TRANSPACIFIC: PERFECT LOVERS

GANGNAM, SEOUL PERFECT LOVERS August 16 - October 19, 2024

TRANSPACIFIC: PERFECT LOVERS

September 5 – October 19, 2024

JENNIFER BAAHNG Gangnam

20 Seolleung-ro 119-gil

Gangnam-gu, Seoul

South Korea, 06100

In celebrating its 20th anniversary, JENNIFER BAAHNG is making a significant mark. The gallery is opening its first Asia galleries, in Seoul, featuring TRANSPACIFIC: Perfect Lovers and Love Difference. This exhibition, presented in two parts at two locations, is a testament to two decades of artistic excellence. It showcases over a hundred boundary-leaping, subtle, playful, and political works presented by a diverse group of twelve artists and one poet, each with their own unique perspective. Perfect Lovers, opening September 5 at JENNIFER BAAHNG Gangnam, is an intimate space of vast intrigue, debuting polyphonic collectives of love, alienation, and the absurdism of ideal love. Love Difference, opening September 3 at JENNIFER BAAHNG Hannam, explores creative differences, alluding to Manet, Warhol, and the art of loneliness. While New York is its home, JENNIFER BAAHNG is expanding its horizons, pivoting to the Pacific to share expertise and resources to develop the collective in Contemporary Art. 

Perfect Lovers, installed in the Gangnam district of Seoul, attends to splendid superficiality and yields a rich psychological weave. It is refreshingly sensuous and seeks flexible interpretations: Rather than assert an identity or contest a social order, Kevin Melchionne steps into an imaginary space he aspires to but cannot fully inhabit; Jaye Moon reworked Felix Gonzales’s “Perfect Lovers” with a clock face in numerical Braille; the celebrated Mr. repurposed a found snowboard with iconic Japanese manga adolescent couples; quandaries of love are seen through the prism of the omnipotent Picasso; stories in first-person narrative are found in Janet Taylor Pickett’s “Pride and Insouciance.” TRANSPACIFIC: Perfect Lovers takes on the confines of adorning life.

Love Difference, installed in the Hannam district of Seoul with a palette of soft concrete in tandem with stark white walls with rich tonal nuances, presents clashing, flourishing, and playful works with a contemporary edge. While the installation feels ethereal, the format lends itself to a vivid, grand fantasy of love: R.C. Baker uses a copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico, in “Holy of Holies,” for which Andy Warhol was credited as the album’s producer; Brandon Ballengée’s “Frameworks of Absence” meticulously embodies the extinct species’ haunting absence; John Cage, a leading figure of the post-war avant-garde, is featured through a set of thirteen Ryoku, created with the principles of an ancient Chinese divination text, the I Ching; going beyond collaboration to a kind of conspiratorial imagination, Laura Bell and Ian Ganassi’s “The Corpses” has evolved into more than two decades of personal and material call-and-response, with a new batch of collages usually in progress or transit; Ru Marshall’s iPhone photo of a bodega in Brooklyn captures fleeting inquiries of interactive perception; Björn Meyer-Ebrecht’s old book covers are raising expectations, holding authority, hiding secrets, and promising a visionary spirit—remnants from the proverbial “junkyard of history”; Jaye Moon’s “Get That Money” uses 9,216 Lego bricks to reconstruct K-Rap lyrics by Okasian into Braille in number codes; in Janet Taylor Pickett’s “The Liminal,” a voice chimes with Manet’s “Olympia.” TRANSPACIFIC: Love Difference reminds us that love is all-inclusive.

Yooah Park’s “Void in Writing” is installed in the ATRIUM in Hannam. The piece is a sculptural mobile made of laser-cut stainless steel suspended by piano strings, soaring 20 feet tall and cascading to the floor. This monumental presentation intrigues and piques the audience’s desire to walk around and contemplate it, enriching TRANSPACIFIC’s rich tapestry of contemporary art.

TRANSPACIFIC embarks on a tour, cites the intricacies, and amps up the romance, love, and deliberate insouciance. Playing out riotously in the soul and on the body of each work in myriad ways, the exhibition sets up methodical beats so that every work resonates. The show moves forward in a vibrant, varied way that brings different perspectives to the tenets of the unexpected. With sensuality and drama, Perfect Lovers is the good, the mad, and the quirky brought together into fantastical stories. Love Difference is profoundly thoughtful and cleverly argued. JENNIFER BAAHNG’s inaugural exhibition in Asia, TRANSPACIFIC, is a tale of love, in two cities, in Seoul.

