Elijah Wheat Showroom spiritedly presents a solo exhibition “Loves Cats, Hates Catastrophes” by multi-disciplinary artist and musician, Michael Hambouz, his first with EWS. 

Do you have stories about seemingly inconsequential moments where you make a decision and the ramifications have life-altering consequences? Perhaps even in recalling the history of your family, where your lineage was forced into difficult positions and decisions were enacted to protect life and changed the course of not only your life now, but your epigenetic make-up? 

Hambouz shares his story: “[His] teenage father, little aunts and uncles, and grandparents were survivors of the Lydda Massacre and forced Death March of 1948. [his] father Kahlil, the oldest of the children, was the first to leave the UNRWA refugee camps in Ramallah, first traveling to Europe, then eventually landing in the US.” Hambouz’s father suffered from haunting PTSD and had a very difficult time being a stable parent. The damage rippled and radiated from this atrocity–despite Hambouz never experiencing first-hand what it is like to live on the land, and having no immediate Palestinian community as a kid growing up in the rural Midwest. Subsequent stories are embedded in the generational trauma that has given life to a curiosity, a mission, to break the mold of abuse and release the violence that is rooted in Hambouz’s personal reflection, placed symbolically within his moving relief paintings.  

Hambouz’s delicately crafted works of art, infused with an autobiographical element, break a mold of surface and allow viewers to see differently, from many angles. Like a witness to a story unfolding, there are varied vantage points with winding locales of entry. Hambouz “create[s] maze-like forms to reference both the architecture of enclosed spaces and the constricting claustrophobic feelings [he] experience[s] being a Palestinian-American with a voice struggling to be heard and for [his] identity to be respected.” Mainly, in the current social media clusterfuck, where everyone has ‘expert’ opinions on everything, and threats of violence, demeaning communications, slander, libel and ‘shadowbanning’ unfavorable opinions are par-for-the course. Hambouz’s experience, translated in directionless forms, begets an experience face-on, recognizing the acute craftsmanship embedded and confronting conceptual integrity by way of the subjectivity of varied divisions. 

Within this body of Hambouz’s diverse and experimental practice, the paintings’ relief and ventricular undulations are meticulously hand formed, painted and assembled with imagery laden with repeating patterns, like music. These objects d’art subtly embed representational form with a personal and recognized symbolism. Moving through the ever-changing stance of perspective, Hambouz’s work, with distinct color pallets, reconning form and the weight of conception, continues to command the vanguard of painting. 

One thing is certain though, his comment “commonality of marginalized people brings a Universality of sentiments” sits with an audience. Here, lies a curiosity about a place of contrariness, disparity, inequality and imbalance. The existing curiosity advances an aspiration to inject radical acceptance, nuance and keen criticality in order to overcome an omnifarious verisimilitude in a narrative. 

Whether our ancestors were forced to make difficult choices to survive, or, decisions were made for them, our stories possess a history of cascading social randomness— one decision leading to another, leading to our own narrative. However sheltered by your family line, you are here now. Together, we can discuss our personal histories, our tragedies, our fortunate placement within the context of another vantage point. That way, we conscientiously make decisions that aren’t just flukes in our lineage, but rather, both gives and saves lives.

Michael Hambouz (b. Niles, Michigan, 1977) is a multidisciplinary artist, multi-instrumentalist musician, and independent curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Hambouz creates chromaesthesia-influenced works – experiments in dimension and color made under the guidance of music – to process bouts of loss and reflections on life in the rural Midwest, New York City, and in the cybersphere as a first-generation Palestinian-American. Experimenting freely with mediums, he encourages unexpected results and mutations in compositional form to bloom in the studio, resulting in conceptually abstracted paintings and prints, intricate layered paper cut outs, sculpture, drawings and animations.

Solo/two-person exhibitions include Spring/Break Art Show (NYC), Neighbors (NYC), chashama (NYC), Kayrock (NYC), Troutbeck (Amenia, NY), The Krasl Art Center (St. Joseph, MI), 3S Artspace (Portsmouth, NH), Future Fairs with Talia Levitt (NYC), Brooklyn Academy of Music with Michael O’Shea (NYC), and a 20-year survey exhibition at Antioch College (Yellow Springs, OH) in 2018. Select group exhibitions include The National Arts Club (NYC), Club Rhubarb (NYC), Andrew Edlin Gallery (NYC), IPCNY (NYC), GROWROOM//SHOWROOM (NYC), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Standard Space (Sharon, CT), Dominique Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Northern-Southern (Austin, TX), Eve Leibe Gallery (London, UK), and The Centre for Contemporary Printmaking, (Bangor, N. Ireland). His art and curatorial work have been featured in Artnet News, The New York Times, Design Milk, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, and Vice. His work can be seen in the collections of Antioch College, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NYU Langone Medical Center, Niles History Center, and Fidelity Corporate Art Collection.

Elijah Wheat Showroom anticipates curiosity, wonder and reveriepresenting the unique works of three USA based experimental photographers: Jon Verney, Rhiannon Adam & Liz Nielsen at PHOTOFAIRS: Shanghai 2024. Each artistic photographer is bending the constructs of what photography can be, and what can be executed with a Polaroid camera, or entirely without.

Beginning with Jon Verney’s Decomposites, the remarkable micro-world of a corroded Polaroid from 70’s deadstock, transforms into a macro landscape, inviting a viewer to explore the details of a handmade negative, and a remarkably focused abstract image. Using color fields from other self-produced negatives. Verney’s archival pigment prints center on pursuing moments of wonder. With equal emphasis on science and magic, the creative practice is driven by curiosity and haptic experimentation. He uses unique, alternative photo processes to explore the liminal theme of phase transitions–how matter shifts from one state of being to another–and how these changes express themselves visually.

Rhiannon Adam, an explorer, and also an experimental photographer, travels perpetually, rarely settling down to rest. Adam’s work is centered on research-based, long-form, social documentary projects that make use of analogue photographic processes and archive materials, as well as her on-going obsession with Polaroid and the materiality of the photographic image. The singular work that we exhibit is an editioned print, yet a personal one. The Polaroid is shot on film, 11 years out of date (on deadstock SX-70) film. The image relates to her childhood nostalgia (fading through the cracked imperfections) of analogue material. It's a stripping away of any signs of when it was shot; It's a way for her to capture the memories she missed (she grew up on a small boat with parents sailing the globe until age 15) by replacing them with someone else’s. Elijah Wheat presented Adam's otherworldly unique analogue montages of Polaroid photo emulsion lifts at the inaugural PHOTOFAIRS, NYC in 2023. She is an expert on Polaroid history and experimental techniques and has authored an exhaustive resource on instant photography, Polaroid: The Missing Manual (Thames & Hudson, 2017, reprinted 2022).

Liz Nielsen brings her most recent camera less unique analogue work to Shanghai, on varied light sensitive materials. One, the traditional FujiFlex, and the other, the film-like transparent FujiClear. Another experimental photographer, Nielsen refers to themselves as a “Light Painter.” With this technique, Nielsen references the painting canon of a still life, and landscape, only future-forward and placed within a cosmic setting (and all that lies in between). The artist’s subjects float location-less, without scale, harnessing the great possibility of life beyond carbon forms and mingling with the presence of emotive vibrating light. Aiming for a quantum vision with a quantum medium, Nielsen’s illustrative work is intended to both be and not be at the same time. The limitless possibilities of capturing a most alive still life, or landscape, creates captured apparitions of light at a macro scale, however, microcosmically is placed within us too.

All of these Artists works center on pursuing moments of wonder, offering an experimental and vibrantly colorful analogue edge. We are thrilled to bring and hold space for this his fantastical, otherworldly wonder-filled experimental photography to Shanghai, China.

Jon Verney (b. 1987 U.S.A) received his MFA from Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan in 2016 and a BFA in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2010. He exhibits his work nationally and internationally, and has been an artist resident at the SIM Residency in Reykjavik, Iceland, the Studios at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Vermont Studio Center, Penland School of Craft, and has spent two years in Florence, Italy working at Studio Art College International. Recent projects include a group show with the artist collective, IQB, hosted by Museo BeGo in Castelfiorentino, Italy, and a collaboration with the Grammy Award-winning musical group, Roomful of Teeth. He divides his time between North Adams, Massachusetts, Tuscany, Italy, and Brooklyn, New York. 

Rhiannon Adam (b. 1985 Ireland) Received an MA English – University of Cambridge, UK, BA (Hons) English – University of Cambridge, UK, Cert. Higher Education Arts, Design and Environment –Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London. She has been shortlisted for, and won, numerous awards, including the Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography and was named as one of The Photographers’ Gallery’s New Talents in 2019. Her work has been published widely in the press, including Le Monde, The Telegraph, the BBC, The British Journal of Photography, Stern, Huffington Post, and the New York Times. In 2022, she was announced as one of eight crew members (all creatives) selected for the first civilian lunar orbital mission; dearMoon, funded by Japanese entrepreneur, Yusaku Maezawa (MZ). The trip will last for approximately one week, and is currently planned for 2024 aboard SpaceX’s Starship.

Liz Nielsen (b. 1975 U.S.A) received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2004, her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, and her BA in Philosophy and Spanish from Seattle University in 1997. Nielsen's works have been reviewed in *Artforum*, *The Wall Street Journal, *The New Yorker*, *The Financial Times*, *The British Journal of Photography*, *The New York Times*, *LensCulture*, *FOAM magazine*, *ArtSlant* and has been a featured photographer with Photofairs Shanghai blog for her solo in London 2019, among others. Liz has collaborated and shared images of her unique photograms for Hermes on three separate projects, Google Canvas, Meta Headquarters, designer Paul Smith, Sydney Brown Shoes and more. Her work has been collected by the JP Morgan Chase Collection, Fidelity Collection, Progressive Insurance, Stanley Morgan, Harris Bank of Chicago, curators from V&A, and trustees at the Norton Museum among others.

Elijah Wheat is enthralled to present a solo exhibition of multi-media works by Beck Lowry, their first at the gallery entitled “The Mountains Will Still Be Here.” The show will open at 3:00PM-6:00PM on Saturday 30 September and run through 5 November, 2023.

Lowry’s sculptures are elaborate wall-hung abstractions carved from assemblages of laminated plywood and intricately ornamented in mixed media. Largely biomorphic in form, the works draw language both from the natural world (mimicking the aposematic markings and structural coloration of flora and fauna) as well as from the rich inheritance of decorative patterning made by artisans for millennia.

Lowry calls works presented “painted weavings”, which evolve in a three-stage process: first a ladder-like armature is carved from plywood. Usually off-kilter and rectangular-ish in form, this armature is then painstakingly woven through with crochet thread to create a paintable surface.

Lowry writes “The work is born of a need to build, to exert myself through physical ritual, and to locate myself experientially within a lineage of ancestral laborers that includes ancient stone carvers, woodworkers, weavers, as much as it does makers within my own family who built houses, wooden boats, and fashioned jewelry.” By combining craft, like carpentry and weaving, Lowry bends their unique aesthetics to their wall works by highlighting a contemporary, ego driven display of art.

The artist uses craft to explore curiosities about the talismanic capacity of objects: to protect, to store memory & history, to embody incantations. Lowry’s desire, through assiduous and devotional labor, is to transform quotidian materials (plywood, salvaged curtains from their childhood home, unfinished embroidery from theirgrandmother’s collection, their wife’s worn-out kurtas) into protective objects, virile objects. That which can be mounted as a shield against unyielding despair over modernity’s broad environmental wreckage- of species, patience, intention, connection. As if prefiguring some unpracticed ritual for an Age of Grief. For when there is a time that humans are no longer on Earth making things, laboring to create objects, protecting themselves from harm, “The Mountains Will Still Be Here.”

BIO

Beck Lowry, (New Haven, Connecticut, 1980) work has been exhibited at Elijah Wheat Showroom, Newburgh, NY, Art Miami, Select Fair, Volta, and Greene Naftali and in Los Angeles at Klowden Mann. Their work has been featured in New American Paintings, reviewed in Artforum, and is part of the collection at Gateway Community College in New Haven, CT. Becca studied Economics at Smith College and lives in New Haven, CT.

Elijah Wheat Showroom (est. 2015) is a New York-based artist-run gallery and nomadic curatorial experience founded by Carolina Wheat & Liz Nielsen. Currently located in Newburgh, NY on the Hudson River in a 3000 sq/ft Kunsthalle. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, whose creative insight, righteous vision, perceptive being and stylistic voice for trendsetting embody the spirit that the Showroom honors. EWS artists are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions and instigate conversations outside a commercial focus. We promote the diversity of artists' voices with contemplative messages while advocating visual art’s accessibility to all audiences.

Elijah Wheat is elated to present a solo booth at the inaugural PHOTOFAIRS, NYC, with the accomplished multidimensional photography based artist, Rhiannon Adam. Six of her latest series of unique work: “Composites,” will fill booth #124.

Adam, already acknowledged for her commitment and visual style to political portrait series of obscure communities, this body moves beyond the lens as she handcrafts a series of large-scale montages of Polaroid emulsion lifts. Landscapes are shot through a lens and fabricated fantastical locations emerge spanning time and geography. Each unique piece is created from a series of lifts, composited, montaged, and rearranged onto a new substrate, in this case, watercolor paper. The pieces are tactile and textural, and embrace error and imperfection.

Taking reference from the composite images created by the lunar surveyor that photographed the moon’s surface, these works occupy the boundary between fact and fiction. A Polaroid cannot be faked, and each one is a “true” original, but when composited in this way, a fictional landscape is built that encourages us to question what is real. This is an entirely analogue process, but can be seen to relate to digital compositing processes more commonly used in commercial photography.

The lifting process is a delicate one, where the Polaroid’s emulsion is removed from its native backing using boiling water, is cleaned and washed, and then finally transferred to the composition one by one. With each image, there is only one opportunity for a successful lift, with the fragile gelatinous image being prone to breakages. The oldest images must be treated differently than the newest shots during the lift process, as the material hardens over time.


Creating the imagery for each piece involves a painstaking gathering process, as each piece contains up to 150 individual Polaroids shot on expired Polaroid pack film which is increasingly difficult to obtain (the deadstock is so scarce, in fact, these may be the last works created with this type of Polaroid film). Individual images are photographed in situ at different locations and countries, some being a few years old before becoming a part of the final work. The translucent nature of the lifts must be considered at all times during shooting, with each image being purposefully overexposed to create an airiness and lightness, allowing them to be layered. Though the process is photographic, each work avoids replication.

In these montages, the influence of her impending journey to space (through the DearMoon competition) is subtle, emerging through pictures of rocket launches alongside subtle nods to Martian landscapes.

BOOK SIGNING | ELIJAH WHEAT | BOOTH 124

Rhiannon is also the author of three books, and we will host a short talk and book signing of Polaroid: The Missing Manual, at the fair, Saturday, 9 September at 1:30pm

Polaroid: The Missing Manual (Thames & Hudson, 2017, reprinted 2022) her exhaustive resource on instant photography.

Her other award winning books include: Big Fence / Pitcairn Island (Blow Up. Press, 2021), Dreamlands / Wastelands (Jane & Jeremy, 2014).

BIO: Rhiannon Adam is a photographic artist, born in Cork, Ireland, in 1985. She currently lives and works between London and the US.

In 1992, her parents sold everything they owned and bought a live-aboard sailing boat, Jannes. From that point, her childhood became nomadic, moving from place to place, mainly around South America and the Caribbean. She eventually moved to London as a teenager to live her with aunt, enabling her to begin mainstream education. She later studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and at the University of Cambridge.

Adam’s work is centered on research-based, long-form, social documentary projects that make use of analogue photographic processes and archive materials, as well as her on-going obsession with Polaroid and the materiality of the photographic image. Her early life experiences have had a lasting influence on her work, with a focus on remote communities, the concept of utopia, and the fine line between fact and fiction.

She has been shortlisted for, and won, numerous awards, including the Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography and was named as one of The Photographers’ Gallery’s New Talents in 2019. Her work has been published widely in the press, including Le Monde, The Telegraph, the BBC, The British Journal of Photography, Stern, Huffington Post, and the New York Times.

She is the author of three books, Big Fence / Pitcairn Island (Blow Up Press, 2021), Dreamlands / Wastelands (Jane & Jeremy, 2014), and her exhaustive resource on instant photography, Polaroid: The Missing Manual (Thames & Hudson, 2017, reprinted 2022).

Souvenirs of the Wasteland

Friday, 21 July through Sunday, 24 September, 2023

Caitlin McCormack & Katharine Ryals

This summer at Elijah Wheat opening for Upstate Art Weekend in Newburgh, NY, artists Caitlin McCormack and Katharine Ryals will present a museum of unnatural history—a curated glimpse of the world left behind after human intervention. In this installation, microplastics have usurped the Hall of Gems; the Great Pacific Garbage Patch drifts triumphant as a continent—terra firma on a planet mankind has rendered uninhabitable. McCormack and Ryals offer a survey of what thrives in the Anthropocene’s wake: mutant lifeforms melded with garbage, eerie radioactive hues, and dark odes to effluvium, ephemera, fast fashion, and immortal trash. 

This retrospective analysis of human behavior communed through the waste we have left behind assumes the form of flashy, bizarre trash objects meticulously crafted by Ryals and McCormack. Since mid-2020, the pair have been developing a collaborative project concerning climate change, presented as a speculation into the nature of the artifacts and fossils our species might leave behind if a more sustainable path for the future is not forged. Together, they present a pseudoscientific display of human vestiges, chronicles the waning of human existence and an influx of strange, new lifeforms. 

Ryals’ contribution to this exhibition will be a series of faux foliage sculptures appearing simultaneously dead and alive. Her glittery, fleshy greenhouse emanates industrial, unnatural colors on the surfaces of synthetic plant leaves. Foliage is embroidered with veins and adorned with silicone, glitter, beads, junk jewelry, synthetic hair, and fabrics. Ryals has also constructed a planetarium complete with orbs suspended in the form of a mobile display, as well as a series of found artifacts and fossil-like sculptures fashioned from molding/casting processes, presented in display vitrines.

Through delicate crochet, McCormack has created a series of complex, wall-mounted rhizospheres depicting hybridized plant and animal forms, illustrating a world in which the byproducts of memory, decay, and waste have synthesized into a unified system. She also constructed multiple sculptures of humanoid appendages sprouting antlers and protrusions reminiscent of cordyceps fungi. These items are similarly displayed in the idiom of an outmoded museum display, to be viewed in the round. McCormack’s heavily textured depictions of organic lifeforms meld with shapes gleaned from science fiction, producing disconcerting images of futuristic earthly inhabitants. 

Together, the artists have also created collaborative artworks functioning as didactics and exhibition design elements within the museum; writer Cara Marsh Sheffler is providing curatorial wall text for the exhibit and cultural historian Celeste Olalquiaga is contributing an essay for the show’s catalog.  Opening to the public on Friday, 21 July for Upstate Art Weekend with a celebration 6:00-10:00 PM that night.  On Saturday, 22 July a “Museum Tour” and artist talk begins at 5:00PM. The exhibition will close Sunday, 24 September, 2023

UPSTATE ART WEEKEND EVENTS:

FRIDAY 21 July 2023// 18:00-22:00: Nightmare at the Museum Elijah Wheat hosts a celebration on the Newburgh riverfront with a site-specific reception for the work of artists: Caitlin McCormack & Kat Ryals and their installation "Souvenirs of the Wasteland." Enjoy a dance party in a presentation referencing a museum of unnatural history—a curated glimpse of the world left behind after human intervention. In this installation, microplastics have usurped the Hall of Gems; the Great Pacific Garbage Patch drifts triumphant as a continent—terra firma on a planet mankind has rendered uninhabitable. Libations will be served.

SATURDAY 22 July 2023 // 17:00-18:30 : Museum Tour with artists Caitlin McCormack and Kat Ryals along with writer, Cara Sheffler who contributed wall text for the show, will be present and this event will serve as an 'artists' talk.' Enjoy the behind the scenes intentions of the exhibition while escorted through the site-specific installation. McCormack and Ryals offer a survey of what thrives in the Anthropocene’s wake: mutant lifeforms melded with garbage, eerie radioactive hues, and dark odes to effluvium, ephemera, fast fashion, and immortal trash. All adventure seekers, scavenger-hunt aficionados and playfully curious minds welcome.

Kat Ryals (b. 1988) Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator, and photographer whose work is often influenced by her Cajun roots and Catholic upbringing. Ryals received a BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA & Adv. Certificate in Museum Education from Brooklyn College. She has shown her work nationally, including in a solo booth at SPRING/BREAK Art Show in 2020 and 2022, a two person show at Ortega Y Gasset Projects in 2022, and in recent group exhibitions with ChaShaMa, Ortega Y Gasset Projects, and The Wassaic Project. She has also completed several artist residencies, including the Wassaic Project (2017, 2019, 2022), ChaNorth (2019), Peter Bullough Foundation (2021), and a Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center (2018). She is the Co-founder of the online arts platform, PARADICE PALASE, based out of Brooklyn and was recently the Curator of Art for famed nightlife and culture venues House of X at PUBLIC and House of Yes.

Caitlin McCormack (b. 1988) is a Philadelphia-based fiber artist who has participated in solo and group exhibitions at The Mütter Museum, Museum Rijswijk (NL), Mesa Contemporary Art Museum, The Taubman Museum of Art, Hashimoto Contemporary, The Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Feinkünst Krüger (DEU), Vanilla Gallery (JP), Rhodes Contemporary (UK), Field Projects, MoCA Westport, and SPRING/BREAK Art Show in NYC. Their work has appeared in publications including Juxtapoz, Hyperallergic, Smithsonian, The Guardian, Whitehot Magazine, Fiber Art Now, and Bust Magazine, and their sculptures were the subject of an interview with Jim Cotter for Articulate on PBS. McCormack has worked as an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and Hussian College of Art and Design. They completed artist residencies at ChaNorth (NY), The Peter Bullough Foundation (VA), and The Wassaic Project (NY), and received a Joseph Robert Foundation grant in 2021.

Elijah Wheat Showroom (est. 2015) is a New York-based artist-run gallery and nomadic curatorial experience founded by Carolina Wheat & Liz Nielsen. Currently located in Newburgh, NY on the Hudson River in a 3000 sq/ft Kunsthalle. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, whose creative insight, righteous vision, perceptive being and stylistic voice for trendsetting embody the spirit that the Showroom honors. EWS artists are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions and instigate conversations. We promote the diversity of artists' voices with contemplative messages, daring to consider programming outside a commercial focus aimed to engage as a community space by advocating for visual art’s accessibility to all audiences.

SATURDAY 22 July, 2023// 12:00-16:00 Elijah Wheat will host a Book Release for Alex Yudzon "A Room for the Night" published by Radius Books. The artist will be present, give a short reading and speak about the series "The Road Home." A curated selection of images will be printed, mounted and framed and exhibited in the upstairs gallery. There will be book signing with the available copies for sale along with libations and nibbles. After months of a solo road-trip in 2019 exploring US motels, the artist presents b/w & color photographs (with a diary/book) of his performative installations captured during his stays. All are formally composed with feats of execution.

Elijah Wheat Showroom showcased many of the works in Newburgh, NY May of 2021 coinciding with Platform Art (a David Zwirner online curated marketplace for fine art sales). We are overjoyed to re-introduce a new selection of Yudzon’s photos from the “The Road Home” series. We have selected a more works that are also highlighted in his inaugural monograph and will have them printed, mounted and framed in the upstairs gallery during Upstate Art Weekend and running through September, 2023. Please join us to celebrate this incredible accomplishment.

Here is the PR from the previous iteration of selected works: Elijah Wheat Showroom is delighted to present The Road Home, a photography exhibition by Alex Yudzon.  Creating autonomous photographs from site specific installations and studio-based still lifes, Yudzon’s work draws attention to the way we construct personal space within the context of the modern world. The series of photographs comprising: The Road Home, contemplates America’s “complex relationship to the hotel as a temporary space; a home, a shelter, a safe harbor, an option of last resort, a place to die or disappear, a stepping stone to a better life or a desperate escape from an old one” Yudzon explains.

When Yudzon received a NYFA grant in photography in 2019, he took to the road alone in order to experience, rearrange, catalogue and document unique independently owned hotels, their keepers and their rooms within. Aiming to shoot at least one hotel in all of the 50 contiguous United States, he has curated a collection that exemplifies his creatively disassembled, reassembled, balanced, disheveled, and totem-like monuments to the spaces. He states: “I work while I travel, moving from state to state, room to room, creating a haunting portrait of American hotel rooms and my interventions within them. Each photograph depicts the process of finding and losing a home. Each installation activates the history of hidden activity of all the people that came before me, their dreams, passions, and collective energy.” There is no personal ephemera in the shots, only objects from the rented room.

