WILD AT HAND – A GROUP SHOW OF CONTEMPORARY DRAWING

Artists

Jeffrey Cheung

Jeffrey Cheung (b. Castro Valley, CA, 1989) is a visual artist, musician, and skateboarder based in Oakland, California. His work is primarily informed by exploring queer identity through painting, illustration, and collage to create empowering images celebrating queer sexuality and identity. He also self-publishes art books, zines, and prints under the name Unity Press. In addition to his own work, he strives to publish works of other artists from the SF Bay Area and beyond, and create print resources and creative space for queer and trans people of color. Cheung’s newest project, Unity Skateboarding, aims to promote queer and trans visibility in skateboarding. He supports skateboarders with hand-painted decks and hosts open skateboarding events to help build and strengthen the queer skate community.

Ryan Travis Christian

Ryan Travis Christian (b. Oakland, CA, 1983) lives and works in Chicago, IL. His surreal personal narratives are fueled by the absurdity of life in his small, suburban-Chicago hometown. The untidy lifestyles of contemporary humanity are all hanging out, including heavy petting, drugs and alcohol, beaten-up cars, fireworks and death. Christian’s idiosyncratic vision—influenced by vintage political cartoons and hand-drawn animation​—has recently expanded to include commentary on current crises in the nation and world at large. Tackling hot political issues such as immigration, depression and the American dream, Christian’s historical precedents become a mirror reflecting many common concerns of the present, warts and all.

June Culp

June Culp (b. 1991) lives and works in Tokyo, having ​earned her BFA in Painting from MICA in 2013​. Culp’s abstract paintings make use of the figure in often comical and sometimes sexual ways. ​Influenced by old manga, there is a sardonically playful quality to Culp’s work that swings between the ordinary and traumatic. The drawings included in this exhibition are black-and-white depictions of a recent trip to a wolf shrine on Mount Mitake. She explains: “​Legend has it, Prince Yamato Takeru lost his way on the slopes of Mount Mitake when a mountain demon disguised as a deer led him astray. A white wolf appeared, and through the fog led him back to safety. The Prince declared the wolves divine and they became the sacred guardians of the Mitake mountain peak.”

Alfie Kungu

Yorkshire born painter Alfie Kungu ​(b. Hebden Bridge, 1993) makes a variety of work ranging from huge latex paintings to small embroidered patches. His work encompasses a playful nature through bold and enthusiastic use of colour. Selected as a New Contemporary in 2016, Alfie went on to be part of the Saatchi Invest in Art series. Kungu has been part of group shows across the UK including London, Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol, this being his first time exhibiting out of the UK. For Alfie, drawings are where he feels he can make mistakes, so they’re much more playful and loose. They have become an ever growing catalogue for characters and places that facilitate my paintings.

Sophie Larrimore

Sophie Larrimore (b. Annapolis, Maryland, 1990) is based in Brooklyn, NY. Sophie explains: “I paint dogs, but these are not dog paintings per se; they are a way to explore texture, form, and color relationships. Dogs have been in the work for some time. A seemingly frivolous or retrograde subject and therefore a good starting point. Over time the forms have become more generic and are essentially one of a group of elements I draw from to make compositions which interest me. I tend to take some time to arrive at a finished painting, going back in when I could (maybe should) stop, but that overworking has become part of the process and creates a tension and awkwardness which makes the work interesting. I want to inspire sustained and repeated looking. The most interesting paintings for me (both my own and otherwise) are those I come back to again and again and my experience of them is different with each encounter.”

Inés Longevial

Inès Longevial (b. 1990) is a painter working in Paris. Originally from the South West of France, the Spanish influence is one of the keys to understanding her work which embodies the spirit of such masters as Pablo Picasso and Pedro Almodovar. She started drawing and painting at a very young age and studied at an Applied Arts high school, before obtaining her Diploma in Applied Arts. Her paintings in oil, simultaneously tender and strong, concentrate on two principal themes: femininity and nature. Using parts of the body, face, and skin color, her art developed a novel and sensual body image in which women can be round and their skin can be different shades and colors. Inès’ childhood, spent “in the little house in the prairie” as she says, always feeds her work in which floral elements together with numerous nuances of color find their way to her canvases.

