themselves. Exploring a range of symbolic content, from the menacing, the potentially tragic, loss and loneliness, all the way to the zany, the silly and the tongue-in-cheek, these virtuosic pieces are highly particular and rarified in their self-presentation, and despite their small size, in their massive impact.
Peter Park's discreetly sized abstract paintings employ a seemingly simple formal language to deploy a complex and deep range of emotional engagement and pictorial activity. Both experimental and highly practiced, they subtly rewrite the codes and play with the meanings of what an abstract painting can do and be.
Zuriel Waters shaped abstract paintings on fabric marry rigorous technical precision with joyful playfulness, a surprisingly lovely approach to a sophisticated formal result. His use of color is bold, even searing, but likewise also gentle and deeply felt. These paintings stitch together more than just their own fabric supports; they intersect 3 and 2D practices, and geometric and hard-edge approaches with esoteric imagery, in a unique blend.
Jess Willa Wheaton approaches collage with disarmingly simple technique and attitude, but in doing so, with enormously sensitive attention to every detail, delivers an intense and delightful experience to the viewer. These composite images fuse creation and recreation, unfurling a regard on the natural world, the domains of human beings, and on the photographic image and the characteristics of image making in and of itself.