Hotels reflect the culture of the community they’re based. They represent so much of what we find appealing and disturbing about this country. “They are at once a destination for romance, adventure and self discovery while simultaneously a liminal space for criminal activity, poverty and social isolation.” Yudzon reflects and then asks:

What gives the hotel the freedom to be anything and everything, to evoke such a richness of content? Perhaps, it is the fact that hotels are a home away from home, they provide privacy and anonymity in a world where both are increasingly hard to come by. There is great comfort in the knowledge that all evidence of one's presence will be completely erased upon one's absence. These two factors, presence without permanence, shelter without ownership, protect us from the consequences of daily life and loosens the binds of our imagination allowing for a rich and diverse history of use.

Yudzon shot thousands of images and visited dozens of hotels. Currently in production, a book will showcase more of the imagery adding to Yudzon’s immersive installations and the history of the fading non-corporate American Hotel. His work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally including Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, China International Photography Biennial and the Arles Photo Festival.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is energized to present the multidimensional practice of the Hungarian artist Marton Nemes for his first solo exhibition in New York: “AMPLIFIER” opening 3:00PM to 6:00PM for a private view and 6:00PM to 10:00PM for a Techno Dance party, Saturday 19 November, 2022. The exhibition runs by appointment through 5 March, 2023.

Born of his experiences in the US since his arrival in May 2022, Nemes’s work is, in his own words, ready to “feel it all at once”. Sensitive to multitudes, perceptive and generous in its translations, this is a body of work communicating through a lurid and distinct visual language. Yes, Nemes feels it all at once. Even in the vast metropolis of New York City, he sees how the harmony of building and breaking “recognizes a loneliness”. What does art do in the face of this loneliness? It provides hope, energy, frequency and vibration. What does Nemes’s art do? It emerges from those vibrations; synchronous vibrations of neighboring objects, both alive and unliving. It comes from, and adds to, a resonance of frequencies. Color, light, sound, air, space. These are the avowed elements of his work.

Let's discuss water. A close-up splash hits a canvas, immediately becoming stagnant, frozen as earth; in this mode, it is ready for inspection and sampling. Akin to the stroke left by a master of calligraphy, motion becomes still and the line becomes alive. The moment is capturing a poised body, at once bending to a performative application of the paint. Nemes liquifies a certain pain of loneliness to a rhapsody of samples, and like a dance, he spreads & splashes it with a flow capturing time well-spent as all one. This practice precisely emphasizes a mental evolution. His practice proceeds by vivaciously amplifying an animated movement, whilst in the next moment, freezing it. 

As a viewer's look comes alive, art is alive, dancing like a waterfall splashing on a glassy surface and captured in a liquid stillness on the reflective plexiglass in the “Meta Paintings.” While he details and hones in on this stagnant yet activated flow, Nemes’s process starts with samples from brightly, often neon-like painted abstractions on canvases. He enlarges the strokes, laser-cuts steel then layers them with acute attention to detail. 

Just as a DJ samples, cuts and scratches, sound interjects in these compositions with a fiery heat. The flames coming off the grinding record as it grooves onto the pressed vinyl become a mix providing heat to a body that is ready to dance. There are three layers in a Nemes painting, sculpture or video display, just as there are three layers to a techno track: bass as the calming backstory holding everything together with its consistent rhythm in the subwoofer, mids as the playful conjurer of harmony, and the highs of a tweeter as the atmospheric melody taking flight above it all, like the metal that sparks with a flame, wrapping the splashed-on canvas. 

Air is present too. Coats of paint are applied through the compressor and sprayer with a glossy enamel of ‘car paint’ in a technology that with his control becomes a gradient of colors folding into each other through blustery blowing, pushing and adding a soft focus atop an already fluid canvas. The ventilator forces a wind cognizant of its power, blades dancing to a beat, tuned-in and sensory to the bodies moving around the daring LED wall panel feisty with its video renderings of Nemes’s canvases. The confident combination and contradiction of water and electricity arouses and motivates the audience. 

And then we see the Earth. There it is, present and immense in his steel sculptures. With decisive, assured and dashing lines, Nemes’s sculptures stand erect in the face of any element. The valor and physical power in their stance speaks adjacent to the river, steel driving into the earth and piercing the sky. Beholden to these elements, the landmark works co-mingle with active bodies. The energy wraps in and around the viewer; the music becomes part of them. The “AMPLIFIER” has arrived.

Márton Nemes (b. 1986, Székesfehérvár, Hungary) is a multimedia artist based in London, creating paintings, sculptures, installations and sounds. He received an M.F.A. from Chelsea College of Arts, London in 2018. Initially inspired by the architecture of Budapest, a city that he has spent the majority of his life residing in, Nemes’s practice is rooted in the colourful abstraction of buildings. Since this early work, and after moving to London, Nemes has been heavily influenced by techno subcultures, continuing to create abstracted colourful works whilst attempting to duplicate the atmosphere and experience of rave culture, creating a disintegration and rearrangement of the pictorial state. Made using a range of materials, Nemes’s artworks are eager to expand and bend, referencing the escapist counter cultures associated with rave scenes, creating multisensory, diverse experiences.

Elijah Wheat Showroom (est. 2015) is a New York-based artist-run gallery and nomadic curatorial experience founded by Carolina Wheat & Liz Nielsen. Currently located in Newburgh, NY on the Hudson River in a 3000 sq/ft Kunsthalle. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, whose creative insight, righteous vision, perceptive being and stylistic voice for trendsetting embody the spirit that the Showroom honors. EWS artists are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions and instigate conversations. We promote the diversity of artists' voices with contemplative messages while advocating for visual art’s accessibility to all audiences.

Intersect Palm Springs 2023 was a phenomenal journey. Showcasing abstractions of both 2D and 3D materials and forms, Elijah Wheat brought works from four NY based artists that we’ve been working with over the years. Our booth looked tight and the response was very positive. We were so honored to carry these artists to the West Coast and hope that the engagement was impactful to the Palm Springs community. Artists and their bios are listed below.

Alex Yudzon (1977 Moscow, USSR), is a New York based visual artist whose work blurs the line between photography, painting, sculpture and performance. Creating autonomous photographs from site specific installations and studio based still lifes, Yudzon’s work draws attention to the way we construct personalspace within the context of the modern world. From 1997-1999 he earned a Bachelors of Arts in Painting: Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, UK after 1995-1997 study at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Yudzon’s work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally including Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, China International Photography Biennial and the Arles Photo Festival, & NADA Miami. Yudzon was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in the fall of 2017. In 2018 he had a solo show with Slag Gallery in Brooklyn and a 2 person show with Rick Wester Fine Art in New York. In 2019 Yudzon was awarded a NYFA grant for photography and some of the work made from the grant was exhibited at Elijah Wheat Showroom in 2021 entitled, “The Road Home.” His work has also been included in Contemporary Performance, a museum wide exhibition at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts.

Márton Nemes (b. 1986, Székesfehérvár, Hungary) is a multimedia artist based in London, creating paintings, sculptures, installations and sounds. He received an M.F.A. from Chelsea College of Arts, London in 2018. Initially inspired by the architecture of Budapest, a city that he has spent the majority of his life residing in, Nemes’s practice is rooted in the colourful abstraction of buildings. Since this early work, and after moving to London, Nemes has been heavily influenced by techno subcultures, continuing to create abstracted colourful works whilst attempting to duplicate the atmosphere and experience of rave culture, creating a disintegration and rearrangement of the pictorial state. Made using a range of materials, Nemes’s artworks are eager to expand and bend, referencing the escapist counter cultures associated with rave scenes, creating multisensory, diverse experiences. He is currently short-listed to represent Hungary for the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Will Hutnick (b. 1985, Manhasset, NY) is an artist and curator based in Wassaic, NY. He creates topographical relics that record and reinvent his physical and sensory surroundings. With a nod to queer ecology, Hutnick’s paintings disrupt the perception of a binary worldview that eschews the inherent interconnection of sexuality, landscape and lived experience.

Hutnick received his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY) and his B.A. from Providence College (Providence, RI). He is a 2021 NYSCA/ NYFA Artist Fellow in Painting, as well as a grant recipient from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation in 2017 and the Foundation for Contemporary Art in2015. Recent exhibitions include: Hollis Taggart (Southport, CT), Soft Times Gallery (San Francisco, CA), 1969 Gallery (New York, NY), Sugarlift (New York, NY), Geary Contemporary (Millerton, NY), Soho Works (Brooklyn), Satellite Art Club (Brooklyn), Craven Contemporary (Kent, CT) and Collar Works (Troy, NY). Hutnick has curated exhibitions at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Trestle Projects, Pratt Institute, Wassaic Project and Standard Space, among others. He has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works, Soaring Gardens Artists’ Retreat, DNA Artist Residency, Wassaic Project, Vermont Studio Center, and a curator-in-residence at Benaco Arte and Trestle Projects. From 2015-20, Hutnick was one of the Co-Directors of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run curatorial collective and exhibition space in Brooklyn. He is currently the Director of Artistic Programming at the Wassaic Project, a nonprofit organization that uses art and art education to foster positive social change.

Ben Godward refers to American material culture as a starting point for his formal and conceptual investigation into the notion of superabundance. His three Hex sculptures made of poured urethane resin demonstrate an artistic process that is complicit with excess. The works’ subtle and sensuous colors for example derive from the literal pouring out or “profusio” of resin and other industrial materials.

Godward’s work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Sean Scully Studio, NY; Rick Wester Fine Art, NY; Slag Gallery, NY; The Front, LA; Jonald Dudd, NY; Norte Maar, NY; Klemm Gallery, MI; Way Out, NY; Centotto Gallery, NY; Storefront Collection, Berlin; Franconia Sculpture Park, MN; Sardine, NY; Lesley Heller, NY; The Laundromat Gallery, NY; Pocket Utopia, NY; Famous Accountants, NY; Orgy Park, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY.

Ben Godward is based in Brooklyn, NY and Marseille, France. He received a BFA in sculpture from Alfred University in 2004 and an MFA in sculpture from the University at Albany in 2007.

Elijah Wheat Showroom presents Will Hutnick's most ambitious solo exhibition to date. Press Play & Record opens September 10th, kicking off our autumn programming in the raw kunsthalle location on the Hudson River in Newburgh, NY. 

Showcased will be a creative display of Hutnick’s surfaced-based abstract 'paintings' varying in scale and incorporating elements of the locale: rubbings of cinder block walls, dried flowers, plucked live foliage, and other site-specific elements. Hutnick highlights scale and repetitive patterns within Elijah Wheat’s current architecture. Visiting the gallery space within the last year, the artist's marks have been carefully printed on an expansive raw canvas prior to the paint’s application and eventual stretching. Weaving in and out of recognizable leaves and wall rubbings are undulating gradients creating radically surreal landscapes. Hutnick’s distorted linear mark making in his paintings, or “topographical relics,” nods to a queer ecology and disrupts the binary worldview. 

Hutnick emphasizes “in this new, queer, futuristic landscape, nothing is as stable as it seems.” As an avid fiction reader, the artist investigates personal artifacts and stories through a traveling line: following, bending, leading, straightening, winding, fading, saturating and impacting its environment—and the canvas. Hutnick executes various printmaking processes on unprimed canvases. He also references a world in these paintings that emerge through idiographic mark making providing a time-stamp of place. 

A critical questioning of identity-based logics of representation, sociality, and sexuality, seen in Hutnick’s titles, is also a means to redress this work in architectural and spatial theory that lives under the title of "Queer Space.” This discourse of spatial identification — in a flat but radically vibrant playground of surface-based often monochromatic depth — is incapable of attending to those moments and places which defy the impulses of representation, and are worthy of being rendered precisely because of this defiance. This is where a minor architecture emerges, presenting the fictional yet permeable locations that queers have had to fabricate for joy, for safety, and for mental health. 

Hutnick is also an avid runner, practices mindfulness and has actively played the cello since grade school. These co-practices embed the endurance for the ambition of playing with scale, a fine-tuned focus of self-reflection and a visual lyricism to his skillfulness in painting. Hutnick’s most recent works record and reinvent physical and sensory surroundings, alluding to an ethereal view of the sky with ideas of steadfast constellations and elusive cloud formations inferring movement to a spiritual, or mindful view of space. Diving into these reinvented abstractions, and ‘queer landscapes’ one is enraptured. For, as he states: “In this new, queer, futuristic landscape, nothing is as stable as it seems. The internal logic of each painting slowly unravels if you let it.”

The opening reception with the artist will be on September 10th, from 15:00—18:00, we invite you to join us at 195 Front St., Newburgh, NY 12550. 

Will Hutnick (b. 1985, Manhasset, NY) is an artist and curator based in Wassaic, NY. He creates topographical relics that record and reinvent his physical and sensory surroundings. With a nod to queer ecology, Hutnick’s paintings disrupt the perception of a binary worldview that eschews the inherent interconnection of sexuality, landscape and lived experience. 

Hutnick received his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY) and his B.A. from Providence College (Providence, RI). He is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Painting, as well as a grant recipient from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation in 2017 and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2015. Recent exhibitions include: Hollis Taggart (Southport, CT), Soft Times Gallery (San Francisco, CA), 1969 Gallery (New York, NY), Sugarlift (New York, NY), Geary Contemporary (Millerton, NY), Soho Works (Brooklyn), Satellite Art Club (Brooklyn), Craven Contemporary (Kent, CT) and Collar Works (Troy, NY). Hutnick has curated exhibitions at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Trestle Projects, Pratt Institute, Wassaic Project and Standard Space, among others. He has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works, Soaring Gardens Artists’ Retreat, DNA Artist Residency, Wassaic Project, Vermont Studio Center, and a curator-in-residence at Benaco Arte and Trestle Projects. From 2015-20, Hutnick was one of the Co-Directors of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run curatorial collective and exhibition space in Brooklyn. He is currently the Director of Artistic Programming at the Wassaic Project, a nonprofit organization that uses art and art education to foster positive social change.

Elijah Wheat Showroom (est. 2015) is a New York-based artist-run gallery and nomadic curatorial experience founded by Carolina Wheat & Liz Nielsen. Currently located in Newburgh, NY on the Hudson River in a 3000 sq/ft Kunsthalle. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, whose creative insight, righteous vision, perceptive being and stylistic voice for trendsetting embody the spirit that the Showroom honors. EWS artists are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions and instigate conversations. We promote the diversity of artists' voices with contemplative messages while advocating for visual art’s accessibility to all audiences.

IAN MCMAHON “Momentary Event [41.511 N -75.004 E]”

JUNE 4-JULY 25, 2022

On the shores of the Hudson River in Newburgh, NY, an historic building formerly active as the Newburgh Steam Mill (and later as the cutting room and tannery of Regal Bag), is now the site of Elijah Wheat Showroom. For the month of June/July culminating for Upstate Art Weekend 2022, the sculptor, designer and performance artist Ian McMahon has cast a full-scale plaster theater curtain on site. It’s soft opening was on June 4th (Newburgh Illuminated), with an artist reception on June 18th. The sculpture as a finale, is engineered to be destroyed for a live audience at 7PM Sunday, July 24, 2022. Tickets will be required for entry (there is a limited amount due to space) and available at this link here.

The cavernous architecture of the Elijah Wheat Showroom’s 3000sq/ft space becomes a stage for both McMahon and material, temporarily housing a 2,500-pound free-standing plaster curtain of graceful drapes, pleats, and folds. The work is inseparably entwined with the space: growing from the concrete floor through a laborious casting process conducted by the artist. Directed by his hand, it will crash into dust against the poured concrete floors.

Prior to the climactic destruction, audiences have an opportunity to behold the imposing monolith: suspended out of time, balanced delicately between the frantic disarray of construction and the controlled crescendo of deconstruction, a monument to the impermanence of the corporeal. When observed from the front, the elegant flow of fabric frozen mid-billow presents a facade of stoic solidity, a silent and looming presence whose solitary mass implies immaculate materialization. Then, as audiences step 'backstage' they are invited to explore the marks of its making, the drips and cracks traversing the crusty layers of the casting process.

McMahon rigorously collaborates with his chosen material, working intimately with it to find a form that relies exclusively on its unique integrity while simultaneously exceeding collective preconceptions. Thereby, he renders an earnestly spectacular experience. It is in this duality that the work transcends its physical lifespan. As viewers contend with the neck-craning creation, they unknowingly deny its inevitable end. As the 45-foot-long and 17-foot-high sculpture proudly flaunts its fragility, it yields a disorienting liminality. The work contains its impending collapse yet also will stand, confronting an audience with its massiveness. This tension is made manifest by the precarious pendulum poised before the curtain in the tressed ceiling. The pole is primed with potential energy paralleling the breathless anticipation of the onlookers. At one swoop, it shatters in an instant of contact between these two actors: the skillful plaster curtain ceases to be, and in its place, collective shards can be carried away, echoing the memory of this Momentary Event.

Playing with the performative components of architectonic construction, Ian McMahon creates monumental action-based works that imbed themselves in place. Scale and physicality are suspended between art and architecture; inviting experiential memory and material discovery to evoke a haptic response. Although driven by a material obsession, he challenges the assumptions of preservation by presenting an experience as object. Both the construction and deconstruction of a work reveal the extreme physical limits of maker and material.

McMahon lives and works in Newburgh, NY. He is the recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, NYFA Artist Fellowship, and Virginia Groot Fellowship. He received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and BFA from Alfred University. Exhibitions include: Crane Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Pierogi: Boiler Room Brooklyn; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Omaha, NE; Suyama Space, Seattle WA; DeCordova Museum Lincoln, MA.; and Tang Contemporary, Beijing, China

Elijah Wheat Showroom (est. 2015) is a New York-based artist-run gallery and nomadic curatorial experience founded by Carolina Wheat & Liz Nielsen. Currently positioned in Newburgh, NY on the Hudson River in a 3000 sq/ft Kunsthalle. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, whose creative insight, righteous vision, perceptive being and stylistic voice for trendsetting embody the spirit that the Showroom honors. EWS artists are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions and instigate conversations. We promote the diversity of artists' voices with contemplative messages while a advocating for visual art’s accessibility to all audiences.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is gleeful to present the textile work of Hope Wang at the Future Fair, May 3-7, 2022. Hope Wang uses hand-weaving, screen-printing, painting, and photography to reproduce architectural “scars” and patterns from common construction materials. Contending with sloppy traces of human activity around sites of industrial labour, her work references building facades that have been eroded, redacted, or defaced. Her weavings consider the ways architectural spaces become artifacts of memory, and thus, how spaces themselves become palimpsests of meaning. She likes to playfully infer that she creates geo-caches of public places she has cried in.

Oscillating between grieving and designing elaborate inside jokes with herself, she didactically creates through meticulous trompe l’oeil screenprints, paintings, and weavings. By focusing on the projected desires born out of that kind of material mimicry, the ‘codes’ of spatial authority, and the personification of our structural environment, Wang uses these representational, non-figurative methods to examine conditions of alienation. 

Considering physically and emotionally taxing manual labour roles, Wang uses these repetitive processes like screen-printing and hand-weaving to package observations of human activity around industrial sites of labour and architectural remnants. While much of these are merely surface level observations about textile and construction industries, Wang also addresses pay inequity and the arbitrary value of labour under capitalism.

Head low and looking down at city sidewalks, Wang reflects in the marks leftover from human’s movement. This public space compels the visual structure of Hope Wang’s interpretive weavings. Yet, a viewer will be confronted with codes of authority: taped off boundaries, traffic cones directing space in parking lots (turned testing grounds in Quarantine), entry/trespassing signs, etc. Throughout 2020 business shutterings, the widespread vacant window fronts barricaded with spray-painted plywood, are among the keen replications and visual depictions of oppressive public structures (and failures) ultimately informing Wang’s most recent textile works where bodies are conspicuously absent, only scars remain.

Hope Wang is a Chicago-based artist, arts facilitator, and poet.

Contending with sloppy traces of human activity around sites of industrial labour, her work considers the ways architectural spaces become artifacts of memory. She likes to joke that she creates geo-caches of public places she has cried in. She hosts and operates LMRM, a floor loom rental studio for Chicago fiber artists. Wang is also a co-organizer of Chicago Textile Week 2019 and 2021, Chicago's first textile exposition featuring a week-long program of events highlighting work spanning interiors, architecture, fine arts, and fashion. She received her BFA (2018) from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a 2021 recipient of the gener8tor Art Accelerator Program Grant. She has attended the Digital Weaving Lab Residency at Praxis Fiber Workshop; The Weaving Mill WARP Residency; and Spudnik Press Cooperative Fellowship.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is joyful to present the objects d’art of Mark Sengbusch at Intersect Art and Design Fair in Palm Springs this February. An array of skillfully stained and assembled birch plywood sculptures will command the space and dip one into a world where sci-fi begins with a brutalist sensibility and a Japanese woodworking charm.

Formally, Sengbusch’s sculptures, relief paintings and wall tiles are a subversion of Brutalist Architecture. The Brutalist sand-beaten buildings of the deserts in the Middle East are like playthings of giants for Sengbusch. The love of Science Fiction, city life, video games, early anime and international travel all mash together in these objects. Japanese woodworking, specifically in temples and shrines, have also been an impactful inspiration. The standalone sculptures fit together with no glue or hardware. With a mantra of “No Fuss”, the artist keeps the design simple.

The “Daisy Chain” is an airy sculpture consisting of just two shapes: the flowers and the connecting chain links. Flattened, the tessellation emerges, referencing graphic design, pattern and decoration. “This work attempts a fusion between architecture and painting,” Sengbusch adds. While the jubilant and thoughtful colors of the works evoke the 70’s & 80’s, where simple analogue children’s toys influenced his upbringing as well as the decades’ fashion and amusements. The titles of the works reflect this.

“Raindrop 43” is a character in Isaac Asimov's book Prelude to Foundation. She resides in “The Empire” that consists of 25 million worlds. She offers another, from another planet, a taste of rare unsweetened raw dainties, which is a light candy. No two dainties taste alike. Raindrop 43 says "It's a good thing. It teaches you the evanescence of things of the world.” The sophisticated and unique color combinations all nod to a painter exploring space as he references his treasured hobbies in shapes that are alike, yet with differing hues.

Displayed on hand-crafted shelving and plinths in an installation Sengbusch’s work intends to bring aesthetic pleasure promoting a reminiscent, yet retro modernism.

Mark Sengbusch received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2008 and his BFA from College for Creative Studies in 2002 after a year at Central St. Martin’s School of Art in London in 2001. He has participated in residencies at Vermont Studio Center and has been awarded the Milton and Sally Avery Foundation Fellowship to attend Byrdcliffe Arts Colony Residency in 2019 & 2021. His works have been exhibited at the NY Armory Show twice with Detroit’s David Klein Gallery. He has also shown with Bushwick’s Transmitter gallery, Best Western Gallery in Brooklyn, and with Hilde in Los Angeles. This is the first presentation with Elijah Wheat Showroom at Intersect’s Palm Springs Art Fair. Sengbusch lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

AZIKIWE MOHAMMED

UNTITLED, ART MIAMI BEACH NOV 29-DEC 4, 2021

Moments Before Seating

Elijah Wheat Showroom is beaming at the presentation of Azikiwe Mohammed at the Untitled, Art Miami fair in 2021. Mohammed makes objects, paintings, videos, and installations that emphasize inclusion. From his nomadic New Davonhaime Food Bank to The Black Painter’s Academy, he surrounds his witnesses with images and productions with hopes for Black prosperity.

The uplifting bright colors Azikiwe uses to execute his paintings are co-mingled with serious scenes of food. Then, he boldly explores helicopter searches and raging fires that have he’s personally witnessed in 2020 and 2021. His work creates an awareness that travels beyond just inclusion, inviting his audience into intimate participation. Rich warm violet walls with golden pin stripes wrap the booth while faux-wood flooring clings to the concrete. Wall paintings exemplify a setting for interchange, comfort and nostalgia. Painted mirrors, with found gilded frames, hang and display a joyful floral arrangement or picnic, interwoven with the viewer’s visage. Retrofitted televisions will host lo-fi single-channel videos containing dreamy landscapes, scrolling psychedelically. They compile ritual-like found audio with cries and cheer alongside overlays of natural field recordings. Perhaps they are sounds of joy or of a contemplative soul searching for meaning that emerges from the audio tracks. Text in the videos provide insightful offerings while hosting poetic scrolling of poetic thoughts electronically manipulated in the artist’s voice.

