myselves CURATED BY JOSHUA FRIEDMAN

KOHN GALLERY

ARTISTS

KATE BARBEE ROMARE BEARDEN AMOAKO BOAFO JARVIS BOYLAND WILLIAM BRICKEL CHELSEA CULPRIT BRUCE CONNER rafa esparza HAMISHI FARAH NASH GLYNN HEIDI HAHN NAOTAKA HIRO LOIE HOLLOWELL OSCAR YI HOU GERALD LOVELL JESSE MOCKRIN SOPHIA NARRETT JAGDEEP RAINA ERIN M. RILEY MOISES SALAZAR PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA EMILY MAE SMITH CHIFFON THOMAS WOLFGANG TILLMANS SALMAN TOOR XIUCHING TSAY SKYE VOLMAR Sophia Narrett, Heart, 2018, embroidery thread, acrylic, aluminum and fabric, 25 x 7 1/2 inches detail Kate Barbee, Rain, 2018-20, acrylic, oil paint, painted scraps, thread, oil pastel, cold wax on canvas, 72 x 72 inches detail Chiffon Thomas, I’ll See For You If You Speak For Me, 2020 Embroidery foss, fabric, thread, chalk, pastel and window screen mesh, 21 1/2 x 20 inches detail Chiffon Thomas, Too Soon, 2020 Embroidery foss, fabric, leather, rusted paper, thread, chalk, pastel and window screen mesh, 21 1/2 x 28 inches detail Chiffon Thomas, I’ll See For You If You Speak For Me, 2020 Embroidery foss, fabric, thread, chalk, pastel and window screen mesh, 21 1/2 x 20 inches Moises Salazar, Clean, 2020, yarn and glitter on satin, 29 x 29 inches detail Moises Salazar, In my feelings, 2020, yarn and glitter on satin, 29 x 29 inches rafa esparza, Guadalupe Macias Ybarra. ¿Qué?, 2018, adobe, wood, chain link fence and acrylic, 93 x 45 x 1 1/2 inches detail installation Gerald Lovell, Sham, 2020, oil on panel, 40 x 30 inches detail Amoako Boafo, Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 52 1/2 x 46 inches Oscar yi Hou, Mlle. Chris à central park 103rd, en automne, 2019, oil on canvas, 60 x 40 inches detail Jagdeep Raina, i am glad you came back, 2019, embroidered tapestry phulkari on muslin, 18 x 12 inches Jagdeep Raina, Serving love and qawali’s since the early 90s, 2016 Mixed media on paper, 26 x 40 inches Jagdeep Raina, Our Loving Temple, from you we learned that this world is false. From you we learned that nothing last forever, 2015 Mixed media on paper, 22 x 30 inches William Brickel, The Trammels of Those Two, 2020, oil on canvas, 59 x 47 1/4 inches detail installation Nash Glynn, Forward, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches Heidi Hahn, Woman I Know, A Woman I’ve Seen, 2020, oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches detail installation Jarvis Boyland, Bloom, 2020, oil on canvas, 72 x 96 inches detail installation Chelsea Culprit, Your Roots Are Showing: Preteen Chimeras with Summer Fruit and Walmart Panties, 2020 Oil, acrylic, oil stick, pastel collage and digitally printed canvas on canvas, 47 1/4 x 118 inches detail installation Naotaka Hiro, Untitled (Inn), 2020, acrylic, graphite, grease pencil and crayon on wood, 58 x 42 inches detail Naotaka Hiro, Untitled (parallelogram), 2020, acrylic, graphite, grease pencil and crayon on wood, 58 x 42 inches installation Loie Hollowell, Prenatal Plumb Line in red-orange, green and purple, 2020 detail Soft pastel and graphite on paper, 34 x 26 inches; framed 41 1/2 x 33 inches detail detail Emily Mae Smith, The Knot, 2020, oil on linen, 30 x 23 inches detail Emily Mae Smith, Live Forever, 2020, oil on linen, 12 x 9 inches detail Skye Volmar, Pollinators, 2020, colored pencil, make-up on paper, 14 x 11 inches Skye Volmar, Look-alike (Clermont Twins), 2020, colored pencil, make-up on paper, 11 x 14 inches Skye Volmar, You, Me (Cloned), 2020, colored pencil on paper, 22 x 25 inches detail Skye Volmar, Like Moth to a Flame, 2020, colored pencil, make-up and oil pastel on paper, 11 x 8 1/2 inches installation Xiuching Tsay, A lost child picked fowers from the starry feld, 2020, oil and pastel on canvas, 19 3/4 x 15 3/4 inches Xiuching Tsay, One few over the cuckoo’s nest, 2020, oil on canvas, 19 3/4 x 15 3/4 inches Jesse Mockrin, Before Battle, 2020, oil on cotton, 62 x 43 inches each, overall 79 1/2 x 87 inches detail installation Jesse Mockrin, After, 2020, oil on cotton, 26 x 18 inches each, overal 31 x 37 inches Erin Riley, Refections 4, 2019, wool and cotton, 59 x 48 inches Erin Riley, Refections 5, 2019, wool and cotton, 49 x 48 inches detail Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Figure(_2100617), 2017, archival pigment print, 32 x 24 inches, framed: 32 3/4 x 24 3/4 inches, ed 1 of 5 detail Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mirror Study(_Q5A2097), 2016, archival pigment print, framed: 24 x 20 inches, ed 4 of 5 Wolfgang Tillmans, Karl, Utoquai 14, 2012, inkjet print on paper, 12 x 16 inches, framed: 13 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches, ed 7 of 10 Wolfgang Tillmans, Karl, Utoquai 12, 2012, inkjet print on paper, 12 x 16 inches, framed: 13 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches, ed 7 of 10 Hamishi Farah, Untitled, 2020, acrylic and pumice on linen, 31 x 46 1/2 inches detail installation Bruce Conner, BLINDMAN’S BLUFF, 1987/2003, Jacquard tapestry, 64 x 56 inches installation Bruce Conner, UNTITLED, 1976, ink on paper, 7 x 5 1/4 inches, framed: 15 1/2 x 13 1/2 inches detail