Brian Lotti

Brian Lotti (b. Okinawa, Japan, 1972) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He skateboarded professionally and is credited with inventing the “Bigspin” and a few other maneuvers. Brian graduated with a BFA from San Francisco State University in 1998 and moved to the rural area of Nevada County, in Northern California, where he practiced landscape and portrait painting for several years. In 2004 Brian moved to Southern California to direct two motion pictures about skateboarding, then returned to his painting practice. Brian currently spends his time working on landscape and figure paintings in and around his home neighborhood of Boerum Hill in Brooklyn. He uses varied swathes of vibrant color, quick staccatos and heavy impasto strokes to create urban landscapes that capture the spontaneity of light and movement in his immediate environment. His colorful works celebrate the commonplace alleys and parks with which he has become so intimately familiar. Brian has exhibited in Los Angeles and Berlin and his works have been collected in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Navot Miller

Navot Miller (b. ​Shadmot Mehola, Israel, ​1991) moved to Berlin ​to study architecture, giving language to years of fascination with symmetry and big colourful objects. He enrolled in Weißensee Kunsthochschule’s Fine Arts program under the Sculpture faculty. His drawings express a gratitude to clear lines and color, combined with social scenarios he observes in Berlin and during travels. Navot explains, “Growing up as an Orthodox Jew, I dedicate to that lifestyle small references in the form of homosexuality. Often, I’ll draw traditional Jewish objects, blessings and clothes from such a lifestyle, mixed with homosexual encounters and dialogues.” His work ‘Hasidic Jews’ presents two figures after a possible sexual encounter, along with objects from his home in Berlin-Mitte. In the second work, ‘Lulu on a Balcony’, Navot uses pencil and pastels to depict a moment of pain and suffering, graced with a sense of hope as the trees in the background bloom.

Brie Moreno

Brie Moreno (b. 1994) grew up in Ottowa and currently lives in London. Her drawings are reflections of her daily life, often portraying confident yet nervous characters amongst comforting backgrounds. ​Her work has been exhibited at Printed Matter in New York as well as at the Galerie du Jour – agnès b in Paris. She has worked with Art Gallery of Ontario, Bloomberg Businessweek, Novembre Magazine, Lagon Revue, and Breakdown Press.

Aaron Pennington

Aaron Pennington (b. 1990) is interested in the handmade and the digital – as modes of representation, communication, connection. His artworks, primarily drawings, examine dynamics of our virtual realm through the lens of craft. In WILD AT HAND, Pennington exhibits two drawings. ‘Desktop Picture #1’ presents a pastel-drawn, default background image from Apple computers. By attempting to draw an extremely available digital picture, he aims to show the ironic glory of something virtually mundane. In ‘Delaney (Study for Perfect Blue)’, a dissected pastel portrait casts a shadow of charcoal and graphite onto the surface below. Through the mixing of sources both personal and pop-cultural, this drawing questions the relationship between portraiture and identity.

Lisa Signorini

Lisa Signorini (b.1989) lives and works in Paris. Her work is predominantly the assertion of an intimate philosophy and articulates itself around fantasized visions of reality combined with a cannibalisation of daily life. She questions the link we have with reality and how we dissociate ourselves from it. Every drawing symbolizes a cognitive dashboard of the subtle slide of a palpable present instant that immediately transforms itself into an immaterial ‘après’. It is in the horde of details that a vast redistribution of awareness prevails and delivers a convoluted story that doesn’t lean on the plausible but treads uncomfortable paths of fiction, romanticism, which leans more on tension than analogy. Her work ushers thought more than belief, in maintaining forms or irresolution between her life and reality.

Constance Tenvik

Constance Tenvik (b. Oslo, 1990) is a Norwegian artist based in Oslo and Berlin. She holds an MFA from Yale University School of Art in New Haven, CT, and BFA from the Academy of Art in Oslo. Her work entails the creation of sculptures, performances and drawings. In WILD AT HAND, Tenvik presents a self-portrait drawing in the form of an ‘exquisite corpse’, created in three shuffling parts to oppose the idea that a person should project only one fixed identity. This drawing envisions the artist as a morphic being who is always changing, a key focus in Tenvik’s practice on a whole. She is interested in transformation and play, as well as imaginary spaces and how to arrive there.

Paul Verdell

Paul Verdell (b. 1991, Long Beach, CA) is currently based in Bowling Green, Ohio. Reflecting on his work, Paul explains, “I grew up on Hip-Hop and was always enthralled by how rappers carried themselves. Their swagger through the rhymes, the beats, fashion, and personalities of each individual artist became a constant inspiration for me as an artist. Considering myself a rap connoisseur, I’ll listen to trap legends like Gucci Mane along with hip-hop classics from Nas all in the same day. Rap today has now transcended from its underground roots into popular culture, which is another reason why I reference it. My body of work combines my love for portraiture with my love for Hip-Hop using the denseness of the oil pastels with intense gestural mark depicting these iconic and contemporary moments within black culture.”

Lily Wong

Lily Wong (b​. 1989 Seattle, Washington) is based in Brooklyn, New York. “The subject matter of my work exists where my Asian and Western cultural influences intersect. Through this lens, I focus on the figure and its gestures, and the way the body both affects and is affected by the environment it inhabits. The hypothetical worlds my figures exist in are familiar, yet just out of reach, eliciting complex and bittersweet emotions that speak to social relations and collective and intrapersonal identities. Ultimately, my work is about that life-long search to know oneself and each other.”