Iterations of spaces and places that Azikiwe Mohammed activates steadfastly include service to the community while he encourages accessibility for all audiences. An artist with a broad media and social practice conjures an Untitled, Art fair atmosphere that intends to lift and empower a Black experience for the people of Miami. Namely, the artist negotiates public programming that brings his “New Davonhaime Food Bank” mission to the beach, finding a way to include and incorporate an invitation to participate in helping feed the people of Miami with a simple raffle. As a longtime educator and community advocate, his mission belongs to all people.

Whether painting sandwiches, roses, pies, or burning portraits, Mohammed instigates a query on living space and how art is not only collected, but presented in a home and aims to understand how it feels to love and to own. He establishes how works can be included in any home, yet how it accentuates a Black home especially.

The safe space Azikiwe Mohammed create’s with Elijah Wheat Showroom invites a community to chill, to reflect and to not be too weary of found objects encasing valuable works of art. Whether carefully placing ephemera, philosophizing or including vague silhouettes, he records and shares Black stories. The comforts of living with highfalutin art, however, stray from traditional white-walls, pristine monitors and custom frames. We invite further conversation about how we can work together to enjoy an exhibition as an experience; not just a commercial booth at Untitled, Art Miami Beach, 2021.

Azikiwe Mohammed’s artwork has been shown in galleries both nationally and internationally. A 2005 graduate of Bard College, where he studied photography and fine arts, Mohammed received the Rauschenberg Artists Fund Grant in 2020, the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2016, and the Art Matters Grant in 2015. He lives in New York and currently has his studio at Mana Contemporary.

Mohammed has presented a number of solo exhibitions in venues including Elijah Wheat Showroom, Newburgh, NY; the Knockdown Center, Maspeth, New York; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Ace Hotel Chicago, Illinois; IDIO Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL and Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, NY; as well as multiple solo offerings at Spring Break Art Show, New York. He has participated in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Queens, New York; Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, California, David Kordansky, L.A.; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others. He is an alumnus of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York, and Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, New Jersey. His work has been featured extensively in publications and magazines, including The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, VICE, I-D, Artforum, Forbes, BOMB and Hyperallergic.

Elijah Wheat Showroom (est. 2015) is a New York-based artist-run gallery and nomadic curatorial experience founded by Carolina Wheat & Liz Nielsen. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, whose creative insight, righteous vision, perceptive being and stylistic voice for trendsetting compose the spirit that the Showroom honors. EWS artists are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions and instigate critical conversations while also promoting art’s accessibility outside of a purely commercial focus.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is delighted to present “Tender Temper”, a solo exhibition of ceramic sculptures by Ashley Lyon. Inhabiting a Kunsthalle-like space on the Hudson River, Lyon’s show celebrates a lusciousness of flesh and intimacy, visualized through the ever-changing maternal body. These are works in a complicated relationship with sentimentality; enlarged domestic objects and cropped body sections reference support and transformation, while swollen breasts - presented as a bench - an enlarged leg - become a tree trunk- and ropes propped in an unspecified readiness elude easy meaning. A mashup of sex, body, and baby, the naked weight and labor of young motherhood’s emotional and physical intensity is laid bare.

Lyon’s newest work seeks to mine the incredibly rich and complex territory of the changes - to the physical and physiological body - inherent in the process of becoming a mother. She considers the “simultaneity of the mother's experience, at once breathtaking, beautiful, confusing, and grueling.” These are words and pieces which embody Alexandra Sacks’ term “matrescense”, the birth of a mother, the profound transition comparable to that experienced in the time of adolescence; at once the body and the mind are assailed by contradictory emotions, ambivalent perspectives. Motherhood, these pieces remind us, rarely matches up to expectations, whether those expectations are internalized or exposed from without, by society and all its norms. To wit: a sculpted hand holds - catches - a layer cake in the moment of its collapse. Sparked by the folly of a child’s first birthday party, this piece at the entrance of the gallery sets the scene for the deeply personal and yet sharply universal explorations which fill the space with this artist’s unstoppable ambition.

Shaping these ceramic works are an obsession with prescription and an intricately constructed theory of the real. We are met with detailed replicas of objects traditionally soft in nature and possessed of intense tactile and nostalgic energies. Lyon’s sculptures are at once atemporal representations of everyday items and uncanny beings which seize at lived reality through a storytelling of the textured and the idiosyncratic. Between 2015 and 2017, the artist’s investigations probed the complexity of the emotional security on offer in the home, particularly through the histories layered in objects of comfort. Since becoming a mother in 2018, Lyon has pursued a powerful new direction in her work; a return, in sculpture, to the primacy of the human figure, but with a child - and a new self - as the muse.

And at the heart of it all is clay; its physicality, its evocative depths. Through her care and closeness for her material, Lyon makes it possible for the viewer’s experience to oscillate between the metaphorical and the material, the suggested and the specific. These are pieces which ask questions of the realities we construct for ourselves, which examine the relationship between empathic response, haptic perception, and psychological projection.

Ashley Lyon (b.1983, Palm Springs, CA) lives and works in Newburgh, NY. She received a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Washington and an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from the Virginia Commonwealth University. Lyon has been awarded residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the European Ceramic WorkCentre and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She received Elizabeth Greenshields Grants in 2011 and 2014. Her work has been exhibited at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; Hunter College, New York, NY; SUNY Cortland, Cortland, NY; The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH; Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, Alfred, NY and Jane Lombard Gallery, New York, NY.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is pumped up to present Frances Waite’s third solo exhibition “Here You Come Again”, showing August 27 through October 10, 2021 with an opening reception Saturday, 28 from 3PM-6PM.

Waite’s photorealistic graphic drawings are shot through with remnants of the past in style, theme and subject, bearing a stark and affecting witness to the agency of the subject. Using stock online photography and vintage snapshots purchased in bulk on eBay as her starting points for many of these pieces, Waite creates a portrait of the artist as seen while seeing, confrontational while gentle, brash while intimate; pushing and pulling between the public and the private, between memory and erasure. At the same time, an impersonal impulse seeks to bring the work far from its origin, rendering that origin source removed and disenfranchised, even while an immeasurable emotional meaning remains in play.

We consider in these drawings the careful eradication of a heavy smudge, or the forgiveness of an impression of difficult memory. Lines emerge as the works build something from something else, leaving a trace on heavy splotches or memorializing a found photograph through the deletion of graphite strokes. Letting things go, crossing them out, being finished, all gone, all done...Waite’s art delicately exposes the hand, thereby removing the work of the hands altogether.

This definitive style defies portrait filters or face-enhancing software. Raw and exposed, the narrative inhabits each title. Whether an image is fake or fantasy, the object is real. When focused on rendering real-life intimate moments of strangers, the subjects stray from coyness and engage the viewer, aware of the power held behind a lens. Incorporating playfulness, figures emerge in an ultimate confrontation. Permission is futile; control becomes allegory.

The drawings are initially exposed and introduced to her followers online, mostly escaping sensitive content parameters or censorship. However, subverting the patriarchal gaze, Waite attends the space with an interpretive hand, coercing a mixed reality that each time awaits acknowledgement. Pressed by an internal angst, she addresses the unrealistic representation and real-life tension engendered by social media, with its oxymoronic presentations of feminism. Whether a dick is being squashed by an androgynous foot, mischievous phallic critters linger in gestural lines, or a dildo acts as a gun in a self-referential portrait, Waites in these drawings fervently implies vulnerability and spins it into strength.

Frances Waite (b.1993, Rochester, NY. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA). Waite graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 2015 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Drawing. Solo Exhibitions: Hot Water, Cob, London (2021); Escape Fantasy (OVR), Cob, London (2020); Slap the Void, Elijah Wheat Showroom, Brooklyn, New York (2018); My Girl, Elijah Wheat Showroom, Brooklyn, New York (2016). Group Exhibitions include New Discretions, Funny Games, Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial, Western Exhibitions, Chicago, Illinois (2021); Female Trouble, Western Exhibitions, Chicago, Illinois, (2020); Island, Ramp Gallery, London, United Kingdom, (2020); Graduation, Good Mother Gallery, Oakland, California, (2019); The Anti Art Fair with Elijah Wheat Showroom, London, United Kingdom, (2019); Here for the Right Reasons (Curated by Janie Korn & Artie Niederhoffer), Sleep Center, New York (2017); Nasty Women, Knockdown Center, Brooklyn, New York (2017); Tie His Hands Gently (Curated by Aurel Schmidt), Romeo, New York, New York (2017); No Empty Vessels, Gildar Gallery, Denver, Colorado (2016); Her Mojo, ASH Art & Space, Long Island City, New York (2016); Phantasmagoria, Kunsthalle Projects, Brooklyn, New York (2015).

We will be showcasing drawing works of Frances Waite and Clive Murphy.

The September, Future Fair celebrates its first in-person exhibition in tandem with the reopening of New York City. Occupying nearly 10,000 square feet of the ground floor of Chelsea’s iconic Starrett-Lehigh Building (600 W. 27th Street) the fair will host a VIP viewing on Thursday, September 9th and will be open to the public September 10th - 12th, 2021. Future Fair will position 34 exhibitors within 16 bespoke exhibition rooms. The fair encourages cross-exhibitor collaboration, with several exhibitors partnering with a curated concept to encompass their shared room.

We will be showcasing two solo shows in Newburgh, NY: Ashley Lyon “Tender Temper” and Frances Waite “Here You Come Again.” *see more on their pages on our exhibitions drop-down menu.

After reviewing over a hundred applications, UPSTATE ART WEEKEND is thrilled to announce its second expanded edition, taking place from August 27-29, 2021, which incorporates sixty one participants in the Hudson Valley. This three-day self-directed, accessible event connects tourists and locals alike, with art and the outdoors, celebrating the cultural vibrancy of Upstate New York.

In the coming months the full program and official map, the later produced in partnership with Chronogram, will be provided for those wanting to safely explore sculpture parks, museums, galleries, artists’ studios, residencies, public artworks and creative projects situated either side of the Hudson River, spanning six counties.

“UPSTATE ART WEEKEND is about community, collaboration, art and the outdoors, which are essential to our well-being. We are thrilled the event has grown so much and cannot wait to connect more visitors with the arts in the Hudson Valley”, said Helen Toomer.

Founded in 2020 by Helen Toomer of STONELEAF RETREAT to celebrate the cultural vibrancy of Upstate New York, UPSTATE ART WEEKEND connects people and places, building a community that not only visits for the weekend, but explores the Hudson Valley throughout the year.

Last year UPSTATE ART WEEKEND increased awareness of and encouraged safe visitor engagement with 23 art spaces in the Hudson Valley.

‘“This collective creative capital is giving the Hudson Valley a reputation as an essential place to visit, explore, and invest in,” says John P. Stern, president of the Storm King Art Center, the outdoor sculpture garden that’s a leading presence in the region. The weekend of events “certainly underscores how much culture has grown in our area, the mutual support that organizations offer each other,” he says’. -Artnet News

‘For residents and visitors alike, the Hudson Valley has long been a bastion of impressive outdoor art, be that at well-known locations like Storm King Art Center or emerging epicenters like Art Omi. UPSTATE ART WEEKEND aims to encourage unity between them all.’ -COOLHUNTING

“Our pop-up location in our Newburgh studio got so much online (and real life SD masked) attention during UPAW, despite the pandemic. The location is off the beaten path akin to a 'speakeasy' art-spot, yet folks came far and wide to experience the exhibition of Azikiwe Mohammed and his off-site installation at a different location in the city with our collaborator, Strongroom.” -Lina and Liz, Partners, Elijah Wheat Showroom, 2020 Participant

“This wonderful celebration of art and culture in the Hudson Valley region comes at the perfect moment, when finally, after months of closure, so many significant organizations and institutions are able to welcome visitors back.” Vittorio Calabrese, Director, Magazzino Italian Art, 2020 Participant

“Amazing initiative after such a lonely time.” Paola Oxoa, Founder, Mother Gallery, 2020 Participant

“Upstate Art Weekend was the doctor's orders in what is arguably a challenging and paradigm shifting moment. We were thrilled to participate in an INCLUSIVE, community-minded, grassroots programming such as what took place this year. It gave us hope for the future, for Upstate, and for new ways of bringing art to a larger audience.” -Team Starlite, Starlite Motel, 2020 Participant

UPSTATE ART WEEKEND was founded in 2020 by Helen Toomer and is powered by STONELEAF RETREAT..

Elijah Wheat Showroom is honored to present the New York debut of Nashville based multimedia artist, Marlos E’van. The exhibition’s title, ghostDope references a fictitious, exaggerated amount of an illicit substance that comes from testimony of unlikely ‘witnesses’ that cooperate for plea deals in the Federal Justice System. Largely, the indictment comes with little to no tangible evidence and the ‘ghost’ triggers a larger sentence due to an offense that crosses the threshold of a statutory minimum. The notorious federal ‘War on Drugs’ cruelly persisted by prosecuting already marginalized populations and fed the prison industrial complex by mass incarcerating individuals of both large and small scale drug busts. These ghosts lie to the jury, and unjustly are meant to take lives away from society, communities and families. Now, how appropriate to discuss these injustices, as NY state (and others) are legalizing cannabis, the inconsistencies of BIPOC opportunities of ownership are futile in a broken system of regulations and policies.

“If somebody asks me what ghostDope is, I’d tell’em it's everything. ghostDope is an acknowledgement from different perspectives within the Dope game. Which includes: the injustices, the highs, the lows, and the metaphorical idealism that arranges structures like oppression, hate, & power as forms of dope— Addictive in every measure.“ E’van explains. Through a personal history, and a community driven social practice, the artist explores scenes from his memory, and from other’s histories offering inspiring stories of love, resilience, death, and overcoming addiction.

E’van’s paintings are often diaristic, with charged scenes such as “Crack Polaroid” where a childhood memory haunts the canvas. His raw execution with acrylic on unstretched and up-cycled fabrics hang from found boards offering a vision of ingenuity while the narrative subject matter eerily lives, like the painting, “Blank House”. Other works like "Tha Living 2 Tha Dead” or “Somewhere There’s a Lil Old Lady Putting Up Her House 2 Get Her Son/Grandson Outta Jail” plainly describe in text what’s uniquely represented in symbols, bold color and thick marks in an unfinished yet stylized environment. Alongside paintings is a “Party Pack” of controlled and subscription based soft sculptures of oversized pills, further exploiting the dangers of ‘white coat’ drug dealers, as Doctors and big Pharma’s role in the opioid crises, among other insidious abuses of power.

Works will be exhibited in Newburgh, NY and open on June 19th with a reception with the artist from 3:00PM-6:00PM. The show will run Saturdays and Sundays noon-6PM, until August 1st, 2021 and by appointment.

Marlos E’van (b. 1988 Tupelo, MS) Nashville based artist, E’van interweaves different mediums such as painting, performance, and filmmaking to create worlds in which their art recollects black histories: joy, pain, celebration, sorrow, and complex emotions from reenacted scenes of American histories. A subtle vernacular in expression has caught recognition from such publications such as Hyperallergic and Native Magazine. In addition to their work as an artist, E’van co-founded/co-designs M-SPAR, McGruder Social Practice Artist Residency out of the McGruder Center in North Nashville.   Working as an educator in a hard-hit redlined Nashville neighborhood, E’van actively listens to his pupils, gathering stories that also inform E’van’s paintings. Their own life creates first-person narratives in paintings targeting marginalization, stemming from a queer black history rooted in his home state of Mississippi. Marlos E’van’s work is included in multiple Southern collections, has been shown in VA, TN, GA, and NY.  He’s been awarded the Mellon Foundation for McGruder, and the Metro Arts Thrive grant. He received his B.F.A. from Watkins College of Art, Nashville, TN.

A group of experimental animations addressing the spiritual and digital body's relationship to our Earthly forms, and our terrestrial environment. The entire screening is 75 minutes.

Elijah Wheat Showroom presents an experimental animation program that will first screen on June 19, at 7:00PM EST in a large scale historic Kunsthalle building on the Newburgh Hudson River waterfront, with a party to follow. 


Next screenings are Sat, July 17 Doors @8PM and Sun, Aug 1, Doors at 2PM.

Showcasing artists:

Lilli Carré + David Sprecher

Rob Carter

Maya Edelman

Omer Gal

Lauren Gregory + Mr. Jimmy Rowland

Victoria Keddie

Joseph Kraska

Sinan Tuncay

Tianyi Zhang


The title is a poetic term for 'free bodies.’ We trust it is appropriate for a post-vaccinated summer-solstice gathering of artists creating animated work to be alongside their audience. Urging a freaky exploration of a future astral body, these animated works call for a curious interpretation of ‘grounding’ or feeling ‘grounded’. It’s also a cry for play, dance and free corporal mobility. The compilation asks the viewer to contemplate their space on land and urges movement to engage with other unearthly, or earthly bodies.

Most of the shorts are 'nature' focussed: stop-frame animations of painted water moving along the Hudson River (Gregory), crumbling mountains and landscapes manipulated from paper (Carter) or with a gender-bending paper-doll stop motion animation (Tuncay). Understanding a relationship to light after a Chernobyl incident, (Edelman) explores a body’s relationship with luminous fractals. There is an interactive dance video similar to the Dance Dance Revolution game from the 90s (Zhang), and an upbeat music video about productivity in quarantine featuring Peppré Ann (Kraska)--plus an animated interactive sound work based on Newburgh's geo-location of space junk currently floating (above the gallery) streamed by NASA in space (Keddie). On the terrain, fairies are assisting a body lost in the midst of a forest (Gal) and alas, our efforts age, melt and freeze, molding an environment we never expected (Carré).

Screenings after June 19 will be arranged privately through October 10, 2021. We welcome viewers after the initial screening however, encourage participation June 19 at 7:00PM. Please reserve your space on the dance floor, our astral bodies are going all night. Here is the link to reserve Tix for "Unfettered Corps" **Screening time is approximately 75 minutes, doors open at 7PM, show begins at 7:30PM with one intermission running until 9:00PM. Dance party to follow screening, please join us in celebration of Juneteenth, Father’s Day and the upcoming summer solstice!

This show coincides with the solo exhibition (in another gallery space located on the third floor of 195 Front Street, building #9), “ghostDope” by Nashville based artist, Marlos E’van.

Lilli Carré (+ David Sprecher (sound))Lilli Carré is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Los Angeles, working in experimental animation, ceramics, print, and textile. Her films have shown in festivals throughout the US and abroad, including the Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, 25FPS, the European Media Arts Festival, New Chitose Animation Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. She is the Co-Director of the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, held annually in LA, Chicago, and NY since 2010. She has created comics and illustrations for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Best American Comics, and published several books of comics with Fantagraphics. Solo exhibitions of her drawing, animation, and sculpture have shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Western Exhibitions, and the Columbus Museum of Art. She has an MFA in Art Theory + Practice from Northwestern University, and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Rob Carter British-born and now US-based, artist Rob Carter creates multidisciplinary artworks which concern our contemporary understanding of the politics of plants and environment through the lens of history. He received his BFA from The Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University and later received an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College in New York. His videos have been selected for the following screenings and festivals: Move Cine Arte in Venice, Sao Paulo and Paris (2017, 2018), In Light in Richmond, VA (2016, 2019), the 18th Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo (2015), PUMA Films4Peace (worldwide screenings (2013), the 8th Busan International Video Festival in Korea (2011), Festival NARRACJE in Gdansk, Poland, (2011), Oslo Screen Festival in Norway (2010), and in the Creative Time/MTV collaboration, 44½, in Times Square, New York (2010).

Maya Edelman is an illustrator and animation director who was born in Kiyv, USSR and moved to New York in 1993. She studied animation and film at Pratt institute, and went on to create a body of work spanning a variety of themes and media, including animation for documentaries, and short films, and has received an EMMY award for

her work on Broad City. Short films she animated have screened at DOC NYC, Sundance, and SXSW. She has frequently contributed animated sequences to live action feature films. In her personal work Maya Edelman explores themes related to water, borders between physical spaces, sleep and wakefulness, life and death.

Omer Gal is an Israeli born, international artist and musician, currently living in Brooklyn, he has shown his work extensively in New York, San Francisco, LA, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Rome, Russia, Italy, Brazil, UK and Finland. He graduated with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and he received his BFA from Minshar school for Art in Tel Aviv, Israel. Along with Omer’s art comes his music and sound work, which he incorporates, into performance, ritual movement, drawing, animation and video.

His short stop motion animation works and videos have been featured at festivals and galleries worldwide.

Lauren Gregory (+ Mr. Jimmy Rowland (sound)) is a painter, animator, and educator who was born and raised in the mountains of East Tennessee. A third-generation southern female painter, she began by following in her mother’s and grandmother’s footsteps, often painting portraits of loved ones in quick one-sitting sessions. After earning her BFA from the University of South Carolina followed by an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009, Lauren developed a technique of oil paint stop-motion animation, a way of making her paintings move. She has created GIFs, looped video installations, and music videos for international acts which have screened at MoMA P.S.1, the New Museum, MOCA Los Angeles, and at museums and film festivals around the world. Lauren has completed artist residencies in Budapest, Hungary, in Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy, and in Newburgh, New York. Lauren teaches painting and animation at Parsons School of Design, Temple University and Ox-bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency. She is represented in New York by the Elijah Wheat Showroom. Lauren recently returned to Nashville, Tennessee where she spends her time painting, teaching, quilting, sewing country fashions, and being outside.

Victoria Keddie is an artist working in varying media and broadcast transmission. For over a decade, Keddie has been the Co-Director of E.S.P. TV, a nomadic TV studio, and episodic cable access serial, that hybridizes technologies to realize synthetic environments and deconstruct the televisual for live performance.

Joseph Kraska is a video artist currently based in Western Massachusetts. His web series as Peppré Ann is an ongoing exploration and celebration of queer identity, self-care, iconography, and consumerism in the age of social media. His productions have been screened at institutions such as, The New Museum NY, The Kitchen, MOCA LA, Moma PS1, and on several locations with Dirty Looks NYC. He has exhibited with Elijah Wheat Showroom in London, New York, and Miami. Currently he works at a vineyard in the gorgeous Pioneer Valley with hopes to gain new inspirations for future projects.

Sinan Tuncay Born in 1986 in Istanbul, visual artist and director Sinan Tuncay received his BA from Sabanci University in Visual Communication Design and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in Photography, Video and Related Media. His work was exhibited internationally and was acquired in private collections and by public institutions such as the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Musée de l’Elysée and Odunpazarı Museum of Modern Art. His first solo exhibition, “I’m Sorry, Leyla” opened in New York in 2016. The same year, he was awarded a fellowship by the New York Foundation for the Arts. The acclaimed music video projects he designed and directed for Turkish recording artists Sezen Aksu, Mabel Matiz and Gaye Su Akyol were awarded ‘The Best Music Video of The Year’ by prestigious institutions. In 2019, his third solo show “Reserved for the Men I’ve Never Became” was opened in Istanbul. In 2020, he was awarded a fellowship by Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Tuncay lives and works between New York City and Istanbul.

Tianyi Zhang (B. 1995, Hunan, China) is a multi-media artist who works in photography, performance, digital film and social media. Throughout Zhang’s work, she explores patterns of behavior and communication in our current over-saturated media and social environment. She creates interactive performances where simple habitual gestures are emphasized to explore cultural pressures, expectations and identity. Zhang holds an MFA (’19) Degree in Photographic and Electronic Media at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and a BFA (’17 & ’14) in Studio Photography, and Design respectively, from The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), in Beijing, China. Zhang’s art projects have been presented in art festivals and galleries around the world, including Elijah Wheat, The Plaxall Gallery, and 25 Kent, in New York, the ICA Baltimore, in Maryland, ESMoA Video Art+Film Festival, in California, Squat Betty Avant Garde Film Night, in London, Video Arte Faenza, in Colombia, and The New Art Fest, in Poland. Her work has been reviewed or featured in Artnet, Soleil Rouge, Artron, Art Zealous, Girls in Film, and Create Magazine.

After months of a solo road-trip in 2019 exploring US motels, the artist presents b/w & color photographs (with a diary/book) of his performative installations captured during his stays. All are formally composed with feats of execution.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is delighted to present The Road Home, a photography exhibition by Alex Yudzon.  Creating autonomous photographs from site specific installations and studio-based still lifes, Yudzon’s work draws attention to the way we construct personal space within the context of the modern world. The series of photographs comprising: The Road Home, contemplates America’s “complex relationship to the hotel as a temporary space; a home, a shelter, a safe harbor, an option of last resort, a place to die or disappear, a stepping stone to a better life or a desperate escape from an old one” Yudzon explains.

When Yudzon received a NYFA grant in photography in 2019, he took to the road alone in order to experience, rearrange, catalogue and document unique independently owned hotels, their keepers and their rooms within. Aiming to shoot at least one hotel in all of the 50 contiguous United States, he has curated a collection that exemplifies his creatively disassembled, reassembled, balanced, disheveled, and totem-like monuments to the spaces. He states: “I work while I travel, moving from state to state, room to room, creating a haunting portrait of American hotel rooms and my interventions within them. Each photograph depicts the process of finding and losing a home. Each installation activates the history of hidden activity of all the people that came before me, their dreams, passions, and collective energy.” There is no personal ephemera in the shots, only objects from the rented room.