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

myselves CURATED BY JOSHUA FRIEDMAN SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2020

Los Angeles, CA – Kohn Gallery is pleased to present myselves, a group exhibition curated by Joshua Friedman, which features over twenty-five contemporary artists who use medium as a lens to examine the ways in which identity is structured or fabricated. With an eye to the physical, social, and historical properties of their chosen media, these emerging and established artists portray the self in pieces—as fragments that may accumulate and amalgamate but never entirely cohere. Identity can be as fluid as a watercolor in which one color bleeds into another; as fractured as a collage composed of ripped strips of paper; as multilayered as a painting that has been built up lovingly and laboriously over the passage of time. It is through the physicality of medium that the works on view confront the myth of selfhood’s unchanging rigidity and turn instead to its fertile nebulousness—looking beyond mind over matter, toward matters of the mind.

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A sweeping presentation of work concerning racial, gendered, sexual, and national identities, myselves will overtake all three of the gallery’s exhibition spaces. The show features pieces spanning a wide array of media: painting, collage, embroidery, drawing, sculpture, photography, and their variegated intersections. Viewers encounter the weavings of Erin M. Riley and Sophia Narrett, whose elaborate tapestries and embroideries examine the construction of the self on social media and the internet; the wax-infused paintings of Heidi Hahn, which grapple with the biographical realities of oft-idealized female bodies; and the slippery avatars of Emily Mae Smith, whose hyper-realistic paintings bring together and repurpose a deep lexicon of art history, framing the vast scale and range of human subjectivity. The exhibition also features the paintings of Salman Toor that consider the tensions between public and private identities of queer brown men; the performative work of rafa esparza, whose adobe panels serve as sites for brown and queer community-building; and the figurative assemblages of Chiffon Thomas, that interpret personal feelings of nostalgia, longing to belong and affirmations of self-identity. This materially diverse grouping provides insight into the many ways that medium and meaning can develop in tandem, as artists reflect upon selfhood’s unstable and ever-changing terrain. myselves brings what’s under the surface to the surface.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Kate Barbee’s practice is an interdisciplinary one, ranging across hand embroidered mixed media painting, collage, drawing, and sculpture. The inherent tension in her work is born from a flurried relationship to her body and her visceral power within it. Her works harnesses emotional and sexual directness and figural distortion which abstracts the figures beyond recognition and distances them from the activities in which they are engaged. Every painting is a snapshot of the self, taken from an angle removed from the moment as if floating above or next to it— raw, naked, and dominant. Barbee currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

A pioneer of African-American art and celebrated collagist, Romare Bearden seamlessly blended images of African-American life in the urban and rural South with references to popular culture, religion, and Classical art and myth. He depicted jazz musicians, monumental subjects, nudes, or mythological characters set against abstract, fragmented backgrounds. Bearden sought to give the African-American experience a universal, monumental, and Classical representation: he would often recast the characters of Classical events as African-American subjects, drawing the political injustices of his time into a universal, allegorical context. Romare Bearden, died, March 12, 1988, New York, NY.