WATCH THE VIDEO

DEBORAH BUCK

Deborah Buck Stand Off, 2024 Acrylic and sumi ink on panel 38.25 x 50.25 in.
   

Madison Ave  New York

Deborah Buck

Witches Bridge

May 16 – July 12, 2024

Jennifer Baahng is proud to announce Witches Bridge, Deborah Buck’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Witches Bridge is an arc of Buck’s 40-year career span, showcasing selected works from the 1980s through the present. Coagulating abstraction and surrealism, the exhibition consists of recent paintings that depict intertwined masses that bulge and fold, ignoring illusion, perspective, or scale, flattening the hierarchical relationship between its elements.  In the 90s paintings, Buck portrays a world where familiar-made-into-strange takes on a Domination Symbolique; unconscious cultural and social domination modes occur within the social habits.  Collages, produced in the 2000s and continuing, are fragmented visuals of conjectures to be fathomed—ranging from the alchemical to the astrological and the heretical to the folklore. Witches Bridge delivers rich narratives in invented landscapes and allegorical scenes, where an absurd tale is configured to provoke profound inquiry and savoring of life.

 

The exhibition opens on May 16, Thursday, with a reception from 6 – 8 pm.

Watch the Videos

Play Video
Play Video
Play Video
Play Video
Play Video

Artist page

Categories: exhibitions

Tags:

Jaye Moon The Wizard Of Oz

   

The Wizard of Oz

March 1 – April 30, 2021

Related

Categories: exhibitions

Tags:

KEVIN MELCHIONNE

KEVIN MELCHIONNE

Kevin Melchionne

MAY DAY, MAY DAY

May 1 – 31, 2025

“I hope to inspire an examination of the habitual deprecation of this approach: ‘Has the reach of one’s aesthetic imagination been reduced to its grasp?’  I suggest sentiment may be the last frontier of the avant-garde.  Accordingly, I propose affirmation in the place of critique, longing instead of identity, pictorial coherence instead of fragmentation.  I propose devotion to craft, not freedom from it.  Rather than assert an identity or contest a social order, I try to step into an imaginary space I aspire to but cannot fully inhabit. At its core, engaging with the instability of that fiction is my artistic practice,”  by Kevin Melchionne.

Kevin Melchionne The Walls Love Seems To Build Between Our Lives And Emptiness, 2023 Oil on panel 26 x 24 inches

Kevin Melchionne

The Walls Love Seems To Build Between Our Lives And Emptiness, 2023

Oil on panel

26 x 24 inches

Kevin Melchionne

Shari Cooke And Her Daughter Stay At An Airbnb While Visiting Colleges In New England, 2023

Oil on panel

22 x 22 inches

Kevin Melchionne

Some Inkling Of The Utopian Conceit, 2024

Oil on panel

30 x 26 inches

Kevin Melchionne

This Life Is The Only Real Form Of Happiness, 2024

Oil on panel

22 x 26 inches

Kevin Melchionne As Though Another Form Of Life Is Possible, 2023 Oil on panel 26 x 24 inches

Kevin Melchionne

As Though Another Form Of Life Is Possible, 2023

Oil on panel

26 x 24 inches

Categories: exhibitions

Tags:

LAURA BELL AND IAN GANASSI

Laura Bell and Ian Ganassi THE CORPSES March 26 - April 30

Madison Ave New York

Laura Bell and Ian Ganassi

THE CORPSES

March 26 – May 3, 2024

Laura Bell, a painter based in the Bronx, and Ian Ganassi, a poet in New Haven, met as artists in residence at the Millay Colony. In 2005, Ian mailed Laura an unfinished poem and handwritten phrases on a piece of printer paper stained with coffee rings, and in an accompanying letter asked her to do something to it. This became the first move in what evolved into their ongoing collaborative collage series, “The Corpses,” titled after the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse. With each mailing, words, images, and objects are added and new pieces are started; at any point, either of them can call a work finished. At first it was assumed that Ian would contribute text and Laura visuals, but this division soon dissolved, with Laura adding lines cut from ads or subway handouts and Ian melting crayons and experimenting with paint. They each had already been using collage methods in their own bodies of work, Ian with overheard and appropriated lines in his poems and Laura with photos and laser prints in the grounds of her paintings. 