Hotels reflect the culture of the community they’re based. They represent so much of what we find appealing and disturbing about this country. “They are at once a destination for romance, adventure and self discovery while simultaneously a liminal space for criminal activity, poverty and social isolation.” Yudzon reflects and then asks:

What gives the hotel the freedom to be anything and everything, to evoke such a richness of content? Perhaps, it is the fact that hotels are a home away from home, they provide privacy and anonymity in a world where both are increasingly hard to come by. There is great comfort in the knowledge that all evidence of one's presence will be completely erased upon one's absence. These two factors, presence without permanence, shelter without ownership, protect us from the consequences of daily life and loosens the binds of our imagination allowing for a rich and diverse history of use.

Yudzon shot thousands of images and visited dozens of hotels. Currently in production, a book will showcase more of the imagery adding to Yudzon’s immersive installations and the history of the fading non-corporate American Hotel. His work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally including Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, China International Photography Biennial and the Arles Photo Festival. This solo exhibition will run in our Newburgh location through May 30, 2021 by appointment only.

The ambitious solo exhibition contains nine tanks with the feminist tech-artist, Ani Liu’s embodied volume of water. The aquariums rest upon steel armatures that stand at the artist’s height. The tanks contain submerged and active digital materials, biological artifacts and neurological data that express unique ideas inspired between biological science and technology about human sentience.

Liu, paraphrasing philosopher Marshall McLuhan, explains that “while we shape our technologies, our technologies co-shape us, and this feedback loop is a very important one to examine.” Recent technological innovations allow us to redesign ourselves profoundly— from networked prosthetics and artificial intelligence, to the genetic code of life itself. Can our behaviors be reduced to algorithms? Can our bodies be upgraded with nonorganic integrations? Can sentience itself be manufactured in a lab?

The grid of nine sculptures investigates cognitive personhood from our own machines, our own carbon-life formations. Descartes pondered five centuries ago, well before the Industrial Age and modern medicine: Where does cognition reside? Where does our soul settle?

Liu’s astute research acknowledges that despite acute advances in technology, experts continue to query where the magical material of sentience arises. These sculptures attempt to activate and confront the visceral appearance of the brain as material, while combining biological matter with technology to give way to ulterior consciousness.

“This set of nine sculptures examines personhood from anatomical, psychological, genetic, biochemical, behavioral, algorithmic, personal narrative and memory. In many ways, this installation is an emotional confrontation with being quantifiable,” Liu explains. Screens are submerged in a non-conductive fluid, playing different videos of data from the artist’s brain. Varying screens depict recordings of EEG data of Liu’s brain learning about brains. Others present depictions of the body as data along with an interface of MRI machines. Compelling videos of the artist question what can be known about a person based on a physiological examination of the body vs a digital one. Liu remarks: “We often think of the virtual as separate from the body but there are physical molecules connecting virtual & the physiological, the material and the immaterial, the digital & the molecular, bytes and biology.”

Reflecting on recent events of the pandemic, this relationship between the physical and the digital has become more palpable than ever. The installation includes an update based on Liu’s recent experiences- a never ending stream of COVID related news, an infinite corridor of Zoom, and an attempt to cope with daily unknowns.

Aside from the sculptures and in an office like a cubicle, guests can play a video game “Shapes and Ladders” revealing how systemic racism and sexism can exist in the workplace. Set in the metaphor of a career ladder, players attempt to navigate through an office building rife with challenges. A private link will take a viewer to experience and engage with a prototype challenging their algorithmically biased character to climb the career-ladder ultimately becoming CEO, or not.

Both works will be placed and exhibited in a restored leather tanning facility located directly on the Hudson River in Newburgh, NY hosted by Regal Bag Studios. The exhibition is also included in NADA Miami Online Fair and open on December 1st, 2020 through December 6th, 2020 and continue to run through January 31st, 2021 by appointment. The socially-distant, masked opening reception will take place on December 5th, from Noon to 8:00PM. We welcome reservations.

Ani Liu is an internationally exhibiting research-based artist working at the intersection of art & science.

Her work examines the reciprocal relationships between science, technology and their influence on human subjectivity, culture, and identity.

Ani's work has been exhibited internationally, at the Venice Biennale (forthcoming, Architecture Biennale 2020), Ars Electronica, the Queens Museum Biennial, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Asian Art Museum, MIT Museum, MIT Media Lab, Mana Contemporary, Harvard University, and Shenzhen Design Society. She’s been featured on National Geographic, VICE, Mashable, Gizmodo, TED, Core77, PBS, PCMag, FOX and WIRED.

She is the winner of the Princeton Arts Fellowship (2019-2021), the Virginia Groot Foundation Fellowship (2020), the S&R Washington Prize (2018), the YouFab Global Creative Awards (1st place, 2018), the Biological Art & Design Award (2017). Ani has a B.A. from Dartmouth College, a Masters of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Master of Science from MIT Media Lab.

She is passionate about integrating multidisciplinary approaches to art making, and is currently teaching at Princeton University. She has previously taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and is on critique panels at Harvard, Dartmouth, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, NYU, UNC Charlotte, Pratt, Parsons.

Credits: This project was originally commissioned by the 2018 Biological Art and Design Awards, with scientific guidance from Professor Mario Maas, Matthias Cabri, and Onno Baur from the Department of Radiology & Nuclear Medicine of Amsterdam UMC. Technical assistance for the 2020 edition by Ryan Thorpe.

The November exhibition surrounding the 2020 Presidential election showcases traditional textile works that address the images, symbols and craft that exemplify the double-standards of American patriotism versus state-sanctioned violence.

CATALOGUE by Johannah Herr & Cara Marsh Sheffler link to buy here.

Curatorial Statement // Press Release

Elijah Wheat Showroom is fired up about our next exhibition: Spread-Eagleism. In collaboration with Intersect Chicago (formerly SOFA), Natalie Baxter and Johannah Herr’s textile-based work will be displayed both online and in a pop-up location in Newburgh, NY, to spur conversation about American symbolism, patriotism and state-sanctioned violence. Both of these artists debuted in NYC with solo exhibitions at EWS. Now, their bold work will be presented in a dual solo show, opening at a socially-distanced and masked reception on November 7, noon-6PM EST, at 195 Front St, Newburgh, NY. And how fitting that Newburgh, the site of Washington’s headquarters at the climax of the Revolutionary War, should be the setting for this consideration of iconography concerning the First and Second amendments.

A defiant bravery shapes the high-spirited yet limp soft sculptures of guns by Natalie Baxter. It is there, too, in her coltish take on the flag or a quarantined-approved house coat, both dangling from the ceiling. The works convey a message of impartiality whilst seeming to speak for both gun rights advocates and those opposed to arms reform. Baxter’s Warm Gun examines American issues of gun violence and masculinity through a collection of colorfully-quilted, droopy caricatures of assault weapons, bringing ‘macho’ objects into a traditionally feminine sphere and questioning their potency. The ostentatious pieces keep a keen eye on opulent capitalism and nod towards the fanatic, overzealous stance - dubbed Spread-Eagleism - that (infected) patriots adopt today.

Herr’s series Domestic Terrorism: War Rugs from America is a devastating portrait of the trauma inflicted by federal policies which creates a unique symbolism to address and identify loci of domestic terrorism. These objects, tufted by hand-held machines, employ material and visual narrative strategies found in Afghan war rugs to interrogate state-sanctioned violence in America. [War rugs are traditional Afghan rugs that began to incorporate military weaponry into their design motifs during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and continue to do so to this day, now including drone portrayals.] The works implore viewers to intimately consider the violences: immigrant detention, mass incarceration, wars abroad, gun violence, police brutality, inadequate healthcare, environmental injustices and income inequality. These are barbaric desecrations that comprise our democracy. An exhibition catalogue collaboration with Cara Marsh Sheffler, will present continued research on the human rights infractions by the United States. It cheekily exemplifies the commercialization of hate symbols and weaponry that infiltrate venues of consumptive capitalism. It’s more than a catalogue, it’s an intricately internet scoured art-book based on real-life promotion of aggressive bigotry.

Together, Herr and Baxter enact a profound visual query about national symbolism and patriotism, as well as exhibiting a heroic dedication to craft.

Spread-Eagleism, a word that has been used in American English for over 150 years, acknowledges a cultish and overzealous type of U.S. patriotism.

These artists, as well as the gallery in which they will show their work, are wide open, taking the risk of vulnerability, of being critical, of assembling peaceably to protest injustices. Their work plays with the Bill of Rights, but it neither underestimates nor mocks the severity of past and current US violation of human rights. Baxter and Herr invoke conversation about a spreading threat of Nationalistic violence; violences that grow from and are legitimized by state-sanctioned institutional and individual Spread-Eagleism.

Natalie Baxter (b. 1985, Kentucky) explores concepts of place-identity, nostalgic americana, and gender stereotypes through plush textile sculptures. Baxter received an MFA from the University of Kentucky, and a BA in Fine Art from the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. Her prolific and uniquely recognizable work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in Mexico City, Mexico; Amsterdam, Netherlands; London, UK, Mullumbimby, Australia; Munich, Germany; Vienna, Austria; Berlin, & Cologne, Germany; and more. She’s presented solo exhibitions at Elijah Wheat Showroom (Brooklyn, NY), Next to Nothing Gallery (New York, NY), Cunsthaus (Tampa, FL), and Institute 193 (Lexington, KY)as well as numerous group exhibitions in both urban and rural areas domestically like: New York, NY, Lexington & Whitesburg, KY, Kent & Sharon, CT, Atlanta, GA, San Jose, La Verne, Santa Clarita, San Monica, Torrence, CA, Mobile, AL, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, State College, Carlisle, PA, Los Angeles, CA, Mobile, AL, Savannah, GA, Nashville, TN, Santa Monica, CA, Helena, MT, Reno NV, New Haven, CT, Minneapolis, MN, Portland, ME, Carlisle, & Meadville, PA, Indianapolis, IN, among many others. Baxter’s work has been reviewed substantially in: The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, The Guardian, and Bomb Magazine. She currently lives and works in Wassaic, NY.

Johannah Herr holds an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2016) and a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design (2009). She has had solo shows at Geary Contemporary, Untitled San Francisco, BRIC, Elijah Wheat Showroom and Envoy Enterprises (all New York City), Red Ger Gallery (Ulaabaatar, Mongolia) and Galeri Metropol (Tallinn, Estonia) and been featured in group shows at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY), Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (Summit, NJ), Center for Contemporary Art (Warsaw, Poland) and DADAPost (Berlin). She is a Fulbright Scholar (Mongolia) and has attended residencies at SIM (Reykjavik, Iceland), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), IEA’s Experimental Projects Residency (Alfred, NY), Oxbow Artists Residency (Saugatuk, MI), and Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY) and Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT). She is an upcoming resident at the Arctic Circle Residency (Svalbard, International Territory). She currently teaches at Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, and New York University. Additionally, she is the Co-Founder of Daughters Rising, an anti-human trafficking, indigenous women’s empowerment NGO based in Mae Wang, Thailand. She lives and works between Brooklyn and Mae Wang.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is an artist-run space founded in Brooklyn, NY, 2015. It also serves as a nomadic curatorial experience. Based in Brooklyn, NY and comprised of Carolina Wheat-Nielsen & Liz Nielsen, two artists and curators that previously ran the Swimming Pool Project Space in Chicago 2008-2011. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, who passed away tragically at the age of 16. His creative insight, righteous vision and stylistic voice for trendsetting compose the spirit that the gallery honors. As a commercial Gallery, they’ve been curating monthly exhibits presenting artists that are underrepresented in the art world. Voices embodied at EWS are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions and instigate critical conversations to promote visual art’s critical messages and its accessibility.

AZIKIWE MOHAMMED, A Place To Sit With Magnolias

July 22-August 30, 2020

ASPEN INTERSECT July 22-26

Elijah Wheat Showroom is enchanted to present Azikiwe Mohammed with an installation entitled A Place To Sit With Magnolias in conjunction with Strongroom’s presentation of New Davonhaime Flag in Newburgh, NY. On view beginning July 22nd, 2020 thru August 30, 2020.  EWS is also part of Intersect Aspen, an online art fair from July 22 through July 26th with this solo exhibition.

The exhibition’s mission strives to invite viewers into a place—in the shade under a magnolia tree—a momentary respite from the societal strife at the core of America yet, recently amplified due to COVID19. Using the eldest flowering trees of Earth’s Pangea native to the American South, in a creation true to Azikiwe’s pursuit of inclusion, service and creating spaces that “mirror the safety you wish you had” this shielded space empowers the participant while uplifting the symbolic Blackness amidst the call to action for racial justice in the United States. 

With walls painted a magnolia color, the white vanishes from a typical gallery presentation. Plant life, furniture, neons and sound immerse the visitor beyond the maker’s luscious paintings. Details of lasagna, Mad Dog 20/20, oranges, and more plant life become a sacred respite from daily realities. Individuals or groups up to four are welcome to sojourn to the Hudson River town to partake in the installation. 

Further, the collaboration presents another feature outside the nomadic exhibition space to reflect the second flight of Azikiwe’s New Davonhaime Flag and includes the inaugural New Davonhaime Food Bank as part of Strongroom, a non-profit arts organization producing site-specific contemporary art installations and related public programs in Newburgh, NY. 

New Davonhaime, is a place which Mohammed established in 2015 as a safe space for Black communities in the United States to thrive and exist. Taking its name from the five American cities with the highest density of Black residents — New Orleans, Louisiana; Detroit, Michigan; Jackson, Mississippi; Birmingham, Alabama; and Savannah, Georgia. 

Azikiwe shares: “Depicted on the New Davonhaime Flag are symbolic colors: The red black and green comes from the Black Liberation flag (red for the blood, Black for the people and green for the land), the blue is the water that runs thru the people in equal parts to that which runs thru the earth and the yellow is the new land we form as a shield. The yellow is in the shape of a shield because the land protects the people. The primary colors all touch each other as to build our home we must come first, and from our roots shall all other things grow.” 

Please join us for an artist talk on Noon Saturday, July 25th at 1 Liberty Street School, Newburgh NY 12550. Immediately after: Outdoor Opening reception on the Hudson River and 30 minute installation visits from 2PM-7PM at Elijah Wheat Showroom, 195 Front Street, Newburgh, NY, 12550.  

Azikiwe Mohammed’s artwork has been shown in galleries both nationally and internationally. A 2005 graduate of Bard College, where he studied photography and fine arts, Mohammed received the Art Matters Grant in 2015 and the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2016.

He is an alumnus of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York, and Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, New Jersey. His work has been featured extensively in magazines, including VICE, I-D, Artforum, Forbes, BOMB and Hyperallergic. Mohammed has presented a number of solo exhibitions in venues including the Knockdown Center, Maspeth, New York; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Ace Hotel Chicago, Illinois; IDIO Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL and Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, NY; as well as multiple solo offerings at Spring Break Art Show, New York. He has participated in group exhibitions at MoMa PS1, Queens, New York; Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, California and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others. He lives in New York and currently has his studio at Mana Contemporary.

Formed in 2016, by Kelly Schroer, Strongroom installations take place in temporary sites in the City of Newburgh, focusing primarily on solo installations in spaces that aim to activate both architecture and artwork, while providing quality art experiences for both the local community and visitors.

“Contact” a solo exhibition with Brent Garbowski “installed” on May 16th and gates “open” through June 27, 2020.

Purchase work on Artfare here.

In the midst of quarantine and social distancing, Elijah Wheat Showroom presents an installation viewable through the gallery window, in tandem with a checklist of the works on Artfare. “Contact”, a solo exhibition by Brent R. Garbowski, touches on recent events that bring us out of physicality and into virtual domains of the body. We’ve had access to these domains for years, yet this facility of access finally activates in the face of the need to come together and be connected.

Garbowski takes from life, and gives an alternative understanding to objects. He states: “Contact begins with a pick up truck I inherited from my father.” Works in the show are casts from the varied dents on the body of that vehicle, whether from minor accidents or more impactful events. He created ‘coherent’ bronze forms from the consequences of these impacts, thereby “embellishing the violence we did not avoid.” The bronzes transfer vehicular trauma into seductive, semi-abstract shapes. Garbowski continues: “The material of “Contact” is not bronze, but damage; damage is not violent, but beautiful. These emotional scabs articulate the subject’s struggle to reckon history.” The records of physical altercations lie on the plinth, hovering low to the floor. The show translates the body of the truck into a different kind of body, molding into an ever-changing reminder of our fortitude for adaptation.

Alongside the bronze sculptures are “Manifold Cabinets” covertly positioned inside gallery walls, with an eerie green glow seeping from the creases of their closed panes. The cabinets are locked. There is a portal to a key; yet the key is never for the viewer, collector or gallery. It is only for the artist to hold. The insides possess an uncanny haunted space which infiltrates the gallery, as if it’s always been there. Here it is, just positioned quietly, haunting the space and emanating the mystery of that which is encased. Is it a body behind the door? Is it uranium? Diamonds? LEDS? An alien form? Its contents are classified as technology’s yellow-green hue seeps through seams, never granting access for a reveal. The keys are gone, the artist’s ‘campy horror aesthetics’ run deep in the habitat, further pushed out of view of a “normal”-times glance.

On the lower section of the cabinets, a text ‘for tomorrow’ is pasted.“Just as the manifold box is no longer what it seems,” it reads, “the electrician’s stickers are modulated into narrative fragments.” What does it say? We want to engage. We are looking for real-life experiences.

As death and decay conjure supernatural narratives, these apparitions won’t let us live peacefully. Garbowski’s sculptures and boxes are incarnations not of sadness, but of grief. The painbody is represented in these grief rituals, particular to each of us. And we are reminded that grief doesn’t represent the mourning of an ending, but a presentation of the [presence] that keeps us alive.

LIVE Virtual Studio Visit

Tuesday, May 19 from 6PM-7PM

Artist Interview on ZOOM linked here

ARTSY LINK HERE

Exhibiting another rendition connected to the historic “Cabaret Voltaire”, Elijah Wheat Showroom reinvents the conversation between politics and art. We present Clive Murphy: the artist as enabler. As the Dead Kennedys album title proclaims: “Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death”, and Murphy’s punk-like sensibility comes via a certain convenience. The ‘artist’ thrives in a system which consumes the gallery’s livelihood in a folly of cardboard carnage.

The commercial production of Clive Murphy’s “Pelts” and “Inflatable Boxes” has been made possible by means of deconstructed cardboard, each segment of which is forever marked by the industrial ink laid down before Murphy’s future-forward aerosol interruptions. The spray paint serves as a proxy to the screen printing which gave first function to each box. Rigorous aesthetics interact with a Neo-dadaist practice fueled by Murphy’s penchant for the absurd.

In the first place, the cardboard box and its contents were not created for an end-user. Markets received the box full of contents in a mode instantly comprehensible to the retailer. Now, though, the box comes right to the consumer. The footprint of the box has moved beyond its initial purpose. Born in Brooklyn, the most compelling feature of the box was that it was stackable. The stack factor made it far more suitable for storage and transportation than its antecedent, the sack.

The sack became the box becomes the skin. Art takes on mortality. The artist’s air may become substituted by the collector’s air, creating an exchange of breath. Inside Murphy’s assemblages lie masks, the interplay between cut-outs and marks evoking a humanlike familiarity for the viewer. The eye is invited to react to an object that has already existed, passed on, yet regained a new purpose.

Considering the future world on offer to his children, Murphy acknowledges concerns for the environment yet does not fully enter into the idea of eco-art. His is a lo-fi form of art-making, derived from a historical understanding and rethinking of visual language. The materials are pragmatic, the design of the commercial marks is labored, but the hand-painted abstractions serve as Murphy’s solution to a complex equation within design.

“GLOSSY INVIOLABILITY”

February 29-May 2, 2020

Zsófia Keresztes

Elijah Wheat Showroom, is proud to present contemporary Hungarian sculptor Zsófia Keresztes with her first solo exhibition in the United States, “Glossy Inviolability”.

We ride a wave of compassion, yet is it all a pretense, merely the facade of empathy? How do we prove that we actually care? Keresztes’ work challenges the viewer to go beyond the enjoyment of the aesthetic to a frank interrogation of the challenging symbolism within the alluring structures.

Here are works which nod towards the idea of an abandoned spider web, of teardrops joined in a “network”. The tears, Keresztes has suggested, represent social media and its predatory claims on our sadness - and the sadness of others. They are toxic. Using a pastel palette of tiles, Keresztes’ formidable technique creates a mosaic which becomes an actual web of tears, linked to the habits we form of searching to assuage our feelings of self-pity, our projections, our need for others to notice and see us online.

The central figure in the gallery greets us as “a robust woman figure in a waiting position, gleaning the acquired attention,” Keresztes says. This woman, like a ‘fakir’ “sacrifices herself on a bed of nails, her body decaying into pieces. Then, she incorporates them together again joining into the circulation.” The pixelated body folds into itself, encompassing the figure’s virtual and actual being. Her mission is to feed off the grief of others, while her pretense is that of inviolability. Her sham empathy, its unbearable weight, is represented by the form of a superficial teardrop which smashes and pierces her limbs.

Empathy is a magic word, a feeling everyone apparently wants to own. Like a wizardly still life, it purports to provide the key to the other’s personal pain and grief. But how genuine - or how phony - are the tears that drop from a shared loss on social media? It’s hard to negotiate through the web of ironically disconnected connectedness. Flocks of sentiment flow into the comment section; all valuable, yet only some solidified by the follow-up and the reality of human presence. The artist ultimately acknowledges a state of ‘empathy fatigue’ throughout the exhibition’s drawing and curvilinear sculptures.

Please join us for the opening reception on Leap Day, February 29th, 2020 from 6:00PM to 9:00PM. Elijah Wheat Showroom is also part of NADA Gallery Open, taking place March 5-8th, with an informal artist talk at the gallery beginning at 2:00PM. **With current attention to social distancing in NYC due to COVID-19, The gallery is now closed to the public, however the showroom window is open to sidewalk passerby’s and engages in virtual exhibition tours through video conferencing for the remainder of the show.

Zsófia Keresztes (1985 Budapest; lives and works in Budapest)

Her sculptures and installations have recently been shown in, amongst others, at 15th Lyon Biennale, Institut d'art contemporain de Villeurbanne; Web of Wet, Trafó Gallery, Budapest; Stone Telling, Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna; Fingertips, Carl Kostyál, London; Love Data, 16th Alios Biennale, La Teste de Buch; Bels Animals, Château du Feÿ, Villecien; Liquid Bodies, Philara Collection, Düsseldorf; 100 Artistes Dans La Ville, Montpellier-Séte, Brno Art Open, Brno; Streamlines of the Jungle, MAGMA, Sf. Gheorge; Sunbaked Thirst With Love, Ena Viewing Space, Budapest; La Revedere, Schimmel Projects, Dresden(all 2019); Sticky Fragility, Gianni Manhattan, Vienna; Éntomos, Prague City Gallery, Prague; Orient, Galeria Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow; L’Esprit Souterrain, Domaine Pommery, Reims; Jutro, Castor Projects, London; Somewhere in between, BOZAR, Brussels; Orient, Kim?, Riga; The Rest / In Peace, 115-106, Budapest; Haptic House, Horse and Pony, Berlin; Acéphale, AQB project space, Budapest; Prospects, Base-Alpha Gallery, Antwerp; Facing Enemies, Melting Opposites, Karlin Studios, Prague (all 2018); Occupations of Uninhabited Space, Gianni Manhattan, Vienna; Esterházy Art Award, Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Abstract Hungary, Künstlerhaus- Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz; Afterbirth of a Dream, Meetfactory, Prague; Letting Go, Trafó Gallery, Budapest; Endless Backup, Futurdome, Milan (all 2017); HOLYLAND, Labor, Budapest; The existential space of virtuality, Erika Deák Gallery, Budapest(all 2017); You dreamt with straight lines, I did with curves, which had acid shadows, Trafó Gallery; #vaporfolk #hollyvoodoo. Sponsored by Amazon Readymades., Lust Gallery, Vienna; The Dys-Picture Generation, Art+Text, Budapest; Data Mining, ENA Viewing Space, Budapest; On Paper II., Erika Deák Gallery,Budapest (all 2016).