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Living and working in , Austria, Amoako Boafo identifies the primary idea of his practice as representation, documenting, celebrating and showing new ways to approach Blackness. Much of his work is inspired by his upbringing, commenting on how males are raised to be aggressive and masculine, which he challenges in his works. In opposition to normalized toxic masculinity, Boafo’s subjects are serenely-posed, pensive, and of sensitive disposition— celebrating his identity and Blackness.

Jarvis Boyland navigates intersections of black identity through portraiture. Based on photographic images which the artist then reconfigures to create specific compositions, his paintings focus on queer men of color within intimate spaces, sensitively highlighting the nuances of these complex interpersonal relationships, identities, and locales. Boyland’s palette suggests stillness in the digital age of app culture that shapes modern interaction while evoking David Hockney’s 1970s California and the coolness of Barkley Hendricks. Black bodies are not welcomed in cyberspace but are privileged in Boyland’s paintings. Jarvis Boyland lives and works in Chicago, IL.

William Brickel’s works are the result of imagination, recalled memories, and observations of everyday situations. His compositions take shape rapidly, shifting and morphing during their creation; they are the product of subconscious and conscious decisions. The human figure is a recurrent and central concern in William Brickel’s practice, providing a means to examine the contemporary status of the self, the other, and how the two may exist together. Brickel’s subjects consider interiority, self-possession, alienation, and isolation. William Brickel lives and works in , UK.

Living and working in Mexico City, Mexico, Chelsea Culprit’s work entangles representations of the body’s capacity for work, play, display, expression, the performed authenticity of identity, and the intractability of freedom and personal bondage. Moving freely between the pictorial imagery of folk art and the materiality of the real world, Culprit’s works are composed of feelings as much as descriptions. Working variously with painting, neon light, sculptural assemblage, and installation, her work uses a composite approach to translate the ideologies of female identity.

A central figure in the San Francisco Beat scene of the 1950s, Bruce Conner spent much of his life exploring the mystical idea that the self and the universe were interconnected, and that the former was a microcosm of the latter. From the 1950s until his death in 2008 in San Francisco, California, Conner worked in virtually every available medium—painting, assemblage, moving

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image, drawing, performance—and his polymathic approach reflected a wide-ranging interest in syncretism. He mingled spiritual beliefs in a bid to reach higher levels of consciousness, and as a way to explore counter-cultural alternatives to the spiritual impoverishment that he identified, and vehemently despaired of, in mainstream, consumerist American society. rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. esparza lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Hamishi Farah is an artist, writer, and musician living and working in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing upon Afropessimist theory, Farah’s painting practice skims through possibilities for non- human representation tiptoeing around the white disembodiment of a colonial libido. Farah’s work unpacks the formation of identity through intersecting histories and questions what is representable and how to represent.

Living and working in New York, NY, Nash Glynn uses her body as a medium to interrogate the categories of nature, femininity, and humanity. Through self-portraiture, Glynn places the transfeminine form in relation to rapidly changing ecologies, positing climate change not only as a problem of representation, but also as a threat to essentialist gender ideologies. Working through ideas of utopia and dystopia, industry and intimacy, seduction and ruin, Glynn blends the artificial and the real and considers the fate of the body, the planet, and humanity.

Heidi Hahn creates perspectival paintings, often engaging with the female body. Her application of paint and layered surfaces, in conversation with aesthetic traditions, draw the viewer into an intense narrative which evokes our attachment to the female body and how that’s processed through both a traditional and a contemporary reading, as the many reclining female figures relate distantly female portraits painted throughout history. Heidi Hahn lives and works in New York, NY.

