current

May 1st to June 4th
2023

Jacob Grumulaitis

Growing up in a conservative Texas town, my visible queerness was an invitation to violence. Being in New York allows me to study culturally queer spaces because of the relative ubiquity of queer spaces. The physical nature of construction is vital to my methods of photography. The pieces reflect individuals and their experiences within a place, my act of space building for my identity and gender, the spaces and legacies created by the queers before me, spaces held in importance by subsects of the queer community, and the historical spaces that are no more. My interest in these subjects stems from a want to be visible within queer history and a yearning to understand the impact of temporary marks on people, places, and history. The works employ collage techniques, site-specific installations, historical studies, and references to the established queer artists I claim as my forbears. These methods act as my imprint; a mark of my work never attempts to claim ownership but enacts itself as a part of a nuanced definition within history. My self-portraiture has been a pivotal part of my work and understanding of my gender and the versions of myself that are known through each person. Each photo lives in temporality, a still of a prolonged performance. Why is the timeline of mark-making not sequential, what histories coexist, and what relation does a person share with a physical space that will inevitably inhabit a part of a future stranger?

Lucy Wood Baird

My practice examines the ambivalent nature of images via sculptural spatial collage of photographic prints. These prints, used as material for composite objects and installations, are divorced from their context and play with the perceived reality and dimensionality of the printed image. The works use images as sculptures, shadows, negatives, and mirrors. Some works allude to light that is documented from another context, others work like sundials activated by ambient light. The works cannot be captured or fully possessed, they maintain their own agency as they are dependent on light, time, or movement to activate them. They are documents of things while existing simultaneously as another thing themselves, showing multiple perspectives at once, and bringing into question what perspective is true or real if any.

Maximiliano Ruelas

Maximiliano’s work aims to create narratives between social contexts, specifically around race, cultural identity and the romanticism that involves the clashing of cultures. The emphasis of his practice delves deep into the problematics surrounding his immediate ecosystem. Ranging from post colonialism in society and the syncretism surrounding us, to queer identities flourishing in a societal turn moil and a changing political context, the themes that motivate his work are often at conflict with each other, yet also harmoniously intertwined. With the materials used, he seeks to create a conversation between painting, one of the most respected mediums, and textiles, a medium often overlooked. These two, one historically masculine, and the other inherently feminine, create a dichotomy that converts into his own contemporary ideology. Maximiliano received his BA in Textile and Fashion from Polimoda. His work has been exhibited in Mexico, Italy and the Netherlands.

Leming Chung

I am an LA/China-based artist working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, sculpture, and game world-building. I received a BS in Economics from China and a MFA in Media Arts from UCLA. I have a long-term interest in the manipulation of body politics in real life and the power dynamic between human and nonhuman forms. I have been exploring entanglement of biological phenomena such as immune disorders and allergies, along with food preparation and preservation, as a comparative study of the unsettled intermediate stage for cross-species interconnection and how future is shaped in ideological narrative.

Jacobo Said

Self-taught artist from Peru. Began a serious practice i n 2 0 1 9 , s t a r t e d b y d r a w i n g a n d d o i n g s c u l p t u r a l p i e c e s u s i n g r e s i n a n d c l o t h . During 2021 I focused primarily on painting, e x p l o r i n g t h e u s e o f v a r i o u s m a t e r i a l s s u c h a s c r a y o n s , p e n s , m a r k e r s , acrylics, oils and other found objects. M y l a t e s t e x p l o r a t i o n s a r e a h y b r i d b e t w e e n p a i n t i n g a n d s c u l p t u r e . Recurring themes in my work revolve around absurdity, irrelevance, and humor. Questioning the function/limits of order, established protocols, and human b e h a v i o r i n a n a i v e y e t p r o f o u n d m a n n e r .