“Female Trouble”

Amanda Joy Calobrisi

Lilli Carré

Qinza Najm

Kathryn Refi

Frances Waite

January 10, 2020 - February 22, 2020

For Female Trouble, co-organizers Elijah Wheat Showroom and Western Exhibitions bring together four female artists who take modes and patterns of female representation into their own hands, uncovering and expounding the delights of their corporeal forms and fearlessly expressing body positive broadcasts of nudes in image, form, and craft. The she-power of this show is about risk, exploration and eminent bodily domains. The show will open at Western Exhibitions in Chicago with a public reception on Friday, January 10 from 5 to 8pm and will run through February 22, 2020.

Victorian-age physicians were tasked with the revival of repressed vaginas, performing remedial pelvic massages until their patient’s female hysteria was tamed, devoting considerable time and energy to whacking women off. Thanks to their caregiver’s elbow grease, women were returned to their designated mates subdued, and under control. Doctors eventually grew tired of the immense effort required to cure hysteria and struggled to find less arduous remedies, leading one exhausted professional to invent the vibrator. This prescribed tool relieved physicians of their palliative duties. Female hysteria was reclaimed, its intended cure eventually transformed and recognized as a source of pleasure, fulfillment and self-celebration. Following in these women’s footsteps, Female Trouble brings attention to feminine figurative work that indulges and divulges into this reclaimed feminine sexuality with pride.

Amanda Joy Calobrisi tells strange and sensuous tales of womanhood. The figures that inhabit her canvases ponder the theatrics of sex—and death—in worlds less dangerous and more revealing than our own. Rendered affectionately rather than objectively, the women fold, bend, lean, and stretch in painted spaces that hover between boudoir and landscape. Individualism and agency mold their realm where self-love and self-admiration are no longer private revolutions. ­­­

Lilli Carré’s work exudes sensuality in earthenware sculptures, formed with poise but tantalizing and forbidden to handle. Inspired by ancient erotic pottery and representations of the malleable animated female body, Carré is interested in narrative vessel forms and how they reflect the desires and behaviours of the cultures that used them. Clay is molded to a presence that at first seems innocuous, but suddenly turns to the bystander and assembles protruding—almost familiar—parts, potentially pornographic in mission.

Qinza Najm’s tapestries are over-woven with titillating and discrete imagery of female bodies stretching to their limits as they distort themselves to wrestle with their confinement. The tightly woven textiles that restrain these women become the sheets to the comfort for a horizontal body. Najm distorts her figures’ encased bodies, perspectivally extending them past the ornamented extremities of her rugs, as “an extended body claims space beyond its expected role.”

Standing stoic, Kathryn Refi’s protean portraits push the malleability of perceived truth to its limits. By wickedly weaving her full-frontal nudes into disjointed photographic semi-representations, Refi summons grid-adhering versions of herself. Unmoving and commanding attention with a wild natural muff of mojo, Refi’s photo montages are wrapped in a balance of symmetry and affixed to space, rebellious in presence.

Frances Waite renders horny apocalyptic meltdowns in her photorealistic graphite drawings. In these tableaus she asks questions about ultimate desire: When the end of the world hits, what will you do? Will you go underground and hide? Will you grab your lover and hold them tight? Will you dance like nothing is out of the ordinary? Will you spread love? If the outside is crumbling, are you, too? In Waite’s world, humans have no other choice than to ‘do it.’ In her drawings Waite reaches a climax: Spread big love.

* * *

Elijah Wheat Showroom is a Brooklyn-based artist-run space and nomadic curatorial experience founded by Carolina Wheat & Liz Nielsen. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, whose creative insight, righteous vision, perceptive being and stylistic voice for trendsetting guides the spirit that the Showroom honors. EWS artists are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions and instigate critical conversations to promote visual art’s discursive messages while promoting its accessibility.

Western Exhibitions is a Chicago-based contemporary art gallery that shows thought-provoking, and visually innovative artists who work across most media, with an emphasis on personal narratives and cosmologies; LGBTQ artists and issues; pattern, decoration and surface concerns; works on paper; and artist books. Western Exhibitions presents unique artist projects, curated group shows and maintains a specific inventory of artist books and multiples, gathered together as a sister entity, WesternXeditions.

“99 Agreements” introducing Tianyi Zhang

As the dark begins to fall into winter, Elijah Wheat Showroom is thrilled to introduce a new voice in performance-based video installation with a titillating exhibition by Chinese artist, Tianyi Zhang. The exhibition will be presenting the work entitled “99 Agreements” opening on November 9th from 6PM-9PM and running regular hours through December 15, 2019~~by appt until January 6, 2020.

“Yes” in Zhang’s native language of Mandarin can have up to eight different characters, pronunciations and meanings. Each a nuanced form of agreement and with its own properties of affirmation. The English language’s term may confirm a direct question’s validity, however, there are also variations to a simple agreement: “Yup,” “Yea,” “Uh-huh,” “Okay,” “Sure,” “All right,” “Right,” “Totally,” “Of course,” “Certainly,” “Sure,” “Indeed,” etc. are all appropriate when something or someone requires approval. Although less direct , the above terms are acceptable yet display a subtle conjecture if intoned a particular way. 

Throughout Zhang’s work, she explores patterns of behavior and communication in our current over-saturated media and social environment. She creates interactive performances where simple habitual gestures are emphasized to explore cultural pressures, expectations, and identity.

“Yes” in the 99 Agreements are enacted with 99 different female characters, all in settings where they perform different roles, tasks and various occasions. Ambitiously recording herself in as many roles, Zhang presents in a high-femme category reminiscent of unsolicited objectification of the damsel in noir films. Zhang notes that “Some are talking to others pleasurably, some are muttering by themselves nervously, some are helpless and in pain.” Yet, when combined, the sonic environment progresses in a “full spectrum of emotion” Zhang explains. 

The multi-channel video with the continuous loop of “Yes” becomes a vacillating wave of confirmation——of what, we have only the settings and performance to determine. With remarkable accuracy, Zhang pulls the viewer into a trance of multiplicity. The artist remarks that:

People are accustomed to a stereotyped lifestyle, repetitive action, and habitual language. Our reactions to the outside world are often mindless.  “Yes," not only expresses agreement, but also nuanced emotion, providing multiple meanings through a meaningless oral habit. “Yes” is used cheaply and understood simply in daily communication, its ambiguous implications always overlooked. Behind the simple language may be habitual harmony, may be the consent to authority, or may also refer to absolute resistance.

The artist asks female identifying participants specifically: How do you interpret the multiple implications of your repetitious confirmations in regards to your career? Keeping in mind the perpetuating inequalities in the work place where women are kept in middle-management positions and asked to do more work, especially when superiors notice their productivity. Likely women are asked to be ‘less aggressive and more assertive’ if their tone is at all defensive or encouraging equality. How often does a “Yes” reply grate the soul when it compromises one’s integrity, yet it is required for the position? Why is it easier to say “Yes” when given an offer, yet it is well below the value of the work a woman is earning compared to men. Tianyi Zhang is creating work for all, while encouraging women to empower themselves in their career. Let us say a “Yes, and…” to counter the inequitable offer, ask for a raise, project our strengths and integrity. 

Compliance is easier, yes. Defiance is bitchier, yes. 

 “Soft Fascination” 

September 7 through October 28, 2019

with:

Jolynn Krystosek

Heidi Norton

Erin LaRocque

Elijah Wheat Showroom presents a group exhibition of multi-media works from three American artists entitled “Soft Fascination.” These artists create with natural and biological elements at the center of their focus. Coined by the environmental psychologist duo of Kaplan & Kaplan, the title phrase suggests that through “Attention Restoration Therapy (ART)” humans are able to benefit from a subtle focus of nature, opposed to a directed attention with their environment. 

By being present within the natural mystery of symmetry, curiosity, and wonder within the wilderness, one is capable of experiencing profound, yet non-grandiose, patterns, shapes, colors, sounds and elements. These elements bring a flow of tranquility without a deliberate focus of health and wellness. And consequently, the prescription for healing is determined to be a subconscious yet awe inspiring product of being unencumbered by the directed attention that the urban and now digital environment requires. 

Jolynn Krystosek’s work focuses on a fascination with the natural world. The objects on display range from slip cast porcelain dead flowers and pods to gilded found bones and sea-shells. Together, they create a strange fusion of the natural and the obvious human hand of constructed sculptures. The outcome fuses traditional craftsmanship and botanicals. The temporal nature of the subject matter, coupled with an uncustomary use of a variety of materials, heightens the relationship between the physicality of the works and the viewers’ own corporeality. 

Panels of manipulated glass by Heidi Norton stand central in the space. Panes are embedded with cellular detritus, bio-science test-tubes, dying plant life, and preserved organic materials.  She states that as “a child of New Age homesteaders in West Virginia, her interests resulted in a strong connection to the land, plant life and nature.” Working from a place of installation and then documenting her ephemeral configurations of living materials, Norton’s photographs have a particular place within the discourse of contemporary photography as she preserves her sculpture to actuate skillful photographic compositions. The textures reveal a painterly display of stagnant foliage, frozen within a second dimension. Working within this plateau,  the outcome is multi-dimensional. Norton continues to intrigue with new sculptures and their photographic counterpoints.

The primary materials Erin LaRocque uses to create her living tapestries are made from Ganoderma Lucidum (Reishi) Mycelium mushrooms growing to her specifications and acute care. She states that “these self-weaving, collaborative medicinal tapestries are personal gardens to cultivate beneficial compounds that can be consumed to improve one’s health and wellbeing, and sites to provide therapeutic “soft fascination” in an urban ecosystem. We provide resources to help each other survive, and when the tapestry completes its life cycle, its physical remains can be harvested to provide resources for human health, or reserved as an object of compassionate decor.” The gallery and the artist will also collaborate on CBD & Reishi tinctures as a nominally priced take-away from the exhibition. LaRocque presents work that is “informed by science, pseudo-science, aspirational self-help rituals, and fate.” The artist uses mushrooms as agents of decay and simultaneous regeneration. With this medium, LaRocque “sparks conversations about the sustainability of body and the environment, and the futility of trying to maintain youth and good health. These tapestries serve to amuse and console, ask us to experience an alternate reality, contemplate the definition of cooperation, and accept destiny and chance.”  

Elijah Wheat Showroom delivers an adaptive, growing display of organic materials alongside sculptures and mark-making derived from once pluming, yet now decaying objects to enjoy as a “Soft Fascination” indoors. Please join us and the artists for an opening reception Saturday, September 7th from 6:00PM to 9:00PM. The show will run through  Sunday, October 28th during regular hours, Saturday & Sunday noon-6pm and by appt.

Jolynn Krystosek (American, b. 1981) received her BFA from San Francisco State University in San Francisco, California and her MFA from Hunter College in New York, NY. She has exhibited throughout the United States including solo exhibitions at Lux Art Institute, Philadelphia Art Alliance, and The Horticultural Society of New York. Her work has recently been exhibited at Casey Kaplan Gallery, Storefront Bushwick, Racine Art Museum, and the Islip Art Museum. Jolynn’s work has been featured in publications including Surface Magazine, NY Arts Magazine, San Diego Union Tribune, the North County Times, the Shepard Express, and KPBS.

Heidi Norton (American, b.1977) is a New York based artist. A recent feature in Art21’s Revolution issue Homesteading as Art and Revolution presents her upbringing and relationship to nature in her art. Norton mounted a large early career site responsive exhibition, Prismatic Nature, at Elmhurst Art Museum where she received a generous grant from the Illinois Art Council to serve as Artist in Residence. There she had the opportunity to curate the McCormick House -- one of three Mies van der Rohe’s residential homes in the United States. In an interview for BOMB magazine discusses the ethics of plants and differentiates between the terms "nature" and "ecology." In 2013, Norton traveled to Bourges, France to participate in the exhibition Ghost Nature at the National School of the Arts. There she researched the natural water structures, primarily concentrating on the marsh systems. Those studies were focused into a large installation that traveled to University of Illinois at Chicago, Gallery 400. Norton’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art received much critical acclaim. Her writings and work are included in Art21, BOMB Magazine, Journal for Artistic Research, Grafts by Michael Marder, and newly released, Why Look at Plants ed. by Giovanni Aloi. Her most recent illustrated essay, The Faceless Plant: A Sketch for Timothy Morton, is in a recent issue of BOMB Magazine. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Art Institute of Chicago, Unilever Corporation, the Joyce Foundation and numerous private collections. She is currently a professor at the International Center of Photography and FIT.

Erin LaRocque (American, b. 1983) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Earning an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2019 and prior, a BFA in Painting, from the Gwen Frostic School of Art, Western Michigan University, 2006. She collaborates with non-human agents that utilize weaving as a natural part of their life cycle to make tapestries that reference the passage of time and the ways humans perceive, use, and appreciate nature. A decade of growing mushrooms and an interest in biology and patterns in nature- both visual and cyclical, led to this ongoing project. Her work has been collected by the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and by the Michigan State Capital building in Lansing, MI.

“Limbo Exchange” July 13 —Sept 1, 2019

Young Sun Han

Elijah Wheat Showroom is pleased to present artist Young Sun Han in a solo exhibition entitled, “Limbo Exchange.” We first presented the series in London in October, 2018 to viewers bringing curiosity, criticality and fanfare. The body of work is a compilation of photographs, a performative video, and found objects deriving from the artist’s unfortunate circumstance when he was a victim of grand larceny. Young Sun Han’s motor vehicle (recently inherited from his deceased mother) was stolen in his Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. After filing a Police report and writing it off as if it was irrevocable, the car was found in central Pennsylvania. Upon return, the officer encouraged Young to throw away the bulk of the items that was overflowing in the vehicle and move on from the incident. However, personal effects told a story the artist wouldn’t let go undiscovered. “Inside, an array of the ‘perp’s' personal effects had been left untouched: a wardrobe's worth of clothing, toiletries, medications, condoms, keys, letters, IDs, and other miscellanea. [A} pungent scent also lingered strongly in the leather seats and car's confines” the artist explains.

The violation from the vehicle’s original theft left the artist questioning the perpetrator’s motive, the persecution, the judicial system as he manifested a response. Young Sun Han toys with the concept of victimhood and notes: “The preservation of his items followed by my exploitative use swings on a scale between empathy and revenge.” Thievery binds humans in an immediate adversarial position, although Han complicates his ethical involvement by building a profile through public display and performance. By delivering this narrative through the curated arrangement of the thief’s items and presenting them in a ‘white cube’, Young deliberately conjures compassion for the ‘perp’ and flips any rage into curiosity. When is justice served? How would this display instigate ‘Restorative Justice’? Between the Community, Offender and the Victim, perhaps the artist has rearranged the role of offender and victim, as the gallery becomes an outlet to involve the community. There are hard questions here, these actions deserve hard answers. Whereas the artist is committed to delivering the items back to the ‘perp’ he has been deliberately blocked from engaging in any communication or reconciliation between the act, the offender and the items.

The artist contemplates whether a “reconciliation can be reached that dissolves the binary of victimhood and the need for incarceration, where race and social status play an extremely partial and discriminatory role. ‘Limbo Exchange’, as a project will continue to reevaluate [Young’s] position in relation to the perp and document any pertinent conversation, action, and event related to the attempted return of their personal effects and final legal judgments.” Please join us and the artist for the opening on Saturday, July 13 from 6pm-9pm and for an experimental artist lecture/performance on Sunday, July 27. The exhibition will continue during regular hours and by appointment through Sept 1, 2019.

Young Sun Han, (Chicago, 1981) is an American citizen of Korean heritage and a New Zealand permanent resident. He currently works between New Brunswick, NJ and Brooklyn, NY. In the summer of 2018, he completed the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, Berlin residency and will attend the Materia Abierta program in August of this year. He received his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has studied abroad at Goldsmiths, University of London and the Kunsthochschule fur Medien, Cologne, Germany–the latter as a fellowship recipient of the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange.

Han's work has been exhibited in many group shows including: David Zwirner (NY), Knockdown Center (NY), Printed Matter Inc. (NY), LMAK books+design (NY), Jean Albano Gallery (Chicago), Zolla/Lieberman (Chicago), Independent Brussels, the Elijah Wheat Showroom, at the Anti-Art Fair (London), 4A Centre of Contemporary Art (Sydney, Australia), University of Sydney, the Suter Contemporary Art Biennial (Nelson, NZ), The Dowse Art Museum (Lower Hutt, NZ), Sanderson Contemporary Art (Auckland, NZ).

 “Drawn Lines”                    17 of May —23 of June, 2019

STACIE JOHNSON 

NEXT EVENT: Sunday, May 26, 2PM: “Tenant Stories” Stories from Tenants who Fight Back. Please some listen to stories from tenants who have challenged their landlords for illegal behavior.

Opening, Friday, May 17 from 6PM-9PM

We are elated to open the Bushwick Space to our community and present new paintings by Stacie Johnson. Her works are influenced by her Gen Alpha daughter, by her participation in the movement for housing justice, and by daily life. We invite you to experience a central making space complete with embellished gallery walls, alongside these abstractions. During the course of the solo exhibition, Johnson will use the storefront space for activating conversations about hyper-local politics, public education, and the housing crisis as it relates to this very neighborhood. 

Johnson’s work is decisive in its formalism. Her mirror-based abstractions take on bold patterns reminiscent and in conversation with Stuart Davis, Marilyn Lerner or Knox Martin. This exhibition will reveal a recent shift in Johnson’s work where she for the first time embraces painting as a way to communicate a political message. Johnson states "there is a connection between free time used as an artist, as a parent, or an activist -- and the privilege of free time in general.” Having lived in Bushwick for almost 10 years, Johnson has shifted from being a participant in Bushwick’s art community to getting involved in local political issues. Living in rent-stabilized housing and enrolling her daughter in public school are two examples of everyday life that are seeds for political action and now also research for her paintings. 

The title of the exhibition "Drawn Lines" refers to a painting Johnson is making that is specific to the location of the gallery. Showing a map of a .5 mile radius around Elijah Wheat Showroom, a new painting depicts the overwhelming number of gerrymandered district lines that dissect and divide the neighborhood. 

Other paintings on view, although abstract, are “inspired by the energy of living in this dynamic and almost dizzying city, as well as the process of making art with children, and seniors,” both which she has done in varying capacities at the local level. At the center of her exhibition, she will have a station where anyone on street level in the neighborhood can join in on the process of making art.   

We are pleased to present the work and programs with Stacie Johnson by supporting additional events Stay tuned to our website and Instagram for a specific schedule of programming slated for Sunday afternoons at the gallery. 

Stacie Johnson lives and works in Brooklyn,  NY. She has an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BA in Communication Studies with a minor in Art History from the University of Iowa. Johnson’s solo exhibitions include Bull & Ram in New York, Threewalls in Chicago and the Contemporary Art Workshop, also in Chicago. Johnson has a relentless studio practice and an exhibition record that spans 15 years with 9 solo exhibitions and more than 60 group exhibitions in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Miami, San Francisco, Houston, Los Angeles, London, and more. Johnson has also been a Visiting Professor at Northern Illinois University and at Illinois State University.

Johnson is insistent on being a free agent, following her intuition and responding to her immediate environment outside of a capitalist perspective. This inspires her supplemental roles as curator, organizer, and occasional activist. Dedicated to building community for artists, Johnson co-founded the artist-run gallery Regina Rex where 13 artist-members collaboratively produced over 50 exhibitions and events between 2010-2014. More recently, Johnson acted as a Curator-at-large at Knockdown Center, a large warehouse-turn arts and event space in Queens, NY.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is an artist-run space founded in 2015. It also serves as a nomadic curatorial experience. Based in Brooklyn, NY and comprised of Carolina Wheat-Nielsen & Liz Nielsen, two artists and curators that previously ran the Swimming Pool Project Space in Chicago. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, who passed away tragically at the age of 16. His creative insight, righteous vision and stylistic voice for trendsetting compose of the spirit that the gallery honors. As a commercial Gallery, they’ve been curating monthly exhibits presenting artists that are underrepresented in the art world. Voices embodied at EWS are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions and instigate critical conversations to promote visual art’s accessibility.

INSILIO

Osmel Portuondo Azcuy and Diego Guerra Hérnandez

Curated by Dr. Anne Luther with accompanying commentary by Dr. Tamara Lee

April 6 - May 5, 2019

Opening Reception, April 6, 2019 from 6pm-9pm

Elijah Wheat Showroom is pleased to present INSILIO, an exhibition of photographs and poetry by Osmel Portuondo Azcuy and Diego Guerra Hérnandez, curated by Anne Luther. The works present the concept of INSILIO: introspection from anxiety caused by nostalgia and disenchantment with society. The photographs show a deeply personal view on the mundane passing of time in a space that one can not escape.

Diego Guerra writes ‘Insilio is the opposite of exile, it is a confinement within oneself due to the anxiety for not having a certain future. Since you have not seen a way to travel inward. In this same work the artist can get lost in the shadows of his own being. Obliged to break the limits established by society, for example, living on an island with four points, the terminals, and the sea on all sides. That would be the closure in a superlative way; But if you do not respond to the context where you live, you can welcome and discover in society, always starting from you to expand the map. Silence empowers this restlessness, this despair due to uncertainty.’

Omphaloskepsis, the excessive contemplation of oneself, looking at oneself without considering the gaze the of other is an element that leads the process of the works of Diego Guerra. “I use myself as a puppet of the lens and I do not give it my face at all, I prefer to blur my body to create a new sense of what we are as humans, from independence and introspection.” Time passes slowly when he looks at himself, from different angles and other perspectives and switches to the fast decision to keep this one moment by  pressing the camera timer, leaving the context behind the camera when his body becomes form in the photograph. He seems to be caught in a “Present Continuous Past(s)”.

Osmel Azcuy lives with the concept of flow. Time, the elements, love and spirituality flow in a constant interplay. He captures particular facets in their flow and sees the mundane, the everyday through an emotional and spiritual eye that guides him. Through his photographs he connects to the elements of this earth with a guidance of his ancestors. His grandfather was a great photographer and passed is artistry onto him. When he takes his photographs, they fuse and connect. His photographs encompass the present with the guidance of the past.  

On May 5th at 2:00PM, Dr. Tamara Lee, Esq. will host a discussion on the concept of “INSILIO” and the challenges of creating and identifying as an exhibiting artist in Cuba. Collaborating with the artists’ ideas relating to their present habitat and expression, she will address participation of workers by way of the political and economic reform in Cuba and the U.S.

Osmel Portuondo Azcuy (1985, Havana, Cuba) is a theater actor and artist born in Havana, Cuba. He is part of the RESISTENCIA project in Havana, has worked in several theater groups and was founder of the theater company Arozarena with Reny Arozarena's Direction. His theatrical performances were included in the Festival of Arts in Centro Habana, Performance Festival in San José with the project RESISTENCIA, International Theater Festival in the province of Sancti Espíritu en Fomento, and other festivals around the island. He gave Yoruba dance workshops and the National Theater of Cuba and contemporary dance classes at the RETAZOS theater dance company. Azcuy attended acting courses at the Higher Institute of Art of Havana (ISA) of 2011-12. The current exhibition is the debut of his photographic works. He lives and works in Havana, Cuba.

Diego Guerra Hérnandez (1995, Havana, Cuba) is a theater actor, poet and artist born in Havana, Cuba. He is the founder of the RESISTENCIA project in Havana, Cuba and organizes art projects with multiple artists in Havana. His theatrical activities include the Laboratorio Fractal en el Festival Ensinol del Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Síndrome de Ulises with the Vivarta theatrical studio at the Festival Internacional de Dramaturgia Femenina in Havana and La Bienal de La Habana. He attended the Escuela de Instructores de Arte in Havana and graduated with a focus in theater in 2014. He is currently working on his debut poetry book Insilio del Amanecer. He lives and works in Havana, Cuba.

Dr. Anne Luther is an independent curator living and working in Berlin. She organized and funded exhibitions of emerging and established artists internationally including Promise Problem at Osmos, I reach out and touch another at Elijah Wheat Showroom, Evidence & Imagination at KESSELHAUS and How will I know at 67 Ludlow. Dr. Luther lectures about the contemporary art market at universities including NYU, The New School, SUNY, Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design, Sotheby's Institute of Art and others. She worked in several art institutions including MoMA PS1 and the art advisory Front Desk Apparatus.  

Dr. Tamara L. Lee, Esq. is an industrial engineer and labor lawyer by professional training. She received her Ph.D. from the department of labor relations, law and history from the ILR School at Cornell University. Her academic research focuses on the popular participation of workers in macro-level political and economic reform in Cuba and the United States. She also conducts research on the political practice of workers under the National Labor Relations Act, the intersection of labor and racial justice, cross-movement solidarity building and the impact of radical adult education on workplace democracy. Her teaching focuses on identity politics in the workplace, and labor market discrimination. 