Naotaka Hiro’s works stem from the idea of the unknown—the world of his body, and regions which he is unable to see and thus unable to confirm unless through a mediated form, such as a camera or mirror. The dilemma of the unknowabil­ity of his body serves as a creative point of departure—a place unknown and mysterious to him from which his imagination may create. His work eludes full comprehension and instead speaks to the limitations of action and constraint, 1227 North Highland Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038 www.kohngallery.com

fragment and whole, and the impossibility of knowing anything in its entirety. Hiro lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Living and working in New York, NY, Loie Hollowell’s work is representational, centering on the figure, still life, and landscape‚ as seen through a reductionist lens. Hollowell uses a variety of formal techniques to create subjects that manifest in tightly rendered sculptural paintings. Conveyed through bold colors, sacred geometry, and symmetry, her pulsating, sensual figures illuminate an implicit optimism in the transcendence of physical form.

Oscar yi Hou’s work explores objectivization and the opposing assertions of personhood, the confines of gender and sexuality, and belonging within the Chinese diaspora in relation to his own coming of age. Depicting his subjects in lush personal settings, bedrooms, and other personal spaces, yi Hou captures his tender, often intimate relationships with his subjects and offers an introspective reflection of self, experience, and identity. Oscar yi Hou lives and works in New York, NY.

Informed by his deeply rooted commitment to fostering alternative community narratives, Gerald Lovell imbues his subjects with the psychical apparatuses of social agency and self-determinative power while revealing individualistic details that lay their essential humanity bare. Combining thin flat painting with thick daubs of impasto, Lovell creates a fleshy materiality that reifies dualities experienced within one’s own skin in relationship to another, such as pride and self-loathing, desire and disinterest, and intimacy and insensitivity. Lovell captures the present moment in order to preserve, honor, and make visible the collective experience of African American millennial life. Gerald Lovell lives and works in , GA.

Jesse Mockrin’s oil paintings marry the effete, romantic aesthetics of 18th-century Rococo portraiture with contemporary imagery to question how gender codes are prescribed, performed, and disrupted in popular culture. Drawing inspiration from current men’s fashion pictorials and classical European painting, her work depicts androgynous figures and unisexual marks of gender identity to give viewers a new lens to view painting. Mockrin’s subversion of the classics captures the way gender shifts through history, illustrating how those norms, when faded, can encapsulate a moment. Jesse Mockrin lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Sophia Narrett weaves together spatially unfolding narratives of desire, sexuality, and the freedom and restraints of femininity through her intricately embroidered canvases. Each piece is a labor of personal narrative, where the search for sustained love can be seen as a search for the 1227 North Highland Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038 www.kohngallery.com

self. Narrett explores how the powers of intimacy can lead to self-discovery as well as miscommunication. She examines role-play, the emotional results of escapism, and the evolving nature of identity. Antithetical to the instantaneous and virtual experience of today, Sophia’s process of embroidery is both slow and careful, and puts forth a form of self-expression that places human touch at the forefront of her art. Sophia Narrett lives and works in New York, NY.

Jagdeep Raina has a research-based practice that begins with examining documents of Kashmiri and Punjabi Sikh communities in the South Asian diaspora. Meticulously working in drawing and textile, Raina questions the assumption of diasporic homogeneity, and looks for instances of marginalized communities, whether consciously or not, further perpetuating the circumstances of their marginalization. Since these narratives exist outside of dominant histories, Raina engages with unusual materials as sources such as vernacular photos in domestic spaces and oral histories, often recreating them from memory. Jagdeep Raina lives and works in Guelph, Ontario.

Erin M. Riley weaves large scaled tapestries of intimate scenes that reflect on relationships, memories, fantasies, sexual violence and trauma. Riley explores the innate difficulty of womanhood, objectification of the female body, and traumas that weigh on the search for self- identity. Riley’s work offers visual dialogue that aims to reevaluate and reconsider the values of contemporary women, their social spheres and stratification, as well as their attitudes towards sex and sexuality through keyhole-like glimpses into their lives. Erin M. Riley lives and works in New York, NY.

