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HVW8 Gallery presents a group show curated by Mtendere Mandowa (Teebs) – As We Are –  a title both permanent and impermanent.  It evokes nature and complements the soothing combination of the pieces exhibited.  The works use different mediums such as natural grown and dyed prints and cloth, abstract woodblock paintings, ceramic vessels and audio visual works, all of which resonate with the values of meditation in movement.  The artists and their work showcase meaningful reminders of self-care practices in motion, and a connection to one another as people in places.  All works were created or completed in 2020 during the ongoing pandemic.

Artist Bios 

Melissa “Misa” Chhan*

Misa is an artist and natural dyer who lives and works in Los Angeles.  She works across natural dyes, textiles, printmaking, and artists books. Her background in Book Arts / Papermaking / Natural Fibers lead her to explore natural dyes as a medium to stay engaged with and learn from the natural world.  The mindset of domination over nature creates a scenario where we feel detached from nature as opposed to understanding that we are fundamentally dependent on it.  Her goal is to bring pure joy through making work with nature and her surroundings.  She spends her time gardening, practicing how to coax color from plants, and researching natural dyes and minerals and how to integrate them in her daily life.

B.A., Book Arts at University of California, Santa Barbara. 2013

https://www.misa.studio/

Kishi Yuma (b. 1993 in Tochigi, Japan)

Since graduating from the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Engineering, Department of Electrical Optics in 2019, he has been active at the base in Tokyo.  He mainly produces works that consider “love” as energy that transcends time and space by looking at “ghosts” in parallel universes using Deep Learning.  His works have been used by NIKE and VOGUE, and he is active in many fields.

https://obake2ai.com/

Jeannie Kwon (b. 1986)

Los Angeles based artist now working/living in Brooklyn NY.  She is a 1st generation Korean-American with a background in the interior design industry. A self-trained potter, Jeannie produces functional works of art that explore the relationships between design, environment, materials, and space with influence from her Korean background and history in pottery. The works shown in As We Are are meditative pieces in a focused form made in Brooklyn in late 2020.

Instagram @jeanniekwonstudio

Leland Jackson (b. 1988)

A Los Angeles based mixed media artist who produces music under the alias Ahnnu.  At a young age, cartooning and graffiti built a background of drawing and painting in Jackson’s life.  As a self-taught artist his work comes from the non-formal, influenced by the experimental practices of musique concrete, abstract expressionism, art brut and hip hop. His approach to image making blends an automatic style of mark making and gestural line work, sometimes alongside collage techniques. A central theme linking all of Jackson’s work is one of human nature , exploring the psychological and mythical worlds of the self.  His musical work is made using a computer, manipulating, blending and assembling samples, recorded audio and electronic sounds.  Ahnnu’s ‘World Music’ and ‘Perception’ was released on Leaving Records, with ‘Perception’ gaining notoriety in Rolling Stone’s top avant-garde albums of 2015.  His other work under Ahnnu, ‘Battered Sphinx’ and ‘Special Forces’ was released on the NNA Tapes label. 

Y2525 is a frame animated music video from Ahnnu’s album ‘Pattern Play’. The video is synchronized to the rhythmic and tonal character of the track. The sounds are represented by a stripped down visual language of lines, circles and squares plotted briefly, at times looping and at others accommodating single occurrences in the composition of the music, all of which collapse onto each other and dissipate.  The viewer is placed in a perpetual transience; a sensory ride of deconstructed motion, rhythm and design. 

Instagram @mellowdeg

Mtendere Mandowa (b.1987 in New York)

With Malawi and Barbados origins, Mandowa is a producer, a painter, and contributing member of the noted LA based Brainfeeder record label under the moniker Teebs. His paintings often reflect his music production: collaging, overlapping, and mixing imagery with painted gestures to create a meditative and abstract visual landscape.  The work emanates a sense of organic appeal with feelings of warmth and rhythm coalescing.  At times the works seem overgrown with organic shapes bending and folding atop one another while at other times the compositions remain sparse and refined.

The woodblock paintings are ritual studies in color and shape performed in the mornings.  Each piece shows abstract shapes overlapping and interacting in a rhythmic manner as they share a limited space in the frame of the wood blocks.  The blocks are scraps of wood bought from lumber yards and cut and sanded to shape.

Web tteebbss.com