INSILIO

Osmel Portuondo Azcuy y Diego Guerra Hérnandez

Curada por la Dra. Anne Luther

6 de abril - 5 de mai de 2019

Recepción de apertura, 6 de abril de 2019 de 7 pm a 10 pm

Elijah Wheat Showroom se complace en presentar INSILIO, una exposición de fotografías y poesía de Osmel Portuondo Azcuy y Diego Guerra Hérnandez, curada por Anne Luther. Las obras presentan el concepto de INSILIO, una introspección de la ansiedad causada por la nostalgia y el desencanto con la sociedad. Las fotografías muestran una visión profundamente personal del paso mundano en un espacio del que no se puede escapar.

Diego Guerra escribe: "El insilio es lo opuesto al exilio, es un encierro dentro de uno mismo debido a la ansiedad por no tener un cierto futuro". Ya que no has visto una manera de viajar hacia adentro. En esta misma obra el artista puede perderse en las sombras de su propio ser. Obligado a romper los límites establecidos por la sociedad, por ejemplo, vivir en una isla con cuatro puntos, las terminales y el mar en todos los lados. Ese sería el cierre de una manera superlativa; Pero si no responde al contexto donde vive, puede recibir y descubrir en la sociedad, siempre a partir de usted para expandir el mapa. El silencio empodera esta inquietud, esta desesperación debido a la incertidumbre ".

Omphaloskepsis, la excesiva contemplación de uno mismo, mirarse a sí mismo sin tener en cuenta la mirada del otro es un elemento que conduce el proceso de las obras de Diego Guerra. "Me uso como un títere de la lente y no lo veo en absoluto, prefiero desenfocar mi cuerpo para crear un nuevo sentido de lo que somos como humanos, desde la independencia y la introspección". El tiempo pasa lentamente cuando él se mira a sí mismo, desde diferentes ángulos y otras perspectivas, y cambia a la decisión rápida de mantener este momento presionando el temporizador de la cámara, dejando el contexto detrás de la cámara cuando su cuerpo se forma en la fotografía. Parece estar atrapado en un "presente (s) pasado (s) presente".

Osmel Azcuy vive con el concepto de flujo. El tiempo, los elementos, el amor y la espiritualidad fluyen en una interacción constante. Captura facetas particulares en su flujo y ve lo mundano, lo cotidiano a través de un ojo emocional y espiritual que lo guía. A través de sus fotografías se conecta a los elementos de esta tierra con una guía de sus anectores.Su abuelo fue fotógrafo y le transmitió su arte. Cuando él toma sus fotografías, se fusionan y se conectan. Sus fotografías abarcan el presente con la guía del pasado.

Osmel Portuondo Azcuy (1985, La Habana, Cuba) es un actor de teatro y artista nacido en La Habana, Cuba. Es parte del proyecto RESISTENCIA en La Habana,ha trabajado en varios grupos de teatro, fue fundador de la  compañía de teatro Arozarena con la Dirección de Reny Arozarena. Las actividades y actuaciones teatrales incluyen el Festival de las Artes en Centro Habana,también en el Festival de performance en San José con el proyecto RESISTENCIA,Festival internacional de teatro en la provincia de Sancti Espíritu en Fomento,como otros festivales por la isla. Dio talleres de danza yoruba y el Teatro Nacional de Cuba y danza contemporánea en la compañía de danza teatro RETAZOS. Asistió a cursos de actuación en el Instituto Superior de Arte de La Habana (ISA) de 2011-12. La actual exposición es el debut de sus obras fotográficas. Vive y trabaja en la habana,Cuba.

Diego Guerra Hérnandez (1995, La Habana, Cuba) es un actor de teatro, poeta y artista nacido en La Habana, Cuba. Es el fundador del proyecto RESISTENCIA en La Habana, Cuba y organiza proyectos de arte con múltiples artistas en La Habana. Sus actividades teatrales incluyen el Laboratorio Fractal en el Festival Ensinol del Instituto Superior de Arte en La Habana, Síndrome de Ulises con el estudio teatral Vivarta en el Festival Internacional de Dramaturgia Femenina en La Habana y Multitud en La Bienal de La Habana, Cuba. Asistió a la Escuela de Instructores de Arte en La Habana y se graduó en  la especialidad de teatro en el año 2014. Actualmente está trabajando en su libro de poesía debut Insilio del Amanecer. Vive y trabaja en La Habana, Cuba.

Dra. Anne Luther es una curadora independiente que vive y trabaja en Berlín. Organizó y financió exposiciones de artistas emergentes y establecidos internacionalmente, como Promise Problem en Osmos, me acerco y toco a otro en Elijah Wheat Showroom, Evidence & Imagination en KESSELHAUS y How will I know at 67 Ludlow. El Dr. Luther da conferencias sobre el mercado del arte contemporáneo en universidades como NYU, The New School, SUNY, el Colegio de Arte y Diseño Central Saint Martin, Sotheby's Institute of Art y otros. Trabajó en varias instituciones de arte, como MoMA PS1 y el Asesor de arte en el mostrador de recepción.

Dra. Tamara L. Lee, Esq. Es ingeniero industrial y abogado laboral por formación profesional. Ella recibió su Ph.D. del departamento de relaciones laborales, derecho e historia de la Escuela ILR de la Universidad de Cornell. Su investigación académica se centra en la participación popular de los trabajadores en la reforma política y económica a nivel macro en Cuba y los Estados Unidos. También lleva a cabo investigaciones sobre la práctica política de los trabajadores en virtud de la Ley Nacional de Relaciones Laborales, la intersección de la justicia laboral y racial, la construcción de solidaridad entre movimientos y el impacto de la educación radical de adultos en la democracia en el lugar de trabajo. Su enseñanza se centra en la política de identidad en el lugar de trabajo y en la discriminación en el mercado laboral.

Elijah Wheat Showroom es un espacio dirigido por artistas fundado en 2015. También sirve como una experiencia curatorial nómada. Con sede en Brooklyn, Nueva York, y compuesta por Carolina Wheat-Nielsen y Liz Nielsen, dos artistas y curadores que anteriormente dirigían el proyecto Swimming Pool Project en Chicago. La galería lleva el nombre de su difunto hijo, Elijah, quien falleció trágicamente a la edad de 16 años. Su visión creativa, su visión justa y su voz estilística para crear tendencias componen el espíritu que la galería honra. Como galería comercial, han estado organizando exhibiciones mensuales en las que se presentan artistas que están poco representados en el mundo del arte. Las voces incorporadas en EWS son socialmente conscientes, están comprometidas políticamente y reflejan una comunidad creativa que se esfuerza por cultivar interacciones e instigar conversaciones críticas para promover la accesibilidad del arte visual.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is pleased to present a solo exhibition of manipulated chromogenic photographs by Kathryn Refi. Entitled Protean Boundaries, the exhibition opens on March 2nd from 6pm-9pm and runs through March 31st.

Refi’s work examines the underlying framework of the grid, which in her own words is “emblematic of reason, the scientific method and objectivity.” The life of a grid is hard-edged, definitive and static, present at the macro level of the layout of an urban environment and down to the combination of pixels on our screen. Inside that plateau of a rough cityscape we move our body, our body attaches to the geometric framework, and we warm the hard edge by outlining our personalized path.

Within her work Refi manipulates, reshapes, tilts and reforms a front facing image of a female figure, her own body, to personalize a new system with protean boundaries. She presents each work as reconfiguration of the same life size print of a photo that is cut by hand and rearranged manually. As a viewer moves closer to the work the edges of Refi's body within the small squares emerge as patterns and newly shifting shapes. She has long been producing work derived from an analysis of the patterns of her daily routines. Now, Refi turns her attention directly to her physical form. The artist plays with the edges of her body to “create an elasticity within an imposed structure.” Each curve is rearranged within straight lines.

Refi investigates how much space the body holds on Earth, how much space she chooses to occupy and what shapes the body can become. Does the individual’s body end at the edges of physicality, of form, of shape? Or do we, as vibrant humans, full of life and permeable configurations mold to the environment we’re poured into? Does the body extend beyond the perpendicular corners of a city grid, of bit-forms of lo-fi and hi-fi digitization? How our own structure’s negative space interacts with our positive space may be just as important as our corporeal forms, stagnant yet mutable adjusting on Earth until we return to the particulates of dust.

Kathryn Refi was born and raised in Atlanta, GA. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Maryland Institute College of Art with her B.F.A. and earned her M.F.A. from the University of Georgia. She has had solo exhibitions at the Fugitive Art Center in Nashville, Saltworks Gallery in Atlanta, the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art and Solomon Projects in Atlanta. Her work has been included in group shows at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, Fe Gallery in Pittsburgh, the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science in Tallahassee, Mixed Greens in New York, the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, and The Contemporary in Atlanta, among many others. She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.

A Solo Exhibition by Alison Kudlow

Opening on February 2, 2019 from 6pm-9pm Elijah Wheat Showroom will present “Meaningful Rituals in Irrational Times” a solo exhibition by Alison Kudlow. The title is a phrase, taken out of a lecture by Katherine Hubbard in reference to Zoe Leonard’s “Strange Fruit.”

The physical site of the gallery will embrace and capture light, promoting the ritual of a flame, yet its glow is frozen in glass. To highlight the radiance, we are amending our open hours in the heart of a dark New York winter. For this show only, the gallery will be open in the evenings from 4-9pm, on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and by appointment.

The artist “investigates the moments when sunlight splits open to reveal its spectrum and small schisms of time and space.” Kudlow “aims to materialize these moments, to freeze time and embody unseen forces.” Throughout the display in the gallery, she exploits the liquidity of glass, and ceramics as she captures moments of ambiguous puddles and drips. Kudlow states that her “praxis is utopian, a repeated ritual that aims to extinguish loss, but can only bring us to the brink of transcendence. The work celebrates the unknown and the unknowable, the space between science and mythology.” There is a self-published chap-book accompanying the exhibition entitled “Turning Time.”

Lurking among the Hearths, are porcelain objects named Caltrops, and some Shards both broken and whole. They are displayed on the floor and on a large pedestal, subtly lit from the inside with LEDs, refracting off droplets of glass, oozing and frozen like still water. “Together they form a landscape, a battlefield” Kudlow examines. Reminiscing on these ancient pods, the artist finds meaning in their form and functionality as medicinal, lucky, yet menacing 'infiltrates' invading the North American environment. Research shows the multi purpose life of the plant and its vitality within a rich history, however unknown to a common passerby on the banks of the Hudson River.

We celebrate the unknown by welcoming our guests to be warmed around Kudlow’s Hearths. These works are composed of selenite logs, cradling blown glass forms with encased krypton or neon. The glass is arrested fluidity among the white ‘timbers’, white opposite of charcoal. The sculptures are reminiscent of a campfire, soothing a visitor with the glow of flickering flames. EWS shares another level of a gathering place, where one can relay stories, folklore and present narratives of mysticism or geology. 

Alison Kudlow (b. 1981) lives and works in Brooklyn. She has BA from the University of Southern California, a post-baccalaureate degree from Brandeis University and is currently in her final year of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Low-Residency MFA Program in Studio Art. She has shown at numerous galleries including Field Projects, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Flux Factory, UrbanGlass, and Deanna Evans Projects, and at Fullerton College. This is her first time exhibiting with Elijah Wheat Showroom.

Justin Davis Anderson

Joel Fennell

Clive Murphy

Aengus Woods

+ More curated works from artists of Liz and Lina’s personal collection

Opening on January 12, 2019 from 6pm-9pm Elijah Wheat Showroom presents a personal and sentimental group show entitled “Living Room” with Justin Davis Anderson, Joel Fennell, Clive Murphy & Aengus Woods: All remarkable confidants that supported us without reservations, held our base together and grounded our reality, 5 years ago this January when we discovered our son Elijah had passed away in our home. During some of those darkest hours, our family was soothed by a sincere empathy that continues to fill our souls, as anniversaries of death are always difficult for families experiencing sudden loss.

Family and friends often help carry grief from the departed, and we wanted to share the gallery’s location as a comforting place to reflect on life this upcoming cold, white January. We invite passer-bys to relax in the warm space while being surrounded by a lively ready-made sculpture by Clive Murphy, an installation of designed objects and wall treatments by Joel Fennell, assemblages and woodwork by Aengus Woods and artistic super 8 film renderings and hand treated Poloroids by Justin Davis Anderson. There will also be works displayed from Liz and Lina’s personal collection which include artists: Roxanne Jackson, Camille LeCoutre, ElijahElisio Timbale Gortaire-Wheat, Acacia Barker, Mary Thiefels, Keri Oldham, Taurus Burns, Lauren Gregory, Stacie Johnson, Liz Nielsen, Frances Waite, Natalie Baxter, Carolina Couture, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jo Boyer, Ben Pederson, & Devon Shimoyama.   

Woods explains: “Last year, when the Donald Judd furniture line was re-launching itself, a profile in the WSJ noted the difficulties encountered by Judd's wife in dealing with the bed her husband had designed. A bare platform, hovering just a few inches of the floor, Judd had insisted on such austere proportions. They matched other proportional relationships in the room. Practicality was hence subordinated to a desire for systematicity, and to such a degree that Judd’s pregnant wife was forced to make the bed each morning only with great difficulty while still lying on it, unable as she was in her advanced state of pregnancy to do so while standing up.”

Further, Woods shares that: “Even putting aside the question as to why the fuck Donald (Donald!) couldn't perhaps assist in the daily bed-making, the episode points to a more general sense of how frequently oblivious our heroic male artists have been towards the practical issues of living. How does a toddler relate to Richard Serra's propped steel works? How does a parent struggling to pay for heat relate to the power usage of neon or fluorescent bulbs in Dan Flavin's pieces? How does a pregnant woman relate to a bed two inches off the floor? We don't live in white cubes. We eat shit fuck, procreate and sleep. If we are lucky we do this indoors with all the smells spills and struggles they entail.” For this, the gallery is grateful for a space to share and contemplate parentlng.

Creating a space together that addresses a safe place to reflect on nurturing, transformation and the vibrancy of life. Perhaps as fathers, or as friends, the qualities of an empathetic familial meeting place will become the gallery.

Justin Davis Anderson is a Brooklyn based artist whose work explores the poetic relation of memory and experience. Often working from photographic, film, or video imagery, artist shot or appropriated, he uses painting and mark making as a self-exploratory and self-editing process. The work then resides in the dialectic of thought and experience, and there is a strong use of chance and the embrace of the instant or unknown in the work. Anderson finds influence not only in the cannons of art, but in religion, travel, poetry, music and everyday relationships.  Often working with musicians and sound artists on collaborative films, he has worked with such names as The National, Hofferlanz, Juan Comas, Kyle Combs, F Books, and Rompers. Anderson has shown in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Newburgh, and Atlanta, and has made films for BAM and The National's High Violet World

Tour.

Joel Fennell is a Brooklyn based artist and DJ. He earned his BFA from University of Illinois, Chicago in 1999. Since, Fennell has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Other Art Fair and David Zwirner, 533 West 19th Street.

Irish born artist Clive Murphy lives and works in Brooklyn. Previous exhibitions include: St. Isdro's Still, Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City (2018); Ambient Occlusion, Present Company Gallery, Brooklyn (2017); House of Cards, Van Horn Gallery, Dusseldorf (2016); Good Things Come..., Plymouth College of Art, England (2016); Two Machines, Knockdown Centre, New York (2015); DIWIF (Demonic Interventions With Ikea Furniture) - collaboration with Aengus Woods, Rawson Projects, New York (2015); Being: The Gameshow, Storefront For Art and Architecture, New York (2014); Saturated Phenomena, Wildlife, Brooklyn (2013); Neo Proto Demo, Kling & Bang, Reykjavik, Iceland (2013) Zypher, Jerome Fellowship funded public sculpture, Franconia Sculpture Park, Minnesota (2012); Fill The Barn, Index Festival of Sound and Technology, New York (2011); The Sixth Borough, No Longer Empty, Governors Island, New York (2010); Almost Nothing, Soap Factory Gallery, Minneapolis (2009); LMCC, New York (2008);Non-Oblectif Sud, Côtes du Rhône (2008); Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2008); West Germany Gallery, Berlin (2007); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007); Fieldgate Gallery, London (2007); Mercer Union Gallery, Toronto (2006); Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (2005) Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork (2005); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Manchester/Sheffield/London (2005); Alma Enterprises Gallery, London (2005); British Council/CityMine(d) Brussels (2005); Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai (2004); Gallery 411, Hangzhou (2004); Zedebois Centre, Lisbon (2003) EV+A, Limerick (2002); CCFA, Prague (2001)

Aengus Woods is the co-author (with Clive Murphy) of DIWIF: Demonic Interventions With IKEA Furniture (New York: Printed Matter Inc., 2014) and a co-editor of Other Edens: the life and work of Brian Coffey (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010). His writings have appeared in About Trees by Katie Holten (Berlin: Broken Dimanche Press, 2015), Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace, edited by Philip Coleman (New York: Salem Press, 2015), Winter Pages, the Irish Times and the Dublin Review of Books. He has previously exhibited collaborative work at David Zwirner, Rawson Projects and the Other Artfair, NYC..

Opening on January 12, 2019 from 6pm-9pm and will run through January 27th.

         “King” Oil on Canvas 48” x 72”

 Open by appointment between Friday, Dec 21 through January 6th, 2019. Please email us to set up an agreeable time. Happy Holidays!

Elijah Wheat Showroom is proud to present “Racism Sweet Racism” a solo exhibition of new paintings by Detroit based artist, Taurus Burns, opening November 3rd from 6pm-9pm and running through December 15, 2018.

As obvious as this title may infer, we feel that there are subtleties that have been sneaking into the comfort of a racially hyper-polarized United States that can no longer be swept aside or whispered about.  The emboldened nature of discriminatory language that has been proliferating since our current president's lack of respect for immigrants, world leaders and citizens has berated so-called white privilege. These declarations wake individuals that have been in the dark about a divisive discrimination that has plagued our country since a dysfunctional slave state has been so-called emancipated. Hearing the confusion as to “How this can happen after Obama” or “I had no idea racism still was so ingrained” can feel insulting to men and women that live everyday with knowledge that they are treated differently due to the color of their skin. Only now, the divisive prejudices are more obvious.  Folks have a proud vocal resurgence, as these ‘Alt-Right’, ‘White Supremacists’ ‘American Freedom Party’ and ‘Neo-Confederates’ are collectively activating their base and are championed by a president who excites his supporters by deriding minorities.
 
As the USA’s systemic marginalization of people of color becomes more reticently discussed amongst all classes of peoples through the Black Lives Matter movement, we exonerate the willingness to acknowledge the different experiences that have plagued generations of families that built our nation. As Taurus remarks by entitling the show "Racism Sweet Racism": "The ideal home is one of comfort, safety and support, and for many this is the heart of the American dream. For some it's a given; everyone else has to fight for it. Everyday we get one step closer to that dream... until another person of color is killed in our community and we're reminded that racism really is as American as apple pie. In our dysfunctional society, many take comfort in the denial of racism. My work is about that denial, and the pain that this country pushes down, strings up, locks away and buries.” Comfort around racism’s social construct and presence is so ingrained; perhaps we cannot see outside of it. 

Taurus Burns has called Detroit home since 1998, receiving a BFA in Fine Arts from the College for Creative Studies in 2002. Since, Taurus has painted murals, created public art and street paintings, been on the exhibition committee of the Detroit Artists Market, juried and curated local exhibits, and painted over 300 Detroit urban landscapes. He was once listed as "Best Local Artist" in Real Detroit Weekly and one of the "Best Local Artists to Collect" in HOUR Detroit Magazine. In 2017 he began to specifically address race, gun violence and the wealth gap in his artwork. He’s been reviewed in the Detroit News, and has had mentions in Hyperallergic. This is his first solo exhibition at Elijah Wheat Showroom’s Brooklyn space as well as his first time exhibiting in New York City. He recently had a solo booth with EWS at the Anti Art Fair in London. Taurus lives in Oak Park, MI. He is a full-time automotive clay sculptor and has been training in the Japanese martial art of Aikido since 2011.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is delighted to present a solo exhibition by Johannah Herr entitled, “Patenting Distraction” opening Saturday, September 15 from 7pm-10pm.

The work is a series of vinyl drawings based on Directed-Energy Weapons— weapons that use beams of highly focused energy waves (such as sound or light) to incapacitate a target. These types of weapons are used in various capacities by US military and police for crowd control during rallies, protests and public gatherings.

Behind the works on display, the gallery will be transformed with vinyl wallpaper that deliberately initiates a Moirré effect. The diagram-based panels overtly and subliminally display deeply researched US government issued patents.

‘Incapacitation through visual and sonic overload’ is allegorical for both current political discourse and rampant consumerism. Herr aims to critically engage power structures that distract citizens into complacency. Or alternatively, fatigue their resistance into compliance. The ‘Figure’ of each diagram corresponds to mainstream American ideology while the labeling of the diagrams’ components corresponds to the historical contexts of power and exploitation. Exposing the myths that underlie and obfuscate these ideological tropes.

The viewer is drawn in by holographic and metallic sign materials while becoming dazzled by optical and patterned backdrops.  As a result, the drawings are hard to look at, just as it has become difficult to ground oneself within a world constructed by spectacular government and corporate manipulation.

Exhibition runs through October 28th                           

Johannah Herr (b. 1987 Lancaster, PA) is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist. Since earning her MFA in Sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016 and her BFA in Fine Art from the Parsons School of Design in 2009, she has explored the “role spectacle plays in contemporary digital media to shape our perspectives, voyeuristically entertain, and simultaneously remove us from, and implicate us in, the trauma of world events.” This is her first solo exhibition at Elijah Wheat Showroom, however also has work in last year’s “Moll Madness” show and will be one of the 20 artists representing the gallery at The Anti Art Fair in London, October 4-7th, 2018. She has had solo exhibitions at Envoy Enterprises in New York, Galleri Metropol in Estonia, and Red Ger Gallery in Mongolia. She has shown in numerous locations throughout New York City as well as in Bulgaria, Berlin, London, Italy, Israel, Reykjavik and Mexico City. She is an upcoming resident at Alfred University’s Institute for Electronic Arts in 2018. She has held residencies at Wassaic Project in Wassaic New York in 2018, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City in 2017, and was a fellow at the Oxbow School of Art in Michigan in 2016. She is currently faculty at Parsons School of Design.

Johannah Herr (b. 1987 Lancaster, PA) is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist. Since earning her MFA in Sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016 and her BFA in Fine Art from the Parsons School of Design in 2009, she has explored the “role spectacle plays in contemporary digital media to shape our perspectives, voyeuristically entertain, and simultaneously remove us from, and implicate us in, the trauma of world events.” This is her first solo exhibition at Elijah Wheat Showroom, however also has work in last year’s “Moll Madness” show and will be one of the 20 artists representing the gallery at The Anti Art Fair in London, October 4-7th, 2018. She has had solo exhibitions at Envoy Enterprises in New York, Galleri Metropol in Estonia, and Red Ger Gallery in Mongolia. She has shown in numerous locations throughout New York City as well as in Bulgaria, Berlin, London, Italy, Israel, Reykjavik and Mexico City. She is an upcoming resident at Alfred University’s Institute for Electronic Arts in 2018. She has held residencies at Wassaic Project in Wassaic New York in 2018, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City in 2017, and was a fellow at the Oxbow School of Art in Michigan in 2016. She is currently faculty at Parsons School of Design.

EWS curated, installed and managed all of the logistics for a ‘new fair’ with Creative Debuts. It was located in an old factory in Peckham, London, and opened October 4-7, 2018.

We emphasized accessibility, interaction, performance, installations, Nasty and political work. Many of the Showroom's crew of artists participated and we worked our asses off to buck the system. We sold limited edition political pins, patches and our hand screened “Manifistation T-shirts” and gave 20% of our proceeds to RAINN. Dr. Blasey-Ford’s testimony was playing throughout London whilst us Nasty Women (yes, totes all ladies with drills, levels and then some holding up walls) scrambled to present a most professional exhibition in non-traditional fair venue.

We’re back in NYC and sharing with you some installation shots of the madness. We humbly thank Sonja Roach, Anna Dinardi, Peppre Ann & Lauren Gregory for assisting with the 24 hour install after our crate cleared customs. It was our first International fair, it was a whirlwind, it was a risk and it was a most memorable time of promoting great art—just for the sake of fucking art. We’re proud of what we accomplished, yet were imitably thankful for the support from our friends.