Pop culture, politics, religion, and poetry make appearances, and recurring images and phrases create echoes and connections. A collage might go back and forth many times or make only one circuit between New Haven and New York. The pieces can be minimal or layered; early ones tended to be more spare, later work often gathered more objects, but over the years this has also followed an ebb and flow. Some pieces develop themes or function almost as diaries (a hospital glove, a postcard), and time frames can be felt in political or current events references. The gathering of materials has become a consuming habit for both of them, combining found objects, text, drawings, ads, photos, fabrics, and all manner of mixed media—a painterly, visceral process, the anti-Photoshop. “The Corpses turned us into scavengers,” Ian has said. “We ended up trying to get the whole world into them.” 

The process has retained its initial sense of play, while also reflecting battles over the obliteration of a passage of paint or text or the declaring of a piece finished. The series quickly demanded a level of intention equal to the work they were publishing and exhibiting individually. Called “joyously Fluxus-like” by Robert Shuster in the Village Voice and described by writer H. Byron Earhart as going “beyond collaborative to a kind of conspiratorial imagination,” “The Corpses” has evolved into more than a decade of personal and material call-and-response. At present, there are more than 300 finished works. A new batch is usually in progress or in transit.

WATCH THE VIDEOS

RELATED:

THUNDERSPANGLE

THUNDERSPANGLE

THE CORPSES, Kevin Melchionne
July 1 - 31, 2025
Laura Bell and Ian Ganassi THE CORPSES March 26 - April 30

LAURA BELL AND IAN GANASSI

THE CORPSES
March 26 - April 30, 2024

Categories: exhibitions

Tags:

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT, ZHANG HONGTU, PINK and THE CORPSES


JANET TAYLOR PICKETT, ZHANG HONGTU, PINK and THE CORPSES


Madison Avenue  New York
Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu, PINK and THE CORPSES
October 5 – October 31, 2023

R.C. Baker
Eric Brown
Deborah Buck
Bell and Ganassi
Jaye Moon
Mr.
Janet Taylor Pickett
Zhang Hongtu

We are pleased to announce the group exhibition Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu, PINK and THE CORPSES, which runs from October 5 through October 31, 2023.  The exhibition marks the New York premiere of Janet Taylor Pickett’s works, previously only shown at the Oceanside Museum of Art in California, that probe a personal and collective past to posit a distinctly Black mythology of Self.  

This is also the debut of Zhang Hongtu’s never-before-seen Shan Shui Paintings from his personal collection.  Zhang’s Shan Shui series spans several years and explores the categories of “East” and “West” in a distinctive manner, reflecting his life in two cultures. He reimagines the work of seventeenth-century Chinese artists in the vibrant colors and brushwork of Monet and Vincent van Gogh.

On view includes works by R.C. Baker, Eric Brown, Deborah Buck, Bell and Ganassi, Jaye Moon, and Mr. selected from the online exhibition PINK and THE CORPSES.

WATCH THE VIDEOS

RELATED:

R. C. Baker TRACED AND PLATED

R. C. Baker

TRACED AND PLATED
November 10 - December 30, 2025
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
RC Baker: Noise for Signal

R.C. BAKER: Noise For Signal

May 24 - June 30, 2018
Eric Brown

ALREADY AND NOT YET

Eric Brown
May 5 - June 25, 2022
LOVE DIFFERENCE

LOVE DIFFERENCE

Eric Brown, Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu
May 15 - June 15, 2021
the church sag harbor logo

Deborah Buck Participates in Women and Humor

June 23 - September 1, 2024
Deborah Buck Stand Off, 2024 Acrylic and sumi ink on panel 38.25 x 50.25 in.

DEBORAH BUCK

Witches Bridge
May 16 - July 12, 2024
Deborah Buck on view in THE RAINS ARE CHANGING FAST at Heckscher Museum

Heckscher Museum: THE RAINS ARE CHANGING FAST

March 23, 2024 - September 1, 2024
Deborah Buck Heavy Is The Head, 2023 Acrylic, sumi ink on Archers paper 55 x 156 in. Detail

DEBORAH BUCK

INTO THE WILD: To Crash Is Divine
Sept 28 - Oct 27, 2023
THUNDERSPANGLE

THUNDERSPANGLE

THE CORPSES, Kevin Melchionne
July 1 - 31, 2025
Laura Bell and Ian Ganassi THE CORPSES March 26 - April 30

LAURA BELL AND IAN GANASSI

THE CORPSES
March 26 - April 30, 2024
GANGNAM, SEOUL PERFECT LOVERS August 16 - October 19, 2024

TRANSPACIFIC: PERFECT LOVERS

Sept 5 - Oct 19, 2024
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
snowboard

MR.