Moises Salazar’s work addresses the trauma, history, and the barriers specific to queer or immigrant bodies. Reflecting on the lack of space and agency they possess, Salazar presents their subjects in safe environments where they can thrive. Utilizing, accessible materials and methods passed down by generations of their family, Salazar’s work places importance on tradition and cultural development. Their work is a vehicle which communicates and celebrates the challenges as well as the great cultural heritage of immigrant and queer communities living within the United States. Moises Salazar lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Through his portraiture, Paul Mpagi Sepuya invites viewers to consider the construction of subjectivity, both in photography and in ourselves. He challenges the history of photography and deconstructs traditional portraiture by way of collage, layering, fragmentation, mirror imagery, and the perspective of the black, queer gaze. Sepuya allows glimpses of the studio setting, the photographic apparatus, and the photographer himself. In contrast to the slick artifice of traditional

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portraiture, Sepuya suggests the human element of picture taking—fingerprints, smudges, dust on the surface of mirrors. Working in a medium that rejects touch he makes photography tactile. Paul Mpagi Sepuya lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Emily Mae Smith’s Pop-style paintings comment on sex and gender with satirical ingenuity, encompassing references to Art Nouveau, Disney and the Chicago Imagists in poster-format, singular narrative oil paintings. Myth-fueled and driven by characters including a recurring sunglasses-toting broom, extended tongues and butts – often framed by a mustache, and a straight and squared-off set of teeth – each character or component is a signifier for issues with sexual politics in general and serve as androgynous female avatars whose interiority, subjectivity, and psychology are completely absent as a visual language in Western culture. Emily Mae Smith lives and works in New York, NY.

Placing human touch at the forefront of their practice, artist Chiffon Thomas’ figurative assemblages examine the difficulties faced by defining one’s identity in contemporary society. Identifying as a non-binary queer person of color, with a strong religious upbringing, Thomas’ work often grapples with conflicting beliefs, values, and desires. Primarily using tactile methods of hand embroidery, collaged found material and paint perform as an expressive visual language that interprets personal feelings of nostalgia, longing to belong and affirmations of self-identity. The weights of the thread oscillate in density and layering, asking the viewer to question the complex binaries of presence and absence, remembrance and forgetting. Chiffon Thomas lives and works in New Haven, CT.

Since the early 1990s, Wolfgang Tillmans’ works have epitomized a new kind of subjectivity in photography, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique and the persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Through his seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, Tillmans’ has expanded conventional ways of approaching the medium and his practice continues to address the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image-saturated world. The artist lives and works in London, UK and , Germany.

Salman Toor’s explorations of figuration as a young queer man of Pakistani origin living in America unpack the concept of the “self” and how identity is formed through the social constructs of gender, sexuality and race. By painting highly personal narratives of young queer subjects in staged environments within their found community, Toor envelopes his subjects in a celebration

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of their most private experiences. Taken as a whole, Toor’s paintings consider vulnerability within contemporary public and private life and the notion of community in the context of queer, diasporic identity. Salman Toor lives and works in New York, NY.

Living and working in Bangkok, Thailand and London, UK, Xiuching Tsay’s work grapples with the depiction of memory. Creating a hallucinogenic representation of her subject matter, Tsay distorts beyond recognition, focusing instead on unearthing the essence of people and objects from her memory. Her adoption of a vibrant, neon color palette, repetition of forms, surreal imagined landscapes, and water as a vehicle to the spiritual, cement her narratives in a world of fantasy. Her ambiguous figures ask the viewer to explore the inner, parallel worlds of the self and our understanding of the physical and the intimate.

Skye Volmar’s work is oriented around notions of excess, performativity, and the communicative powers of human flesh. Volmar places emphasis on the formation of her figures and how one’s skin and sexuality is depicted in relation to the inherent politicization of our bodies. She sees the self in a transitory state as figures teeter between over and under definition, of beauty with an impending sense of doom. Skye Volmar lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

ABOUT THE GALLERY

Since its establishment in 1985 by Michael Kohn, Kohn Gallery has presented historically significant exhibitions in Los Angeles alongside exciting contemporary artists, creating meaningful contexts to establish links to a greater art historical continuum. Kohn Gallery represents important West Coast artists with long careers and rich histories such as Joe Goode and Lita Albuquerque, works by Larry Bell, as well as the Estates of Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, John Altoon, and Ed Moses. Kohn Gallery boasts an expanding roster of emerging and mid career artists including María Berrío, Heidi Hahn, Sophia Narrett, Caroline Kent, Enrique Martínez Ceyala, Rosa Loy, Octavio Abúndez, Gonzalo Lebrija, Ori Gersht, Mark Ryden, and Troika. Visit kohngallery.com for the latest information on upcoming exhibitions.

Instagram: @KOHNGallery, #myselves #kohngallery Gallery Contact: Joshua Friedman, [email protected] Press Contact: Gia Kuan, [email protected]

1227 North Highland Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038 www.kohngallery.com