EWS :: TAAF :: ARTIST LINKS

AIMEE ODUM

AIRCO CARAVAN

ASHTON ATTZS

BRENDAN LOPER

CHARLES SHIELDS

EMILY HOERDEMANN

FRANCES WAITE

JACKIE FURTADO

JOHANNAH HERR

LADY KITT

LAUREN GREGORY

LAVINIA HANACHIUC

MARGALIDA MARIA CRESPI

NATALIE BAXTER

NICHOLAS CUEVA

PEPPRE ANN (JOSEF KRASKA)

ROXANNE JACKSON

SHANNON DOWNEY (BADASS CROSS STICH)

STACIE JOHNSON

TAURUS BURNS

YOUNG SUN HAN

Nasty Women NE

& Nasty Women Portugual

.......AND so many more! 

Calmly creating a practical life.

Opening August 5th to the public and running through September 4th, 2018

Design Direction, Wardrobe Consulting, Globally Sourced Vintage, Production Expertise.

Conceived in Brooklyn, New York in 2017, Don’t Panic is a collaboration from Nadine Scretching (New Zealand, 1987) and Rachelyn Remz (CT, 1981). After years spent absorbing culture from every perspective, Scretching & Remz decided it was time to create their own story, drawing from their friends and creative surroundings.

With experience in Fashion, Music, Art, and Food they've opened a full service mixed media agency.

DP takeover runs from August 4th - Sept 4th, 2018. Featuring Art, Design, and Fashion from Scretching & Remz in collaboration with selected peers.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is proud to announce “Quiescent,” a ‘straight’ photography exhibition with Brooklyn based photographers: Jackie Furtado, Alex Yudzon and Sara Maria Salamone, all deriving compositions from a formalist standard, incorporating memory, and presence. Works will highlight a ‘decisive moment’ that upends the contemporary burst of social shutters. Public image-makers’ current obsession with documenting and curating their memories fall prey to a motionless shoot, a determined instant yet seemingly edited instant. All artists create work that has a stain of nostalgia in the present moment. Photographing now, for what will be gone later is a moment of really seeing. Opposed to photographing in lieu of experiencing, they each are in the state of looking at, present in the moment.

The stillness lingers on a chromogenic print of Furtado’s, (taken with a 4x5 camera) “Shotgun Sun I & II” at rest within a frame, proof of soft whispers with desert hues bouncing off the negative. An image of the artist’s brother, stationary, stuck in the weeds or “The Overlook” capturing a windless and instantly by an omniscient viewer. Furtado powerfully freezes her figures in a landscape. “Rose after Edith” proves that a monochromatic setting perfectly halts a horizontal figure, embedded in a site where a tranquil light stands. Furtado escapes the rapid fire shoots of her generation of cell-phone photographer, and instead promotes a latent luminosity within her compositions.

Amongst the tiered stage, back center of the gallery, lay objects replicated from an historical Russian Cookbook that Yudzon sculpturally recreates and then photographs, without manipulation, from “The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food.” Enjoy “Sausages with Beer” above the display, then, peer into "The Book…” both the original and recreated. From 1939, until its collapse, it was the only cookbook available inside the USSR. He states that the photographs “…act as memory images, combining fragments of the real and the false to create a simulacrum that looks convincing on the surface only to fall apart into a jumble of inconsistencies upon closer examination.” Like the programmed teen exploration of “Finsta” and “Rinsta,” Instagram accounts, the ‘real’ or the ‘fake’ photo is anything but a sincere and accurate documentation of an instant. Yudzon’s images combine a fictional painting quality to a non-fictional, straight image caught on a 4 x 5.

Slowly and deliberately, Salamone’s series honors the daily inventory of objects and relationships most of us are indifferent to, such as errant weeds, and window tchotchkes. Amidst change, she documents a grammar of stillness and double-takes. Form and composition merge with a domestic photographic tradition. Wrapped in immobility as snapshot “Palm Tree Cars, Maspeth” becomes a remembrance to a hidden street, the image encapsulates its stasis with cleverness.

Please join the artists and us, July 7th between 7pm and 10pm for the opening of the Showroom’s first photography exhibition, “Quiescent.”

BIOS:

Jackie Furtado (b. 1990, Germany) is based in Brooklyn and the product of young military divorcees. Arriving to the states shortly after, Jackie split her time in southern California and Chicago. Furtado received her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has exhibited nationally and internationally with: Of the Afternoon, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Coat Check Gallery, Iceberg Projects, Higher Pictures, and Elijah Wheat Showroom. Her work has been noted in: Bad at Sports, Artnet, New Yorker, Lenscut, ArtFCity, among others.

Alex Yudzon (b. 1977, Russia) graduated with a BA in painting from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London and studied extensively at Pratt Institute in New York. Over the past decade, Yudzon has exhibited works extensively nationally and internationally including: Art Basel Miami Beach, AIPAD, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Art Bastion Gallery in Miami, La Bottega Lab in Italy, Galerie Le Magasin de Jonets in France, and Kolkata International Performance Arts Festival, in Telaviv, Israel, Zengzou, China and in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has been a resident at Wassaic Project, NY, & The Headlands in CA,  He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Sara Maria Salamone (b. 1983 Albany, NY) is a photographer and curator who has earned her BA in Photography from Hampshire College and her MFA in Photography and Related Media from Parsons The New School for Design.  Recent exhibitions include, CRUSH Curatorial, Amagansett, NY, New Hampshire Institute of Art, Manchester, NH, and her most recent solo exhibition was held at GCA in Brooklyn, NY.  Salamone has curated exhibitions at Albany Center Galleries, LAUNCH F18, site95 and Doppelgänger Projects.  Salamone also comes from a diverse and experienced background, having worked at Casey Kaplan, site95, LAUNCH F18, The Armory Show, Frieze New York and is the founding Director of Mrs. in Maspeth, Queens. 

Elijah Wheat Showroom celebrates Marcel Alcalá’s relocation to NY, as we present an exhibition entitled, “Holding Court.” The Showroom will serve as a studio for 10 days as Alcalá derives magic and the power of ulterior realities by the creation of New Work. Santeria and spiritisma is steeped deeply within their upbringing, as this week intends to topple the standard notion of a gallery. Acting as theirself, the artist will be present, producing work throughout the duration of open hours. Using the walls like a studio, and conjuring passerby’s inside to experience their process.

Both political and critical, Alcalá consistently roots for love and power for their QPOC family while pointing out the flaws of an absurd societal structure. Overall, Alcalá's artistic practice holds varying gestural forms. From vibrant, playful, narrative illustrations to keenly written and socially conscientious poetry performances always addressing the uncertainty of our American consumerist culture and upending ‘freedom of expression.’ The works’ delivery twists identity politics inside a country led by corporations.

Marcel’s work is symbolic and crude, venturing outside of institutional structures, they often tackle gender, celebrity and commodification of culture.  Figurative paintings depicting ‘male’ nudes with penetrating arrowhead or snakelike members expose themselves in a wild, colorfully active setting. Many characters flaunt high-end  'female' accessories. The glyph-like, emoticon faces feign emotion and serve as masks for the beings. With added text and symbols, Marcel visually addresses privacy, attraction, mystery, classism and destabilizing white privilege. As the clown that fascinates him, Alcalá uses humor, play, and the absurd to level essential critiques at the extremes and everyday banalities of societal power.

We welcome you to experience the new work on display between June 26th until July 5th, with a ‘Open Studio’ vibe. EWS will host a mid-term viewing on Saturday, June 30th from 7pm-10pm.

Marcel Alcalá (b. 1990, Santa Ana, CA) raised by Mexican "immigrants", inhabiting the U.S. before the Christian Colonial invasion. They received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2012. Alcalá has shown work and performed in: New York, NY // Brooklyn, NY // L.A., CA // Chicago, IL // Burlington, VT // Mexico City, Mexico // Paris, France // Lausanne, Switzerland // Oslo, Norway among other cities.  Alcalá also regularly performs activist spoken-word made-up as a clown. Marcel is further known for founding “McPoems”, a take-over poetry experience at McDonald franchises in Chicago & LA. They have received the Smithsonian Young Ambassador Scholarship among other awards for residencies in France and Norway.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is delighted to present a solo exhibition by Irish artist, Clive Murphy, opening May 19th from 6pm-9pm and runs until June 24. Beginning with reclaimed woven rugs, Clive re-purposes the textiles into wall tapestries. Heavy black pigment soaks the fabric leaving only cutout like negative space, revealing forms with a minimalist composition. Works are all comprised by the same floating shapes, however, adapt to a random sequence of four key elements into an abstraction. Also, conspicuously placed on a pedestal is an interactive box, holding identical loose forms, like detritus compiled randomly, frozen on the back panel.

Encouraging viewers to remove the object, the Random Composition Generator shuffles the loose parts as the ‘artist’ shakes the pieces to an optimal arrangement and locks it in place. Then, replaces the game back onto the gallery’s pedestal. Like DADA-identifying artists/activists of the early twentieth century intended, an optimal category of chance is embraced to release creativity from rational control. Questioning the role of the artist in the artistic process, Murphy insights audience involvement and includes them in the production and presentation of compositions. Participants will have an opportunity to leave an analogue image to remain in the gallery for the duration of the show along with Murphy’s signature small scale ready-made sculptures.

There is a calm practice of abstraction, freeing any subject matter and allowing a metaphysical standard to present the compositions without pretense. Like dropping sticks of the I-ching or tossing runes, shapes and symbols forecast and magically inform the participants’ current art-going experiences. This occultist-like pinball game offers humor, accidental design and a primal abstraction for the participant. The random patterns and abstractions reveal anything from “little nymphs, to cheeky demonic faces” Murphy chorts.

Clive Murphy lives and works in Brooklyn. Previous exhibitions include: St. Isdro's Still, Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City (2018); Ambient Occlusion, Present Company Gallery, Brooklyn (2017); House of Cards, Van Horn Gallery, Dusseldorf (2016); Good Things Come..., Plymouth College of Art, England (2016); Two Machines, Knockdown Centre, New York (2015); DIWIF (Demonic Interventions With Ikea Furniture) - collaboration with Aengus Woods, Rawson Projects, New York (2015); Being: The Gameshow, Storefront For Art and Architecture, New York (2014); Saturated Phenomena, Wildlife, Brooklyn (2013); Neo Proto Demo, Kling & Bang, Reykjavik, Iceland (2013) Zypher, Jerome Fellowship funded public sculpture, Franconia Sculpture Park, Minnesota (2012); Fill The Barn, Index Festival of Sound and Technology, New York (2011); The Sixth Borough, No Longer Empty, Governors Island, New York (2010); Almost Nothing, Soap Factory Gallery, Minneapolis (2009); LMCC, New York (2008);Non-Oblectif Sud, Côtes du Rhône (2008); Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2008); West Germany Gallery, Berlin (2007); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007); Fieldgate Gallery, London (2007); Mercer Union Gallery, Toronto (2006); Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (2005) Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork (2005); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Manchester/Sheffield/London (2005); Alma Enterprises Gallery, London (2005); British Council/CityMine(d) Brussels (2005); Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai (2004); Gallery 411, Hangzhou (2004); Zedebois Centre, Lisbon (2003) EV+A, Limerick (2002); CCFA, Prague (2001)

Elijah Wheat Showroom is proud to announce a transgressive two person ceramic show, Flamethrowers.  Artists Shannon Goff and Roxanne Jackson address handmade sculpture with a vigorous building of clay, fired to ceramic with lustrous glazing yet at war with more traditional approaches. Jackson and Goff fuse two levels of visual structure: above the horizon and below. They each wield weapons, like fire, to merge the two into powerful ceramic objects.

Jackson centers the object firmly, like a mineral once stuck and removed from the geology of an alien plateau. “Her macabre works are black-humored investigations of the links between transformation, myth, and kitsch.” She explains. There is a comfortable emotional shift from the Alienware series of Jackson’s work: representational heads of 'beasts' are flayed and opened in a process that deconstructs the original image(s); the result leads to creatures or mineral formations opening as if caught in a psychedelic, biological dissection of the underworld's secrets.  Her protruding ‘mystical’ elements stab the atmosphere from the palms of paws, like an offering to its celestial creator. Nails, fur, candles, crystals, gold chains and dice are reminiscent of an urbane plateau, earthly, physical and profane albeit a suggested irreverence for self-imposed sacred symbols of contemporary occultism.

Contrarily, Goff’s balanced abstractions build a contained calm, breaking rules of gravity, and enacting the false unease of their own strength. The torrid structure implies entanglement, within a collapsing landscape. The imaginary landscapes assemble as gestural drawings in space, testing the conceptual and structural limitations of the material. “I work on the edge of chaos and the beneficial space of failure...gravity is a constant tutor.” She explains. The entangled line often begins innocently, like a doodle in its purest form. The negative space inside Goff’s sculptures feels equal to the positive space. The delicacy of her work goes against the weight of the material, making them feel light, airy, and ungrounded, not so common for an earthly and permanent material of clay, then glazed and carefully fired. As if painting a Japanese landscape, lines lift upward, suggesting the presence of the atmosphere.

The Flamethrowers’ sculptures synchronize with craft in a pure form yet blaze a path for a reinvention and disruption of historic ceramic sculpture. Their keen ability to combine both the celestial and terrestrial from their interpretation of the horizon, as ‘above and below’, sacred and profane, proves their conceptual tenacity. These artists share a sculptural practice that highlights a subversive and at times transgressive one; both thwarting a conventional expectation of the ceramics tradition.

Roxanne Jackson is a ceramic artist and mixed-media sculptor living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Gothamist, ArtSlant, Brooklyn Magazine, among others. She has been an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Wassaic Project, Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China, funded by an NCECA International Residency Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Honey Ramka, Regina Rex, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Knockdown Center, BRIC, the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, PA; the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minneapolis, MN; the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, ME; the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, NJ. She has shown in China, Portugal, Romania, Canada, and such cities as London, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Brussels, Leipzig and Mexico City. Jackson is also the cofounder of NASTY WOMEN EXHIBITION, a national/international art exhibition and fundraising project.

Shannon Goff is an artist from Detroit currently living and working in Central PA.  She received her BFA from the University of Michigan, a Post-Baccalaureate from Kyoto Seika University in Japan and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.Shannon has been the recipient of a Japanese Monbusho grant and twice awarded residencies to the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry program. She has been an artist in residence at the ClayArch Museum in Gimhae, South Korea and a United States Artists nominee. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Knockdown Center, Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Ferndale, MI, Printed Matter, the San Jose Museum of Art, UC-Northridge, Honey Ramka,and in Beijing, Berlin, Chicago, London and Australia.Recent reviews of her work have been featured in Hyperallergic, DesignBoom, Colossal, FastCoDesign,Cfile and Detroit Art Review.She is an associate professor of Sculpture and Ceramics at Penn State University.

The Elijah Wheat Showroom presents artist Natalie Baxter: TrollLolLol. The show's title references cruelly worded and deliberately accusatory commentary found on the Internet that incites outrage for the victim and creates a twisted humor from the perpetrator. Natalie’s educational story begins with her grandmother’s training working with thread & needle. Her elaborate sewing techniques are remembered to fabricate contemporary non-functional representational objects, like pistols & assault rifles. Baxter “strives to create approachable, soft sculpture work as an accessible entry point to unpack issues that have become points of division in today’s landscape.”

Since her matriarchal and institutional instruction, she has worked with fiber to create the Warm Gun Series “examining the United States’ issues of gun violence and masculinity through a collection of colorfully quilted, droopy caricatures of assault weapons, bringing ‘macho’ objects into a traditionally feminine [craft] sphere and questioning their potency.” Baxter received thoughtful and charged online reviews of her exhibitions as well as negative.  Baxter and her work were the focus of an article on Glenn Beck's website, The Blaze, in which she received numerous angry and hateful words from trolls. In response, from these comments, she fastidiously fabricated appliqué banners with the derogatory phrases, in image of the protest signs of the suffragettes. 

The AltCaps series then reclaims “comments directed at [her] about gender, sexuality, and mental state, however, [she has] a hard time believing that this anxiety and aggression all stems from making a collection of stuffed pillow guns.” She decided to re-live these comments from the internet and stitch them onto a permanent presentation because “sadly, [it is] a part of the fabric that makes up the world we live in today and instead of shrug it off, [Baxter] feels it’s vital that we confront it.”

Both series of work, Warm Gun & AltCaps will be conjoined as the installation of the banners circumvents on the walls the suspended, limp guns from the center of the gallery. Viewers are enticed to travel through the exhibition with the playful, interactive and brightly colored fiber installation as the toxicity of explicit words of hate go flaccid and provoke comebacks.

Natalie Baxter (b. 1985, Kentucky) received her MFA from the University of Kentucky in 2012 and her BA in Fine Art from the University of the South in Sewanee, TN in 2007. Her work has been exhibited recently at Mulherin (New York), Spring/Break Art Fair (New York), Alison Milne Gallery (Toronto, ON), Institute 193 (Lexington, KY), In Ersten (Vienna, Austria), and The Cornell Art Museum (DelRay Beach, FL). Baxter’s work has been featured in Vice’s The Creator’s Project, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, W Magazine, The London Observer and The New York Times. Baxter has been an artist in residence at The Wassaic Project and a fellowship recipient at the Vermont Studio Center. She currently works in Brooklyn, NY.  

LONDON!

Lina and Liz as part of the Original Nasty Women Exhibition Crew in NYC (yup, we're 2 of the 10 OG crew) are teaming up with Creative Debuts, an online gallery and sales space for emerging artists & designers. 

This is a curated show and a chance for artists that submitted (during the open call) an opportunity to present work both online and exhibited in a London creative space for a month. There is a ticketed entry for the auction. See details to RSVP here. 

DATE AND TIME

Thursday, March 8, 2018

7:00 PM – 11:00 PM GMT

Add to Calendar

LOCATION

The Black & White Building

74 Rivington Street

London

EC2A 3AY

United Kingdom

View Map

Proceeds to go to
End Violence Against Women Coalition

Artists notified of selection after February 1st, 2018. All  artists were encouraged to submit. There was no limitations on price of work, size, media, gender identity, political affiliation, race, etc. 

Elijah Wheat Showroom presents an environmental winter show entitled “Persistence of Future Memories.” Displayed will be inventively vibrant paintings of Annie Ewaskio and delicate ceramics with single-channel videos by Aimee Odum. Opening, Friday the 2nd of February from 7pm-10pm.  Together, the works present future landscapes that melt into folk-like narratives of Arctic expeditions and take-overs of a natural world. Remembering conflicting desires from human instincts to conquer the landscape (turning mostly tragic)—either the natural world is destroyed or the destruction becomes that of man.

How insignificant is a surfer against the mammoth waves of Nazare?  What shelter can withstand a volcanic eruption? Where are the personal artifacts left behind a fleeing catastrophe? Where is the temple holding the bodies after the Earth’s last frontier crumbles? Here are works that are on the verge, a looming doom that speaks of an escape to a darker territory and a future that feels nihilistic, juxtaposed to an escape inside a utopian otherworldliness. 

Just as an ‘emotional hangover’ may influence any retained memories in one’s consciousness, so do the shadowy and sprawling works in “Persistence of Future Memories.” Ewaskio’s paintings display a depth of light and forms straddling unfamiliar landscapes, highlighted by bold lines and saturated hues floating like remnants of a memory. Odum’s ceramics mold to a site unseen, giving to a passage that must grow and adapt to its new surroundings. The healthy formation of minds-eye remembrances steer the future, “Persistence of Future Memories” allows hope to bring us to an alternative reality, joyfully allowing our own recollections to connect, adapt and befitted as bold memoirs.

Annie Ewaskio has participated in solo and group shows across the United States, including GP Presents, A.I.R., and Underdonk (New York); Zolla/Lieberman (Chicago); Texas Christian University (Fort Worth); and Current (Baltimore). Her work has appeared in publications including The Brooklyn Rail, The New Yorker, and New American Paintings. Ewaskio is the recipient of two Kossak Painting grants, the Jerome Foundation Travel & Study grant, and the William and Dorothy Yeck award from Miami University. Residencies include The Arctic Circle Program and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE. She has an MFA from Hunter College, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Aimee Odum is a visual artist residing in Brooklyn, New York and currently oversees the Jane Hartsook Gallery at Greenwich House Pottery. Odum received her MFA in Studio Art from University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Here she also fulfilled curatorial endeavors and organized events as Director of sUgAR, University of Arkansas' student-run gallery, and as Director of sUgAR Vision, an Internet and Televised art platform. Recipient of the Sturgis International Fellowship, she was a Visiting Artist at Iceland Academy of the Arts in Autumn 2015 exhibiting her work at Mengi and The Living Art Museum. Recently, she premiered a collaborative, performance-based project in Belgium and was part of the traveling exhibition Running Towards Dreams exhibited in Fayetteville, AR and Tehran, Iran. Odum’s studio practice utilizes video, objects and installation, addressing how human instincts and cultural patterns formulate conflicting desires for the natural world. 

Elijah Wheat Showroom is proud to present new work by Frances Waite, “Slap the Void” opening from 6pm-9pm, Saturday, December 16, 2017.

Waite’s drawings are fantastical, forward, vulnerable and thoughtful. Her sometimes self-effacing-selfies are realistically drawn to present a reality within a known environment turned dreamscape. Shifting from ardent drawings of: her living space, to a couch, to her offering of her left boob to a painting she never painted, to graphic poses under displays of future creations. We exhibit these multi-scale portrayals in a familiar place, where she held her first Solo-show in September of 2016.

The void is fantasy; the void is “me and my ghost and my ghost dick and my ghost life” she explains. The space between visual reality and the void is where the couch becomes a character, a truth. But did it really happen? Garnering fanfare in the social media scene, she snaps these creations, posts this reality and moves on. We are always excited about where Frances Waite’s imagination takes her, what she gives to her drawings, how she exposes herself, and how she virally shares them on social media.

EWS presents these original works on paper, about her void by exhibiting a reality that never really happened, in an objectified world of voyeurs. Now, at the precipice of female empowerment, and the breakdown of patriarchal standards, she portrays an anomaly of a feminist’s vulnerability.   Waite explains,  “I draw myself into my living room under a painting I never made of a boy I don't know giving me an orgasm I won't have.” She ‘Slaps the Void’ in real life, (finding a space to exist and move between) while reliving joy or “pain in million different ways.” The vagary of hand drawn images will be on display until January 14th, 2018.

Frances Waite currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Starting 2018, she will be an L.A. based maker of drawings. She earned her BFA from Pratt Institute, and has been included in exhibitions throughout the East Coast and Midwestern United States. Frances’ work has been featured in Huffington Post, Paper Magazine, Vices Creator’s Project, FUKT Magazine, among others, mainly of web publications often highlighting her prolific presence on social media. Instagram is the tool she uses to release drawings that explore the limitations of public and private intimate space.

“This too shall pass. So be it.”

May 5th-May 28th, 2017

JEFFREY GRAUEL

MICHEAL DYKEHOUSE

CHERYL POPE

Elijah Wheat Showroom presents a group exhibit for a spring unlike any other. Our hearts have been heavy remembering those that have lost their lives too early, too young, too unjustly, too violently, and just too visibly in our media.  We want to talk about grief. We hope to acknowledge death and the skewed way our Western culture portrays the perception of death, dying and the act of grieving. Loss manifests itself; it is always personal, as is the sorrow that follows. Many are touched by the intensity of the loss of a loved one earlier in their life, while others may not have gained the empathy that ensues-- due to the lack of experience of an intimate death. However, it’s not just humans that experience loss of other humans. Loss and grieving can extend to loved ones and passions.  Such as: animals, an intense personal job, an important cultural movement, an election, etc. 

So often, when confronted by another’s anguish of death, one may not know what to say, do, or share when responding to the mourning person. One would more likely have the capacity for empathetic communication if they faced a similar tragedy of untimely death, or intense loss. Also, there would be a better understanding if the grieving (within the presence of those survived) felt the permission to discuss the progression and stages grieving more openly. There are so many outside expectations for the grieving— projections of what historically we see in Hallmark Cards—yet how do we address the inconsolable genocide so far removed from our land yet portrayed in our media? How do we address the heartrending anguish of an unknown soldier, an unknown citizen, an unknown victim from gang related violence, or a known catastrophe of police brutality and murder? Images of death, dying and torture have been resurfacing online (since print regulations from the 70’s) only to reiterate the need to discuss all personal and political ramifications of human’s suffering, violence and war.

Presenting funerary elements in a combined white-cube setting, Jeffrey Grauel crafts a series of ‘hides’ with wool yarn positioned sculpturally on stations meant for wreaths next to a coffin. Nostalgia also beckons hobbyists who once were challenged by such pre-manufactured objects for idle hands. Here lies, an object meant for dexterity and productivity opposed to media scrolling. These delicately stand amongst each other, revealing on the backside images of those we may have revered and lost, such as: A dog, a cat, a horse, a Caucasian representation of ‘God’ and the ideals and presentation of a Native American Chief.