Snowboard
MR.

MR.

Janet Taylor Pickett

Janet Taylor Pickett

CONJURE
October 13 - November 30, 2025
Sue McNally Jaye Moon Janet Taylor Pickett

PARADE

June 2025
Janet Taylor Pickett Memory of Water II, 2021 Acrylic and collage on canvas 40 x 40 inches

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT

The Selma Burke Invitational African American Art Show
May 30 - June 29, 2025
Janet Taylor Pickett Entering the Gee’s Bend, 2013 Acrylic, gouache, watercolor, graphite, photos on Arches paper 30 x 22 in.

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT

April – May, 2025
TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE September 3 – November 2, 2024 HANNAM, SEOUL

TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE

Sept 3 - Nov 2, 2024
GANGNAM, SEOUL PERFECT LOVERS August 16 - October 19, 2024

TRANSPACIFIC: PERFECT LOVERS

Sept 5 - Oct 19, 2024
The Muse, 2023 Acrylic on canvas 48x48 in.

PRIDE AND INSOUCIANCE

February - April 2024
Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

October 3, 2023 - March 31, 2024
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
(DE)CONSTRUCTING IDEOLOGY: THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND BEYOND November 13, 2022 to March 12, 2023

Zhang Hongtu lectures and exhibits at the Wende Museum

November 13, 2022 - March 12, 2023
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Zhang Hongtu

VAN GOGH / BODHIDHARMA

Zhang Hongtu
March 25 - April 27, 2022
LOVE DIFFERENCE

LOVE DIFFERENCE

Eric Brown, Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu
May 15 - June 15, 2021

BRANDON BALLENGÉE

Brandon Ballengée  RIP Great Auk: After John James Audubon, 1858/2023 Bien edition chromolithograph 26 x 39 in., unframed
Is Apple a Design Company?

Apple is more than a tech company; it became a culture unto itself, a passion of most of people and the birthplace of the world’s most revolutionized products.

Madison Ave New York

Brandon Ballengée

L’Art de la Solitude (The Art of Loneliness)

November 10, 2023 – January 27, 2024

L’Art de la Solitude (The Art of Loneliness), Brandon Ballengée’s debut solo exhibition at the gallery, presents a poignant and multifaceted exploration of the interplay between art, biodiversity, and humanity.  Showcasing more than three dozen works selected from the 1990s to 2023, the exhibition is a testament to Ballengée’s engagement with the ongoing ecological crisis and the profound ramifications of species loss, prominently coined as the Anthropocene or Sixth Great Extinction. It is an artistic intervention that beckons viewers to confront the realities and consider the urgent need for preservation and conservation.  L’Art de la Solitude (The Art of Loneliness) runs from November 10 through December 30, 2023, with the OPENING RECEPTION on Friday, November 10, 6 – 8 PM, accompanied by CENTRAL PARK BIRD WALK on November 11 and THE ARTIST TALK on November 18 at the gallery.

Brandon Ballengée, an artist, biologist, and environmental advocate, utilizes a myriad of mediums and artistic expressions to mirror the current ecological predicament.  At the core of this exhibition lie three distinct series, each foraging into the complexities of our environmental challenges:

FRAMES OF ABSENCE

‘Frameworks of Absence,’ initiated in 2006, meticulously embodies the extinct species’ haunting absence.  By physically cutting images of vanished animals from historical prints, Ballengée forges what he terms ‘Frameworks of Absence.’  These assemblages not only signify the species lost but also involve a transformative event, where the burned remains of these cut images are gathered in urns, symbolizing a personal and collective remembrance.

THE CRUDE OIL PAINTINGS

The ‘Crude Oil Paintings’ series, which commenced in 2020, immerses itself in the enigma of lost fish species endemic to the Gulf of Mexico post-Deepwater Horizon spill. The artist embarks on an arduous quest to portray these missing creatures, drawing from preserved specimens and utilizing contaminated sediments and dispersants to craft their haunting portraits. This series serves as a contemplative reflection on what is obscured and irretrievably lost due to our collective treatment of the environment.

SOS PAINTINGS

Continuing his artistic journey into the present and beyond, the ‘SOS Paintings’ provide an introspective look into the looming threat of deep-water mining in the Gulf of Mexico.  These colossal paintings, created using unconventional materials like thrift bed sheets and latex house paint, are interpretations of deep-sea species at risk due to this emerging deep-sea mining industry.  Ballengée captures the mystery and beauty of these enigmatic creatures and ignites contemplation on the potential repercussions of human intervention in this untouched abyssal zone.