Cheryl Pope presents work close to home as she laments on the youth targeted and caught in the gunfire of some of the violent streets of S. Chicago. “Too Young Too Die” is a performative sculpture of carnations and roses in a ‘spray’ on the gallery wall that assuredly wilts as the exhibit carries on and time passes throughout the month.

Michael Dykehouse’s hyper-real oil paintings present political figures trapped in the presence of contemporary ideals. “Year of the Cock” summons #45’s aggressive, foul-mouthed protruding profile commemorating the ‘fire rooster’ of the Chinese Zodiac, 2017. The “’Always got mad when the class was dismissed’” painting portraying Betsy Devos devours the life of an apple while the figure reaches to strangle the viewer.  This action exemplifies an act of belligerence by appointing her to the pinnacle of the USA’s educational governance, memorializing public education.

These works’ installation within the gallery serves as a reminder, honoring the passed, acknowledging bereavement and establishing a protected space to instigate dialogue about rampant death that citizens are experiencing personally and politically this year. We shall let time proceed, remembering the good, remembering the laughter, as our own inner clocks wind down (or speed up!) healing woes, shock, heartache, anguish while we evoke the affirmation: “This too shall pass. So be it.”

“MOLL MADNOSS”

JOSEPH KRASKA

JOHANNAH HERR

MARCH 3RD-APRIL 16TH

Elijah Wheat Showroom continues to instigate, agitate and resist with March's programming entitled “Moll Madnoss.” Opening, Friday March 3rd from 7pm-10pm featuring a premier of Joseph Kraska’s 7th episode of "Peppré Ann and Froends.” The artful video portrays a digitally complex SIMS-like virtual world that is ruled by Peppré’s festive yet demented consumer driven life, inside the ‘Moll.’

The Showroom will become a retail clothing environment with a collection of pre-owned professional garments for sale on racks.  Suites, dresses, blazers, button down shirts and more, will be available from homogenized franchises located throughout the USA (and abroad). Contemporary political statements on patches or lapel pins will be affixed with each purchase deriving from the flurry of witty protest signs from the Women’s March on January 21st, 2017. Some of which are: “I’m Not Ovary-Acting”, “Resistance Is Fertile”, “I <3 Naps But I Stay Woke”, “This IS What a Feminist Looks Like” and many more. Patches and lapel pins will be available for sale to iron-on or stich-on to one’s own garments as well. The ‘Moll’ will also proudly present prefabbed handmade caps by Johannah Herr stating: "NASTY", "CUNT" &  "FEMINIST" for purchase. Alongside the caps, a few of Johanna’s “Snuggies” printed with a complex pattern of teargas, rubber bullets and other weapons used by U.S.A. SWAT teams during peaceful protests for crowd control will be presented and “for sale”. Teaming up with our neighbors, DRTYSMMR, EWS strives to capture community on the Bushwick streets. Works of artful garments will also be available as “up-cycled” fast fashion from an enhanced ready-to-wear collection at the store, next door.  

The privately owned mall, opposed to the public gathering spaces of the town square, is an example of corporate capitalism at the center of a meeting space. Consumers and business owners come together in suburbia or massive structures to acknowledge this cultural phenomenon as central locations for the exchange of goods, albeit driving away from the main streets of villages where its inhabitants thrive between independently owned, neighborly exchanges. Thereby as arts writer, Alicia Eler, explains that its “Creating consumer experiences out of public spaces is indeed how Jerde [inventor/architect of the ‘Mall’] is best remembered; it is an aesthetic experience of the most mundane variety, and indeed his aim was to serve “the common man” rather than “the elite.” ...Somewhere in this shift people started mistaking culture for consumerism and vice versa.”

The American Mall's function in suburban society, (albeit also slowly disappearing) as a gathering space focuses on consumption opposed to political gatherings. Our freedom to assemble is quickly being challenged as peaceful protestors’ and protectors’ rights are currently being questioned and states such as ND, MI, LA and OH are working to make it illegal to (and other crazy notions) congregate without consumption. The act of wearing a political sign on one's clothing, whether professional are everyday, without assembly, makes everyday an individual silent protest. 

From the sales, 50 % of the proceeds of the clothing & patches will go to Lambda Legal-- a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is a national organization committed to achieving full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and everyone living with HIV through impact litigation, education and public policy work.

EWS worked alongside with 9 other Nasty & superbly specialized bad-ass organizers to make 'HERSTORY'.  Lina & Liz were the central points for artists' inventory logistics & communication to assist with the success of the show. Nasty Women exhibition opened at Knockdown center January 12th, 2017. The team gave 100% of the proceeds to planned parenthood. In three hours, 2240 people attended, 444 artworks purchased and almost 35k raised for PP for an incredibly basic, yet well organized cash & carry system. See the links on PRESS for the <3. 

MAIN HIGHLIGHTS: 

· 623 Artists delivered works

· 444 Works sold on opening night generating almost $32k for PP

· 680 (?ish) works under $100 'SOLD OUT' generating over $45k

· 700+ submissions

· 150+ volunteers

· 32+ Articles written about NWE

· 40+ shows now worldwide which has started a movement of Solidarity in Blue and Red states across the country and also in locations across the world. 

Elijah Wheat Showroom is proud to present 'Channeling', an exhibit of Lauren Gregory’s expressive animated oil portraits and stop-frame animations at Satellite fair during the 14th installment of the whirlwind that is Miami Basel.

Humans have been engaging in the act of channeling for millennia, for as long as there has been mark making. Springing from this primordial well, energies intermingle to actuate a spirit onto a wall of a cave, a canvas, or a panel. Often, when watching an artist in the midst of capturing their subject, the arm, body and overall performance becomes channeled. The expressions of Ms. Gregory’s work portray otherworldly, inspired creatures and figures. Her thoughtful portraits epitomize a ‘channeled’ experience inside both her still canvases as well as her videos.

The EWS booth presents four video ‘channels’ on monitors with varying animations ranging from Gifs to two-minute loops that Lauren has created mostly in 2016. These works demonstrate thousands of strokes painted with her fingers and thousands of frames shot and assembled. All are combined to create the motion that breathtakingly brings these scenic paintings to life. The lowered atmospheric light and movement beckons the viewer. As they’re drawn into a trance Lauren’s paintings reveal a dark humor while exposing an unusual portrayal of everyday life, celebrities and pop culture.

The still portraits, some on non-traditional canvases are lit with bright spots hung at an unusually high centerline above the video. Each of the elevated peering eyes follows the viewer as they enter the space. Works of thickly painted oil often have sculpted eyes that follow the viewer as they are in their presence. Further, these still subjects are Lauren and the Showroom’s Bushwick queer artistic community, all painted from seated moments, when the artist channels their looming creative energy. Elijah Wheat is also present, depicted in wolf fur, holding his cat.

These hauntingly realistic and penetrating interactions will induce a space where individual viewers become entranced by the animated paintings’ movement; each participant mesmerized and still, watching, staring and being stared at, channeling into spirited objects.

Ellen Schafer

Curated by Dr. Anne Luther

November 12 - December 11 2016

Opening Reception, November 12, 2016 from 7pm-10pm.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is pleased to present I reach out and touch another an exhibition of new work by Ellen Schafer, curated by Anne Luther.

Some spaces move our body in a familiar way. We are accustomed to the architecture of a shop, a show room, or a supermarket and the internalization of the way we move our bodies is not questioned. We walk, touch and communicate in mundane modes; the intimate awareness of the space lays out an architecture that moves our body. Simulated here is a system to place our bodies into the familiar awareness of a showroom.

The resemblance to the showroom differs in a very particular way: the objects displayed are made with hand sanitizer, silicone and urethane, all materials, that through their handling take on a resemblance to organic, body-like physique. Our bodies become ingrained in the objects we usually use and that habitually form our everyday routine. We can recognize ourselves immediately in a familiar architecture. Nevertheless the body-like material reminds us of our own material existence: looking at these objects I realize that I can only see part of my own body, I can’t see my back, the top of my head, my cheeks. I am subject to myself because I cannot see, touch, or move around me fully, like I can around these objects.

The work has traces of an interaction with the material object; we can see a geometric print, a connection and moves on the surfaces. The object shows traces of intimacy and thought or maybe our desire to recognize ourselves without the material body of the ‘Other’. In this system that we encounter in the exhibition intimacy becomes a consumer experience, and a moment of personal agency still defined by consumer behavior - we are learning about our body through the familiarity of objects. The inquiry begins as follows: One day I realized that my left leg was branded 'Just Do It', 'Champion', so I reached down and began carving into my right.

Ellen Schafer attended the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California from 2014-15 and received a BA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2012. She has exhibited in both the United States and abroad, including Various Small Fires (Los Angeles), Shanaynay (Paris, FR), Park View (Los Angeles), CirkulationsCentralen (Malmo, SE), SPF 15 (San Diego), ltd los angeles Hollywood Hills and Actual Size (Los Angeles).

The place between: The Taint. Our next exhibition coincides with the 2016 presidential election as well as Halloween. Combining these two moments, between October 15 and November 8th the work presented at EWS engages politically. “Taint” plays as the title of the exhibit with work by Jo Boyer and Marcel Alcala with an installation by EWS. 

Each artist identifies as queer with a neutrality of gender stereotypes in their physical presentation both to their communities and our greater society. The work they create speaks to facades of formality and any binary gender roles. 

Jo Boyer builds with porcelain creating vessels with cavernous hiding spaces hung like reliefs on the wall opposed to freestanding. Their bats are dangling, looming over the gallery, bringing an auspicious capitalism; as the Chinese understand five bats signify prosperity, health and luck. Penetrating air plants burst from the openings of the ‘pods’ and anatomically correct black porcelain hearts. The porcelain becomes a home. The growing Tillandsia thrives in habitats that are not meant to be homes.  Sculptures of their sleeping bats hang erratically in corners of the gallery bringing a nocturnal character, hungry for blood, possibly rabid, however quietly watching with a menacing surveillance. As the bat references both fortune and medieval darkness, a viewers’ perception once again becomes skewed based on appearances.

Marcel’s work is gestural, patterned and sometimes crude.  Figurative paintings depicting male nudes with penetrating arrowhead or snakelike members expose themselves in a wild, colorful jungle like setting. Many characters don 'female' accessories. The childish glyph-like emoticon faces feign emotion and serve as masks for the beings. With added text and symbols, Marcel visually addresses privacy, attraction, mystery, and classism. The figure’ interactions portray American capitalism acknowledging and destabilizing white privilege. They also regularly perform activist spoken-word made-up as a clown. Marcel is further known for founding “McPoems”, a take-over poetry experience at McDonald franchises in Chicago & LA.

Each artist’s work is displayed with a 6ft gummy candy python almost slithering on the floor, in an unnatural habitat of a white cube. The candy represents a false reality between sweet excessive intake and menacing appearance of a dangerous evil constrictor from biblical parables. The snake is ready for a bite of Halloween consumption—a trick or treat of sorts, condoning excessive consumerism.

This tainted red monstrous candy, contained in a terrarium like-space that is between many worlds of gender, between that which is cavernous and that which protrudes, living and dead, fake and real, appearances and reality. Hoping to bring a viewer thoughts of what ‘taint. Artificial pretenses placate moments of reality through Halloween. The election presents candidates in bipartisan roles, which taint altruism, promote sexism, and which are tainted with accusations of corruption. This election champions American excess and superficial statements costuming reality. Here lies the fine line between a male and female candidate that just “Taint.”

Frances Waite's "My Girl" 

Elijah Wheat Showroom is ecstatic to present works on paper by Frances Waite. She is a newly emerged artist with her first solo show, “My Girl”. The body of work is prolific with many playful, sexy illustrations of queer figures in bleak landscapes. Her cunning artistry portrays an intimate scrutiny while she celebrates sentimentality.

The affection in touch, being touched, and touching stretches across the surface based work provoking a viewer to feel big love. Often, the tiny, childlike characters sexually experiment between two worlds: A ghostlike past and a present orgasmic setting. Using some text, and with clear representation of sexual interactions with both highly rendered and gestural elements, she provides blaring commentary on the casual interactions of a stagnant solitary search for sexual comfort. In the midst of climax, often tears are indistinguishable from pussy squirts and cum shots.

With in a current sociological dating conundrum, a ‘love’ seeking generation emerges focused on judgmental superficial left/right swiping of one’s social media connections. Human images are presented as possible ‘dating’ options. With a flurry of false promises and controlled profile information, one objectification reigns: partner’s expectations.  

Frances has gained many followers. Her impressive popularity was earned after conducting an open-call experiment to deliver nude pictures (she’d take them any way digitally) and then would draw them. The project brought hundreds of anonymous photos via email, Instagram, WhatsApp, and even text. Proactively, Frances rendered over 50 of these 500+ submissions, focusing on images with limbs, not just the ‘dick-pics’ she received.

The artist communicates depicting representational contemporary queerness, and presents symbols connecting meaningful female relationships between her contemporary peers and ‘ghostmen’. The combination of figurative elements with text provides an explicit and subtle dialogue about the ease of finding willing partners—and the aftermath. Her imagery provides the viewer with most empowered yet vulnerable of sexual experiences.  Presenting stories of nudes moving through a barren landscape with smooth rapid transitions, or renditions of human figures sensually bouncing between bodies with non-connected ‘bangs’. Her sexual narratives describe voluminous interactions. This exhibit parades the nude with a captivating body of work.  Viewers will lean into stories of contemporary hook-up culture, female sexual desire, anonymous sex and embracing a culture of non-binary gender interplay or non-hetero-normative sexuality. A re-occurring theme of female sexual empowerment inside a tender and perceived vulnerability is keenly expressed. Relating to the amorphous and transmutable dating scene she takes "hook-up" culture, shakes it up, exposes it, and turns it upside down. 

Transaction

Jun 10 – Jul 17
Opening reception: Jun 10, 6-9pm, at the Knockdown Center

Closing Reception: July 17, 5-9pm at the Knockdown Center with a special Piece by RAFT (Pat Noecker). 

Energy is neither created nor destroyed; rather, it changes form…with

Aaron Johnson
Alex Chowaniec
Aliza Morell
Angelina Gualdoni
Austin Eddy
Alyssa Gorelick
Brent Garbowski
Brook Sinkinson-Withrow
Carol Jackson
Carol Bove
Edie Fake
Katie Bell
Kenrick McFarlane
Lisa Yuskavage
Marcel Alcala
Marcel Dzama
Mike Schreiber
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Shara Hughes
Shannon Goff
Wendy White
Yevegenia Baras
Young Sun Han

special map by Michael Merck

This curatorial experiment will present 25 artists’ personal artifacts exposing small natural take-aways from a creative’s beloved landscape.

The suspended installation will showcase small physical remnants of a single journey, or moment in time, which an artist wanted to remember and take away, opposed to the carefully crafted work they usually complete to show the public. Through these remnants, the artists willingly share their inspiration, intention and momentum with participants.

Viewers will be invited to explore and bask, if you will, in the echoing auras that these talismans cast.  There is a recreating of sacred space for each object, which ultimately has an intimate value to the artist, alongside their manufactured conception.

Just as chest x-rays of Marilyn Monroe, Buddy Holly’s glasses, Elizabeth Taylor’s jewels or Andy Warhol’s wig were sold at auction for a significant price tag, could these talismans of established artists become a valuable collector’s item? Or are these geographical remnants truly priceless? We invite you to discover the energy transactions.

Organized by Elijah Wheat Showroom (Liz Nielsen and Carolina Wheat)

CLOSING EVENT

'Long Term Exposure' is the title for a performance at the closing. Pat Noecker will set up 10 amps in a circle and execute his tonal sound work called “Long Term Exposure.” A floor rug and pillow will be positioned in front of each amp in order to provide listeners with an immersive experience where they will be bathed in sustained sine waves over a period of 30 minutes. Long Term Exposure was designed using tone-generating apps with the aim to positively alter the physical body through protracted sound.  The piece grew from Noecker’s experiments playing tone-generating apps, most recently for Hopes And Fears Magazine and at Trans-Pecos.

ALCHEMY

May 20th-June 12th, 2016

Elijah Wheat Showroom presents a group show titled, Alchemy. “The medieval chemical process of generating gold by the magical combination of basic elements” is a longstanding magical idea. Not only does the word promise longevity as an elixir for life, it attracts a mysterious combination of something common into something exceptional.  The promise in this exhibition will mix painterly expressions interacting together in order to transmute a special kind of Universal currency. The attraction to this currency is not a sparkling gold embodiment, rather, a currency of time, of pleasure, of a contemporary market exchanging symbols to take away meaning for a renewed purpose in ‘this thing we call life’. The four artists’ works shown in this exhibition understand the mysterious process of turning ordinary materials into something impressive in a formidable way.

Nick Cueva uses natural unprimed upholstery as a canvas, combining oil paint and representing elements outside of a hazy void. As if a viewer has just awoken from a decadent dream with a groggy vision--the eyes struggle to make out their surroundings. Focusing on an unassuming material, a moment of recognition begins and the sculpture or painting’s message becomes a mysterious reveal. The reveal conjures a sultry pleasure and enjoyment of a life delightfully lived; becoming a transition between achieving dreams in a reality.  Cueva’s marks prove a simultaneously refined and intuitively discovered canvas all while wrapping an ordinary still-life into an extraordinary entity. 

The careful symbols and asymmetry found on the oil canvases of Stacie Johnson reflect a further mastery of manipulating paper, oils and objects into an optical wonder. Each canvas is sensibly combined with off-balanced colors where drop shadows and cutout shapes push the abstractive symbols in-between a here and now. It’s a visual pull advocating further inspection and wonder all while adding to a harmonious yet mystifying alchemy.

A hand-built ceramic wall shields a nude, energetic dancer in Hannah Walsh’s silent video “Hole Wall”. As if the discovery of the figure is the only visual reference to reality, she cautiously assembles a setting further frustrating an illusion of privacy. Therefore subjects her audience to the subtle mystery and a pleasurable voyeurism.

As Brendan Loper’s satirical works on paper cycle through a digital screen, it becomes obvious that the prolific wit, current irritations and social commentaries are a charmed intelligence. The enchanted characters, spanning a historical breadth, wallow in a structure that is rendered both absurd yet accurately representative of simple contemporary American culture. These carefully penned illustrations melt into a thrilling and often hilarious mockery. He proves that civilization emerging from a primordial well overflows with a banal social order, and transmutes into laughter, that which keeps us living longer, fuller lives.

These artists presented in the exhibit Alchemy wield an uncanny energy to connect messages based in the mathematical structure of visual language. Their combined chemistry provides magic to a viewer, so as to find pleasure, laughter, wonder and the currency of a golden time.

The Elijah Wheat Showroom presents ABRACADABRA, a painting show with three hard-working female painters that ‘create as they speak’. This term describes a powerful Aramaic/Hebrew incantation that brings to life that which may be an inanimate object, breathing words into form in order to construct a magical world where anything is possible.

Showcasing work that has been newly made in 2016, each artist displays examples of a breathtaking illustrative voice, found in a surreal world of light, time and space that speaks to a primal otherworldliness. The objects in the ether have been fabricated to a likeness that is both simultaneously familiar yet often unrecognizable. The viewer is placed into an atmosphere of a black hole, a loop, an unfamiliar place. Creeping out onto a shifting plane with vibrations of luminosity, beings of the night cast figures, and beckon an underworld.

With “The Minor Fall” and “Secret Chord” Aliza Morell displays oil paintings of glowing neon roses along with an image of a summoning palm. The “Secret Chord” portrays a conjuring salon hand, echoing with light and luring a viewer into the darkness. “The Minor Fall” projects the voyeur to the ceiling where they can see the bird’s eye display of fallen roses, strewn upon the ground. The works push the viewer towards the wall or up to the ceiling in a playful structure operating outside of two-dimensionality. 

In Monica Bernal’s body of drawings and paintings, she brings us to a topsy-turvy world meandering through active life forms inside a black hole. Energy is vibrant, plants are growing, aliens exist among nothingness and new life is born in a dark, seemingly hopeless setting. She is creating as her pen speaks; she is visualizing an existence beyond Earth, beyond known geography, beyond a space that is recognizable. 

Lauren Gregory’s stop-frame painted animations contain loops of physicality and sexuality exhibiting an ultimate force of creation. Her frolicking images with female wrestlers entitled “Tussle” roll with time like a well-traveled hitchhiker. A force of symbiotic meeting, of frustrated approaches, of nearing an ultimate destination, it’s here that a passenger creates as they whisper their final landing to the driver. The simple animated loop "Dickmatized" depicting a perfect male member, dangling, bobbing and enjoying freedom also gives form to a moment of Abracadabra: For enjoyment, for life, for a magic wand granting your wishes.

@ Catalyst Gallery

137 Main St

Beacon, NY 12508

Elijah Wheat Showroom is daring to present landscape-like works spanning the course of Liz Nielsen’s 20-year photographic and artistic career. The title is suggestive of the subtle scent of the Earth after a light rain. Oils from plants interact with the dry rocks as an aerosol disperses into the atmosphere. Just as chemical liquid interactions mixed with light are integral to the process of photography, so is the harmony of the gentle eco-system of this terrestrial land. With petrichor, one walks into the landscape, with a keener consciousness, now surrounded by the aroma and the brighter colors of an interactive nature.

Liz Nielsen’s prolific career spans two decades and encompasses varying experiments in photography along with incredibly fluid, yet ever-changing processes. Known for her large-scale camera-less light paintings and photograms, this show departs from the expected and enters a history through the lens. Works shown here will connect the early camera shots and compositions to the more contemporary modern ab-ex photos the artist has created in the darkroom.  Intermixed images will prove how the landscape and horizon often inform her imagery and where future and alien landscapes interlude to beckon a playful yet thoughtful view of shapes, forms, and perspectives often unsettling the geographic Earth as humans experience.

An early eye, first focuses on representational relationships between the landscape, shapes and subject within the ‘Cuba Series’. Yet, her shooting still holds the creative fields of life’s vibrations interacting inside the camera. The moment she chooses to allow light to enter the lens, color moves the spatial landscape in the ‘Deep Space Series’. As Nielsen’s vibrant palette slowly becomes an understood language, she shifts the viewers’ point of view; her voice becomes stronger, more uniquely forceful, as abstractions proliferate the imagery.

Please join us for a first-time walk through discovering an introspective collection of work that displays bold Earthly and far-out cosmic landscapes processes from the lens. Then notice a contrasting saturation of expressionistic abstract color after an unflinching, yet subtle rain of creative success mastering the physics of light in the darkroom. 

ZVX brings together four artists who build upon, and question source material from the 21st century. Borrowing the concept of Open Source, computer software code that is made available to the public, these artists reinterpret and re-conceptualize the past and present into new forms, ideas and meanings, to create work that is both nostalgic and of the near future. The delicate balance of selected works by the artists intuitively engage Open Sources with broad interpretation. This includes: Found internet imagery, code, fractal memories, quantum mechanics, space, and time. The results remix appropriated ideas, imagery, color, shape, vastness, landscape, and materials leading the viewer to bold new interpretations of surreal worlds colliding and space folding.

At Zolla/Lieberman Gallery

Chicago, IL

July 15th-August 26th, 2015

Curated by Liz Nielsen and Carolina Wheat of Elijah Wheat Showroom

What does one need to operate, make and maintain a studio in NYC? What is sacrificed? The materials for making, in a community of makers, vary. The density of talent is unequal. When the price for a slice of cheese pizza is the same cost as a single subway ride in the city we recognize that there’s affordability, yet finding space to work and live is compromised by the density of the population. The ante is up. Living in NYC takes an unrivaled work-ethic to thrive.

Living in NYC is money. Culture is worthy of our time. Any cultural lifestyle is a luxury. NYC epitomizes culture. Is working and making art in NYC worth the time and money? What is the return on investment? Are there specific locations that foster specializations or subcultures, inside a larger demographic? We present, a slice of New York City’s actively engaged artists practicing in: Bushwick, BedStuy, CrownHeights, ChinaTown, Williamsburg & LES.

This assemblage of artists’ studio locations highlights a minor architecture of a larger community. We bring to Chicago a group of visual examples containing hott and sexy collective-thoughts trending in NYC, 2015, fresh from the summer studio.

Using ingenious atypical making materials, these artists create unconventional ways to share their vision of contemporary metropolitan society. Just like grabbing a slice, greasy and hot: taste is secondary.

featuring works by:

Aaron Johnson
Alyse Ronayne
Angelina Gualdoni
Annie Ewaskio
April Childers
Brian Andrew Whiteley
Christian Sampson
Clive Murphy
Jeremy Couillard
Justin Davis Anderson
Livia Corona Benjamin
Liz Nielsen
Mike Schreiber
Monica Lorraine Bernal
Stacie Johnson
Yevgenia S. Baras

Enjoy,
Lina & Liz