L’Art de la Solitude (The Art of Loneliness) is an artistic journey reflecting our ecological plight. Through three compelling series, ‘Frameworks of Absence,’ ‘The Crude Oil Paintings,’ and ‘SOS Paintings,’  Brandon Ballengée epitomizes the essence of loss caused by species extinction and environmental perils. The exhibition’s haunting images of extinct species, the ghostly portrayal of lost Gulf creatures, and the impending threat of deep-sea mining converge. As a catalyst for reflection, the exhibition urges viewers to contemplate the implications of our collective actions on the fragile fabric of our environment.  L’Art de la Solitude (The Art of Loneliness) is a visual poetry and a thought-provoking crusade.


REVIEW:

https://www.villagevoice.com/ecology-minded-artist-brandon-ballengee-pictures-what-weve-lost/

WATCH THE VIDEOS

RELATED:

moody logo

Moody Center For The Art: Breath(e)

September 21, 2024 - August 2026
germanisches nationalmuseum logo

Germanisches National Museum: HELLO NATURE

October 3, 2024 - March 2, 2025
hammer museum

Hammer Museum: Breath(E)

September 14, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Brandon Ballengée  RIP Great Auk: After John James Audubon, 1858/2023 Bien edition chromolithograph 26 x 39 in., unframed

BRANDON BALLENGÉE

L’Art de la Solitude (The Art of Loneliness)
Nov 10, 2023 - Jan 27, 2024
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023

Categories: exhibitions

Tags:

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

Madison Ave New York

Picasso, Welcome to America

June 15 – September 27, 2023

R.C. Baker

Brandon Ballengée

Romare Bearden

Deborah Buck

Shijia Chen

Billy Copley

Eileen Foti

Björn Meyer-Ebrecht

Jaye Moon

Pablo Picasso

André Raffray

Janet Taylor Pickett

Zhang Hongtu

Every artist since the early 20th century has been influenced by Pablo Picasso.  The protean painter/ sculptor/ printmaker/ ceramicist helped define what “modern” art once was – and is still becoming.  In 1939, MoMA’s staff was gathering 300 works by the world’s “most famous living artist” (according to the museum’s press release) for Picasso: Forty Years of His Art.  A centerpiece of the exhibit was Guernica, his grisaille mural decrying the destruction of the small Basque town by Nazi bombers, in 1937.

Along with Michelangelo and Rembrandt, the name Picasso (1881-1973) has become a synonym – a cliché, even – for “artist.”  But none of the artists in Picasso, Welcome to America see the Spanish-born titan as an old hat.  Instead, these ten Americans find in the European trailblazer constant inspiration and ongoing challenge.  Zhang Hongtu imagines Chairman Mao exposed by glaring illumination similar to the all-seeing lantern in Guernica.  Jaye Moon also reimagines Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, in When Bob Dylan Meets Picasso, Guernica – using Lego bricks in Braille rather than paint.

The bodies and masks in another Picasso touchstone, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), come under scrutiny from Eileen Foti and André Raffray through substitution and homage.  Billy Copley finds masks in unlikely surroundings, while Janet Taylor Pickett moves effigies aside to place her powerful female figure at center stage.  Deborah Buck turns Picasso’s infamously harsh male gaze around, painting surreal figures that might be asking, “Who’s crying now?”  In Weary of Treading the Earth, from 1945, Romare Bearden, working in watercolor and ink rather than his later signature collage, energizes cubist space with a circus-like palette.  R.C. Baker riffs beyond Picasso’s Blue and Rose periods through primary-colored aluminum printing plates.  Björn Meyer-Ebrecht’s dynamic wood and enamel sculpture strips the figure to cubist angles and voids, while Brandon Ballengée searches for animals that, like Picasso’s minotaurs, are no longer with us. Original works by Pablo Picasso will also be on view, commemorating the 50th anniversary of his death.

All of the artists in this exhibition have been influenced by Picasso’s experiments with form and perspective – his breaking of traditional and academic rules.  Some of the work here also comments on his darker side, while other pieces engage with the social and political aspects of Picasso’s art.  Ultimately, these ten contemporary artists in Picasso, Welcome to America appreciate the formal and aesthetic complexity of a constant innovator.  This great artist was effectively barred from ever visiting the United States because he was a member of the French Communist Party.  But the joke was on the Feds – Picasso has been in America all along.

VIDEOS

Play Video
Play Video
Play Video

RELATED:

R. C. Baker TRACED AND PLATED

R. C. Baker

TRACED AND PLATED
November 10 - December 30, 2025
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
RC Baker: Noise for Signal

R.C. BAKER: Noise For Signal

May 24 - June 30, 2018
moody logo

Moody Center For The Art: Breath(e)

September 21, 2024 - August 2026
germanisches nationalmuseum logo

Germanisches National Museum: HELLO NATURE

October 3, 2024 - March 2, 2025
hammer museum

Hammer Museum: Breath(E)

September 14, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Brandon Ballengée  RIP Great Auk: After John James Audubon, 1858/2023 Bien edition chromolithograph 26 x 39 in., unframed

BRANDON BALLENGÉE

L’Art de la Solitude (The Art of Loneliness)
Nov 10, 2023 - Jan 27, 2024
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE September 3 – November 2, 2024 HANNAM, SEOUL

TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE

Sept 3 - Nov 2, 2024
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
Janet Taylor Pickett

Janet Taylor Pickett

CONJURE
October 13 - November 30, 2025
Sue McNally Jaye Moon Janet Taylor Pickett

PARADE

June 2025
Janet Taylor Pickett Memory of Water II, 2021 Acrylic and collage on canvas 40 x 40 inches

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT

The Selma Burke Invitational African American Art Show
May 30 - June 29, 2025
Janet Taylor Pickett Entering the Gee’s Bend, 2013 Acrylic, gouache, watercolor, graphite, photos on Arches paper 30 x 22 in.

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT

April – May, 2025
TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE September 3 – November 2, 2024 HANNAM, SEOUL

TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE

Sept 3 - Nov 2, 2024
GANGNAM, SEOUL PERFECT LOVERS August 16 - October 19, 2024

TRANSPACIFIC: PERFECT LOVERS

Sept 5 - Oct 19, 2024
The Muse, 2023 Acrylic on canvas 48x48 in.

PRIDE AND INSOUCIANCE

February - April 2024
Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

October 3, 2023 - March 31, 2024
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
(DE)CONSTRUCTING IDEOLOGY: THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND BEYOND November 13, 2022 to March 12, 2023

Zhang Hongtu lectures and exhibits at the Wende Museum

November 13, 2022 - March 12, 2023
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Zhang Hongtu

VAN GOGH / BODHIDHARMA

Zhang Hongtu
March 25 - April 27, 2022
LOVE DIFFERENCE

LOVE DIFFERENCE

Eric Brown, Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu
May 15 - June 15, 2021
the church sag harbor logo

Deborah Buck Participates in Women and Humor

June 23 - September 1, 2024
Deborah Buck Stand Off, 2024 Acrylic and sumi ink on panel 38.25 x 50.25 in.

DEBORAH BUCK

Witches Bridge
May 16 - July 12, 2024
Deborah Buck on view in THE RAINS ARE CHANGING FAST at Heckscher Museum

Heckscher Museum: THE RAINS ARE CHANGING FAST

March 23, 2024 - September 1, 2024
Deborah Buck Heavy Is The Head, 2023 Acrylic, sumi ink on Archers paper 55 x 156 in. Detail

DEBORAH BUCK

INTO THE WILD: To Crash Is Divine
Sept 28 - Oct 27, 2023
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
GANGNAM, SEOUL PERFECT LOVERS August 16 - October 19, 2024

TRANSPACIFIC: PERFECT LOVERS

Sept 5 - Oct 19, 2024
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023

JENNIFER CHO: HAYSTACK, MOUNTAINS AND WATERLILIES

Madison Ave New York Jennifer Cho Mountain, Haystack and Water Lillies

Madison Ave New York

Jennifer Cho

Haystack, Mountains and Waterlilies

April 25 – May 31, 2023

In Haystack, Mountains and Waterlilies, Jennifer Cho mobilizes “Slow Art” to articulate the need for sensuous and sensible vigilance within art-making. The exhibition is an ecology of built forms, a simulacra—a made up ecosystem that offers a view of a world proximate to our own.   It fuses warm atmosphere with conceptual elegance, drawn from outworn materials. The installations delight and enchant while destabilizing what qualifies as a landscape. In Haystack, Mountains and Waterlilies, all five senses are employed with grace and acerbic wit, balancing consistency with surprise. Cho inhabits the painterly practices of Cezanne, Monet and Millet, transporting their intensely embodied preoccupations with landscape onto her own artistic concerns. Complicated and subtle, the exhibition excavates the sedimentary layers of technology that develop a scene of both intimacy and ignorance; technology we entrust with our most vital choices and secrets.

“Haystack” (2000-2023) is a ghostly, crystalline work carved from soldered compact discs. The term “Slow Tech,” coined by Jennifer Cho, enlists rigid, glittering forms that resemble a natural haystack. Extravagant yet tranquil, the work triggers a human nostalgia for a primordial state of cultivation, as art objects are culled from the natural world. Like Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) tributes to the endurance of unrewarded toil for peasants, unspooling the strands of the compact disc requires careful, assiduous work. Taking the time to unfurl these strands, Cho engages in an epic struggle with seemingly slight and minuscule material.

To raise “Mountains” (1995-2023), Jennifer Cho inhabits the practices of Jeong Seon (1676-1759) and Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). While these artists walked through the respective mountains of Mt. Kumgang and Mt. Saint Victoire, they used their footsteps as a way to physically and psychologically register the scene they were about to paint. Cho transposes that footwork into handwork, creating a delicate, melancholy rendering of “Mountains.”

Haunting and menacing, “Waterlilies” (2000-2023) erects shallow pools at the center of a gallery room containing Siamese fighting fish and floating compact discs. Hazy and textured, the clear water grows progressively murky as the fish dart around the pond. The work interlaces narrative with fantasy, developing a false ecosystem from fish and obsolete technology that nonetheless teems with life. The result is an otherworldly biome that seems to exist outside of time and space—an altered reality. 

Haystack, Mountains and Waterlilies confers the history of landscape as a long arc, connecting Asian landscape to European plain air works, to Contemporary Art. In these respective works, history provides the framework for new matter, as ostensibly obsolete technology is re-released as mountains, flora, fauna, and water. The exhibition persuades for a fresh conceptualizing of time, asserting a vision of history less as a linear progression but more as a topography whose past is layered within its present material. The beauty of the physical universe is not an illusion of the human eye and the rest of the human sensorium, but a true glimpse into the inner nature of things. Daring to look at works of art in the flesh, Jennifer Cho sees the landscape both in its beauty and in its terror. 

VIDEO

Play Video

RELATED:

Categories: exhibitions

Tags:

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT: LIGHT, COLOR AND DESIRE

NECESSARY MEMORIES | March 15 - April 28 | SUNY Old Westbury NY
JANET TAYLOR PICKETT: Light, Color and Desire

May 27 – September 3, 2023

Oceanside Museum of Art

Light, Color and Desire presents the art of Janet Taylor Pickett, whose pathbreaking work explores Blackness, identity, and history.   A focused solo exhibition of nearly thirty (30) paintings and combines produced between 2003 and 2023, Light, Color and Desire  coronates the artist, as a synecdoche for all women, as  a contemporary goddess who reigns over fertility, fecundity, and embodied experience.  This mythology of Self reaches its apotheosis in Taylor Pickett’s luminous portraiture. Emanating expectancy and resolve, the subjects appear as incarnations of an ongoing desire for social, sexual, and spiritual freedom that is personal and universal. Polemical, unique, politically and socially committed, the art included in Light, Color and Desire demonstrates Taylor Pickett’s arrival at a distinct narrative voice inspired by Johannes Vermeer, Henri Matisse, and Frida Kahlo.

Janet Taylor Pickett was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1948, the third generation in her maternal family to be raised in that city, which was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Her father, Dempsey Taylor Jr., was born in Brownsville, Tennessee and travelled north during the Great Migration, settling with his family in Ypslanti, Michigan. This imbrication of personal and shared Black History is concealed in Taylor Pickett’s work, which pours forth from an arduous path sowed with the sorrow of memories and a sea of desires. In particular, Janet Taylor Pickett’s becoming was influenced by Romare Bearden, whose collaged elements became the bedrock of her own work, situating her as a celebrated collagist.

LIGHT

Janet Taylor Pickett has always been intrigued by light, a preoccupation that she shares with Johannes Vermeer (1632 – 1675). Vermeer implemented camera obscura and applied layers of shadow to achieve the effect of an illuminated subject emerging from the darkness. Taylor Pickett begins with a full composition and then engages color blocking, leaving light to illumine her central subject. Neither plaintive nor condemning, the subjects seem to gaze both inwards and outwards, beholding internal and external topographies with poise and depth. In The Artist Unmasked (2021), the steadfast female gaze belies colossal emotions that the subject restrains. The expression harbors a universal vulnerability; an imperative grace under pressure that a (white) culture expects Black women to retain. This self-possession within constriction also figures in the painting Ladies in Waiting (1981), where the artist is framed by luscious, magenta walls. The light-infused domestic interior pulses with a celestial buoyancy, as though the space hums with ethereal hymns.

COLOR

Light, Color and Desire positions Janet Taylor Pickett as a colorist: an artist keen to the affordances of each hue, and how they inter-animate each other. Taylor Pickett forgoes neutral tones in favor of a kaleidoscopic color scheme, which conjures mood, light and space. Her saturated palette and enlistment of cutouts highlights her dialogue with Henri Matisse (1869 -1954). In The Ritual (2003), an amalgamation of painted and collaged elements, Taylor Pickett recruits cutout dress forms, which augment and amplify Matisse Cutouts. The work curates an altar that colligates a European reference (a painting by Fra Angelico) to African ones: hennaed hands and a fertility figure ringed with a golden aureole. Its display of talismanic forms and Christian iconography renders the work an homage to Black faith and a votive in its own right.  Taylor Pickett’s Indigo Blue further highlights her visual dialogue with Matisse (Prussian) Blue. This deep affinity for Blue is enacted in Memory of Water II (2021), which substantiates the ever-present call and response water has had in the collective history of African Americans. Water symbolizes the flow of memory from the Nile, to the Mississippi River to the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean; it is the genetic rhythm of memory that water holds.

DESIRE

Engulfed in flora and fauna, ripe with bold self-possession, the intensely embodied subjects in Janet Taylor Pickett’s work suggest her spiritual linkage to Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), who deployed self-portraiture to explore sexuality, femininity, and her relationship to the natural world. In Forest Born (2022), the roots and curls of flora render an organic issuance from nature. Both artists share an autobiographical narrative that weaves pain and joy to desire. In their political commitments and their unapologetic examination of suffering as well as beauty, they are thematically and aesthetically connected across time and space. Taylor Pickett and Frida Kahlo turn to their own bodies as a site and source of inspiration. While Frida Kahlo lingers on trauma, Taylor Pickett, attuned to life’s difficulties, tributes the beauty of the world and the joy of life. This resiliency and jubilance is personified in the recent painting series Gaia (2022), the goddess of the earth, whose gaze is defiant and searching. The portraits enact the apotheosis of self-actualization; the artist-as-subject is endowed with full agency, and regards the viewer with a gaze that harbors the command of a mystic. As a conceptual linchpin of the exhibition, Gaia confers that Light, Color and Desire is seeing the life of Janet Taylor Pickett.

Janet Taylor Pickett is utterly authentic in her vision and scope: an expression of a life being led in pursuit of psychical, spiritual and aesthetic liberation. It marks her as a vessel for femininity writ large—a contemporary goddess whose beauty and power supercharges life itself. While Taylor Pickett approaches the present as a benediction, she also presides over the past. History suffuses her art. As sustained visual poems, the paintings and combines in Light, Color and Desire probe a personal and collective past to posit a distinctly Black mythology of Self. Taylor Pickett’s work is a serious intellectual interrogation of beauty, nature and emotions that enables her recognition at the fore of Contemporary Art. Imbued with the mysticism of devotional work and the enigmatic lyricism of folklore, Janet Taylor Pickett paints as she emotes.

Dr. Jennifer Baahng, Guest Curator

Related:

Janet Taylor Pickett

Janet Taylor Pickett

CONJURE
October 13 - November 30, 2025
Sue McNally Jaye Moon Janet Taylor Pickett

PARADE

June 2025
Janet Taylor Pickett Memory of Water II, 2021 Acrylic and collage on canvas 40 x 40 inches

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT

The Selma Burke Invitational African American Art Show
May 30 - June 29, 2025
Janet Taylor Pickett Entering the Gee’s Bend, 2013 Acrylic, gouache, watercolor, graphite, photos on Arches paper 30 x 22 in.

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT

April – May, 2025
TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE September 3 – November 2, 2024 HANNAM, SEOUL

TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE

Sept 3 - Nov 2, 2024
GANGNAM, SEOUL PERFECT LOVERS August 16 - October 19, 2024

TRANSPACIFIC: PERFECT LOVERS

Sept 5 - Oct 19, 2024
The Muse, 2023 Acrylic on canvas 48x48 in.

PRIDE AND INSOUCIANCE

February - April 2024

Categories: exhibitions

Tags: