moniquemeloche

moniquemeloche presents The Transcendence of Time, the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition with conceptual artist Nate Young. Through this new body of work, Young mines his own family archives to explore and question the nature of identification, history, and the significance of ritual as a means to instill authority. The Transcendence of Time allows for a deeper investigation into excavated bones thought to be from the horse that once carried the artist’s great-grandfather from the South to the North during the Great Migration, a personal narrative illuminated by the larger history of US race relations and the movement of black bodies. In this continuum of work, Young now considers the impetus of the bones through the lens of science and philosophy, exploring their ability to offer clues and insights to his family’s unique journey to identity, while also connecting to a more universal narrative. Riveted by the illusion of time, Young evokes the theoretical proposition of a causal loop – the concept of objects and information as self-existing, through a cyclical relationship between cause-and-effect that functions to preserve a fixed outcome. While the works are visually rooted in narratives of family history, there is a subtle reference to time as existing beyond perceived limits. “The past, present, and future exist within the work, challenging and transcending linear boundaries by examining the complicated relationship between the bones and their origins, suggesting their continued existence across multiple planes of time. There is a metaphysical proof of informational loops that suggests the potential to unlock and actualize the past and the future, through the assured knowledge of the bone’s existence within the here and now.” – Nate Young More simply put, Young considers the idea of an object bringing about its own existence, a concept popularized in mainstream media through films such as “Back to the Future” and “Interstellar”, as well as well as the recent Netflix series “Dark”. The exhibition presents two unique bodies of sculptural works, each rooted in this fascination with quantum entanglement, where the present actualizes and discovers artifacts of the past. Inspired by rituals’ ability to frame, define, and empower, Young presents reliquaries that loosely mimics ornate altars and vitrines found in a house of worship, thereby elevating the horse bones to a sacred position of authority and cultural relevance. Excerpts of text appear within each altar, recounting the harrowing stories of his great-grandfather’s battle with depression. The bones built into each work themselves reveal secretly coded messages within. What we arrive at is an expansion of the ongoing critical investigation of the myriad ways in which meaning is constructed, and how it’s informed not only by empirical evidence, but also by ritual and philosophical belief. Nate Young (American b. 1981, lives Chicago) received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2009 and a BA from Northwestern College in Minnesota in 2004. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009. Young’s recent solo exhibitions include (re)collection), The De Pree Art Center at Hope College, Holland, MI (2020; …WELL!, Julius Caesar, Chicago (2019); Cleromancy, moniquemeloche, Chicago (2017); re:collection, VisArts, Richmond, VA (2017), Stations, Luce Gallery, Turin, Italy (2016), The Unseen Evidence of Things Substantiated, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA(2015), and But not yet: in the spirit of linguistics, moniquemeloche, Chicago (2015). His work has been included in many group exhibitions, including FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial of Contemporary Art (2018); Four Saints in Three Acts, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, (2017); Chicago Invites Chicago, Galerie Lelong, New York (2016); Retreat, curated by Theaster Gates, Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago (2014); Tony Lewis and Nate Young, Room East, New York (2014); the Soap Factory’s Minnesota Biennial (2013); Fore, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012); and Go Tell It on the Mountain, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Young was a 2015 Artist-in-Residence at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, and he is the recipient of the Knight Arts Challenge Fellowship from the Knight Foundation (2014); the Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2014); and the Bush Fellowship for Visual Artists (2010). His work is in notable collections, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; Mott Warsh Collection, Flint, MI; and the Fabric Workshop Museum, Philadelphia. Young was recently commissioned by the Driehaus Museum (Chicago, IL) to create new works and site specific installations which respond directly to the complex history of the museum’s 1883 building and its architecture. The exhibition will be on view in the Summer of 2020. Young is co-founder and Director of the artist-run exhibition space The Bindery Projects, in Minneapolis. He is Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Online viewing room: https://moniquemeloche.viewingrooms.com/viewing-room/4-nate-young-the-transcendence-of-time/ Virtual walkthrough: https://vimeo.com/411004867/46e2139188

moniquemeloche is pleased to present David Shrobe: Natural Sovereignty, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Through assemblage, collage, drawing, and painting, the works on view draw from oral histories, family portraits, and online archives to present the vitality of family life among Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities. Pulling from the past to project new possibilities of the future, Shrobe considers the backyard and garden as an extension of the home and a site of sustenance, survival, and resistance.

moniquemeloche is pleased to present Candida Alvarez: Multihyphenated. This is the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery.

moniquemeloche is pleased to announce Sanford Biggers: Back to the Stars, the artist's fourth solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition showcases new artworks from his ever-evolving Chimera and Codex series, which juxtaposes figurative marble sculptures and quilt compositions. Biggers' practice brings aesthetic, poetic, and social insights to the intertwining stories embedded in material culture. His creative processes recognize and conflate syncretic impulses between aesthetic expressions from seemingly disparate societies and histories, transforming them into rigorously formal and conceptual artworks.

moniquemeloche is pleased to present Antonius-Tín Bui's second exhibition with the gallery, There are many ways to hold water without being called a vase.

moniquemeloche presents Days Later, Down River, a solo exhibition presented by Maia Cruz Palileo.

moniquemeloche is pleased to present Lavar Munroe, Sometime Come to Someplace. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Munroe, a Bahamian American artist, works with acrylic and mixed media on unstretched canvas, often incorporating objects and materials such as beads, jewelry, ceramic tiles, glass, textiles, chicken hides, and feathers. The artist’s work reflects the environment where he grew up, drawing from memory and mapping a personal journey of survival and trauma. In his new series, Munroe centers on their recent travel to Zimbabwe, exploring the cultural similarities between the Caribbean and southern Africa. Sometime Come to Someplace, a line spoken by Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, references the notion of a journey and feeling at home in a foreign place, and like Zimbabwe, is a place rich in social, political, and mythological histories. Munroe’s unique visual language viscerally captures the experience of late nights spent under the stars, dancing to the familiar sounds of steel drums around a crackling fire–often the night’s only source of light amidst the vast plateaus, the darkness energetic with wildlife. Taken together, the works on view embody the journey, magic, love, and celebration of escape through fantastical and dreamlike imagery.

moniquemeloche is pleased to present Arvie Smith: Call and Response. Spanning both galleries, the exhibition features a series of new and legacy paintings by the Portland, OR-based artist Arvie Smith and is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Smith’s practice contends with the complex history of social and racial injustices in America. Born in Houston and raised in Roganville, TX and Los Angeles, Smith conveys the collective horrors, humiliations, and discriminations that Black people have suffered in the United States over the past 450 years. Fueled by a drive to be an artist at an early age, Smith started copying paintings of Michelangelo when his family moved to Los Angeles. He had a solo show at a bank at age 15 and was the school artist for its sporting events. Excited to continue his early painting career, Smith applied to an art institute but was abruptly dissuaded by a receptionist who said, “we don’t need your kind here.” He would go on to earn his BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art with a concentration in painting and printmaking in 1986, twenty-some years later. It was at PNCA where Smith met painter Robert Colescott–the first Black artist to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale–who influenced Smith’s approach to racial taboos and stereotypes through satire. Smith continued to earn his MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art where he was a teaching assistant to abstract expressionist Grace Hartigan, who challenged him to raise his ambitions and reach for his canvases. He later returned to PNCA where he taught painting for over 20 years. In 2017, Smith received the recognition of professor emeritus and an honorary PhD from PNCA. Smith’s wildly colorful paintings combine stereotypical Black images found in advertising and pop culture such as Aunt Jemima, Sambo, Bojangles, and Minstrel shows; historically taboo subjects such as interracial relationships; current and historical events referencing the history of slavery, the KKK, segregation, and police shootings; and Smith’s own experience to create lyrical 2-dimenstional master works. Chock full of identifiable symbols and figures, Smith’s warm-toned paintings are often inspired by epic tales from Greco-Roman history, through a fascination with stories intended to shape minds and behavior. Fittingly, Smith’s work is included in the affiliate exhibition at the Venice Biennale, The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined at Palazzo Bembo, Venice through November 27, 2022. Contextualized through paint, Call and Response evokes the oral tradition that enslaved Africans brought to colonized America. Firmly entrenched in African history, ‘call and response’ can be found in storytelling, religious rituals, protest, public discourse, children’s rhymes, and most notably music, in gospel, blues, R&B, rock and roll, jazz and hip-hop. Tapping into the spiritual significance that influenced and built upon African American culture, the act of call and response was a way to exchange stories about African life and create new lore about the American experience, shedding light on instances of hardship shared, unifying each other together. Smith embraces his ancestors’ songs using his art as resistance to call out embedded truths on America’s racial, social, and cultural history. As an American citizen and artist, Smith intends his work to be the “call,” a springboard for meaningful dialogue and understanding, soliciting the viewer’s “response” thus making space for us to collectively find the rhythm towards empathy by seeing others in ourselves. In reflecting on his 4-decade career Smith remarks “I paint as an American of African descent, who grew up in the Jim Crow South and South-Central Los Angeles, and living in a white man's America, I paint. My narratives connect the present to the past, examining America's complex history of social and racial inequities. I have consumed a steady diet of racial injustices personally and collectively, providing an ever-growing catalyst for my artistic journey.” Arvie Smith (b.1938, Houston, Tx) holds an MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. Smith studied at Il Bisonte and SACI in Florence in 1983. He has had recent solo exhibitions at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR; Jordan Schnitzer Museum, Portland, OR; and Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland, OR. His work has been included in group exhibitions at UTA Art Space, Beverly Hills, CA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; and Upfor Gallery, Portland, OR. Smith’s work is held in the Permanent Collections of the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Delaware Museum of Art, Wilmington, DE; Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore, MD; Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Portland, OR; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR; and Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, Asbury, NJ. Smith is a recipient of the 2020 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculpture Grant and the 2022 Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts, The Ford Family Foundation Visual Arts Program.

It’s a story that happens to you once and then lives in you forever…… Tenderness is a choice, it’s what you choose when you’ve suffered enough…… Because everywhere you look, there are stories telling themselves…… There is nothing harder to let go of than an already gone thing…… Love is, after all, what fights for us so that we can hold our peace…… –Selections from the novel Vegabond by Eloghosa Osunde moniquemeloche is pleased to present Cheryl Pope, Variations on a Love Theme. This is the artist’s fifth solo show with the gallery. Variations on a Love Theme presents a series of new works that feature the artist’s unique needle punched wool technique to create richly textured and colorful textile paintings. Referencing the familiar repertoire of the French Post-Impressionist, Intimist1, and Imagist paintings, Pope recreates deeply personal recollections that cinematically compose the silent complexities of beautiful and tragic oscillations between love and loss in our everyday lives. Spanning both galleries, the works on view feature interior scenes of couples, portraits of women, and depictions of motherhood. At once autobiographical and fictional, the paintings offer a unique perspective into the artist’s memoirs. Images of couples are drawn from memory, referencing the artist’s own relationships and moments of disconnect, anxiety, and desire, while beach scenes depicting a mother and child accentuate a tender stillness of caregiving.Portraits of women–often friends of the artist–reveal an orchestra of silence depicted through the subjects’ inward gaze and the psychology of interior spaces. In these scenes, the figures exist in a nest of choreography–a rotating stage of mystery, tragedy, and poetry of day-to-day living with feelings of presence and absence woven throughout. Through material intervention, Pope employs a sense of magical realism where the foreground and background are collapsed into patterns and basic shapes, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. Taking inspiration from Les Nabis2 artists, the works seek to create an art of suggestion and emotion, and calls forth the malleability of experience, memory, and storytelling. Variations on a Love Theme is a telling and a withholding of the real and the imagined where memories of love and loss are both fact and fiction. By placing the viewers in a surveillance perspective–simultaneously inside and outside the figurative frame–we become implicated in the artist’s memories, bearing witness to the complexities of love and words left unsaid. This exhibition will travel to the Ulrich Museum of Art, KS August 25–December 3, 2022. A digital catalogue will be published with an essay by Ksenya Gurshtein. Cheryl Pope received her BFA and MA in Design from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, where she is an Adjunct Professor. She is the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Public Artist Award, Franklin Works, Minneapolis, MN (2017); Selected Artist, Year of Public Art, Chicago Cultural Center, IL (2017); Mellon Fellowship, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH (2016); and 3Arts Award, Chicago, IL (2015). Pope’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Joan Flasche Artists Book Collection, Chicago; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Honolulu Museum of Art, HI; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Poetry Foundation, Chicago, IL; DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; United States Embassy, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; The Jackson West Memorial Hospital, Miami; and The Ulrich Museum of Art, Kansas. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Unmasking Masculinity, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (2022-23); Can you see me?, Weinberg/Newton Gallery (2022); Skin in the Game (2022); and The Long Dream, Museum of Contemporary Art (2020-21). -- 1 Intimism was an artistic movement in the late 19th-century and early 20th-century that involved the depiction of banal yet personal domestic scenes. The Intimists diverged from the Impressionists in abandoning a focus on formal accuracy in depiction of light, color, and perspective in favor of emphasized texture, exaggerated palette, and merged figure and ground. 2 Les Nabis were a group of young French artists active in Paris from 1888 until 1900, who played a large part in the transition from impressionism and academic art to abstract art, symbolism, and the other early movements of modernism. They believed that a work of art was not a depiction of nature, but a synthesis of metaphors and symbols created by the artist.

“History is not something given, a fixed, chronological linear outline with blank spots waiting to be filled with newly unearthed facts. It's the activity over time of all the minds compromising it, the sum of these parts that produces a greater ecological whole. History, the past is what you're thinking, what you've thought. You, the individual, you the enabler and product of the collective enterprise of mind. History is mind, is driven by mind in the same sense a flock of migratory birds, its configuration, destination, purpose, destiny are propelled, guided by the collective mind of members of the immediate flock and also the species, all kindred birds past and present inhabiting Great Time.” -John Edgar Wideman moniquemeloche is pleased to present Nate Young: (un)time, the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. (un)time reveals a series of new drawings by Nate Young that are a continuation of works which stem from a shared source image–a photograph of Young posing with his horse, based on his memory of a photograph of his great grandfather also posing with his horse–referencing the story of his equestrian escape from North Carolina to Pennsylvania. Dealing with notions of remembrance, identity, and death, the artist recreates this imagery as an attempt to access the past in the present, thinking about how images and memories behave in the presence of (un)time. “Untime” is a framework for the absence of time, and in this context, its relation to Blackness and its immeasurable, permanent condition of being that is dictated by an endless proximity to death (Murillo 54). Each image depicting the artist and his horse and/or his ancestor and their horse offers an ontological glimpse into the temporal distance (or overlap) between two identities. The figures, with their haunting presence, each shift slightly, yet appear frozen against a vast cosmic backdrop, which the artist carefully renders in graphite. They subsist in various distortions–warping, duplicating, blurring–a visualization of Black atemporality, or Black untime, which is dictated by persistent time loss, lapse and loops, a result of the indeterminate negation of Blackness in history, politics, and culture (55). Some figures recede and disappear entirely through the use of vellum, a semi opaque material which Young deliberately employs to obscure their appearance. Like trying to recall an old memory, the figures’ relationship to the viewer is constantly shifting, suggesting an unknowable relationship to time. In what appears to be a sequence of various stages of erasure, we are left in this simultaneous in-between state of never having existed, or, not being while existing (60). Taken together, (un)time is a meditation on personal and collective memory within the historical framework of Black erasure. By repeatedly rendering and recuperating his personal memory, Young underwrites the notion that the past only exists because we reproduce it. Nate Young (b.1981 Phoenixville, PA, lives Chicago, IL) received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2009 and BA from Northwestern College in 2004. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009 and was invited back as a Dean of the residency in 2015. That same year, Young exhibited his first solo show with moniquemeloche, followed by a solo booth at Artissima, Italy, and a duo booth at UNTITLED Miami. Since then, Young’s work has been shown at Bridge Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Museum of Contemporary Arts, Chicago, IL (2021); De Pree Art Gallery, Holland, MI (2020); The Driehaus Museum, Chicago, IL (2020); Front Triennial at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH (2018); Visual Arts Center, Richmond Virginia (2017); and The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY (2012).His work is in the permanent collections of DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Fabric Workshop Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C. ------ Murillo III, John. Impossible Stories, On the Space and Time of Black Destructive Creation. Columbus, OH, Ohio State University Press, January 2021

moniquemeloche is thrilled to present Slow Clap, Jake Troyli’s second solo show with the gallery and most expansive exhibition to date. Slow Clap presents a new series of paintings that marks the artist’s continued investigation in self-portraiture fusing classical iconography and humor to explore labor capitalism as a demonstration of value. The exhibition features two new large-scale, multi-figure paintings with their complexity and maximalist viewpoint akin to the classic Dutch painting, Garden of Earthly Delights. Rather than Bosch’s embellishment of lust and worldly fleshy indulgence, Troyli depicts a scenescape display of nude avatars fixed in a constant cycle of performance and labor. Compartmentalized into various scenes analogous to theatrical set design, the figures enact a variety of activities where the lines between celebration and violation are blurred.Troyli–who draws inspiration from his time playing division one basketball–contemplates the spectacle; criticizing the systems he both benefits from and is subjected to. Using classical Renaissance painting techniques, each work is built up starting with an underpainting to establish tones, followed by layers of bright color to achieve a graphic, cartoon-like quality. Troyli’s decision to leave the figures unrendered is deliberate, keeping the brown undertones visible as a means to express a generalization of race, marking the bodies as “other.” Through the repetition of symbolism present across this body of work, Troyli essentially subjects himself to repeated acts of surveillance, display, labor, and violence. Mining imagery from the larger multi-figure works, Troyli generates a selection of paintings that dial into a particular sentiment. In addition to his familiar self-portraits that emphasize the artist’s visual response to the gaze, Troyli is expanding his repertoire to move beyond the frame, focusing on his elasticized avatar now at the hands of overly devotional, white characters that embody the voyeur. In The Crowd Surfer, these oversized hands simultaneously uplift and hold back the artist’s body, now headless, and in Superfan, the body is climbed or hugged on by a crying fanatic, a commentary on virtue signaling and competitive mourning around racial injustice. Duality is abundantly seen throughout the work, as the artist grapples with notions of uplifting/pulling down, empowerment/vulnerability and excitement/fear, underwriting the tension between the Black body as subject versus object. Aptly titled Slow Clap, Troyli’s exhibition is a slow burn side show, where performers run toward a finish line that doesn’t exist, hover atop a seemingly impossible high dive, or are simply hung out to dry. Sentiments of sarcasm and disapproval underline the collective desire for these figures to fail in their valiant efforts to become individuals. Nudity becomes a tool for control, exposing physical attributes to assign value and acting as symbolism for feelings of vulnerability and performance anxiety. With the current saturation of Black figuration, Troyli subverts narratives surrounding Black exceptionalism and exploitation, providing his own fresh perspective through humor, and positions the viewers as audience in order to ask important questions around performance for spectators versus performance for self, and who the payoff is actually for.

moniquemeloche is thrilled to present of the land behind them, a solo exhibition of new works by Dan Gunn. This is Gunn’s fourthsolo exhibition with the gallery. of the land behind them explores the psychological and mythological implications of regional self-conception. Focusing on the Midwestern pastoral landscape, Gunn considers the urban and rural divides through elaborately carved draperies with inset landscape imagery, paper collage, and ceramic sculpture.

moniquemeloche is thrilled to present icutfromthemiddletogetabetterslice, a solo exhibition of new paintings by David Antonio Cruz. This is Cruz’s second exhibition with the gallery. Icutfromtehmiddletogetabetterslice explores the notion of ‘chosen family’: the nonbiological bonds between queer people, based in mutual support and love. Each painting depicts the likeness of the artist’s own community, and at the same time the portraits strive to capture much more than the physical representation of the figures; they venerate the overall structure of queer relationships, captured through intimate moments of touch, strength, support, and celebration.

moniquemeloche is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by New York born artist David Shrobe. Riding the Wind’s Back, meticulously carved and painted assemblage structures investigate the coexistence of hybrid identities and notions of a collective remembrance reimagined. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and first in Chicago. Mining archival, biographical, art historical, and literary sources, Shrobe’s new assemblage paintings build on the artist’s interest in folklore and creation mythologies, utilizing the allegorical language of flight drawn from diasporic traditions to conjure liberatory modes of mobility into imagined futures. Shrobe’s cosmologies situate heroic ancestors, toppled statue heads, and spiritual entities to mediate between earthly and spiritual realms of existence. Fashioned from found and inherited items, Shrobe intuitively links the various materials used both formally and conceptually in service of unfolding intergenerational narratives. Imbued with images of confederate and historic monuments, alongside the disregarded essences from the artist’s Harlem neighborhood, Shrobe reflects on past Black experiences and creates mystic hope for new ones. The luminous, incandescent color palette is juxtaposed with black and white graphite drawing to further confound the viewer’s sense of time, uniting the worlds of the present, past, and future. Each fragmented figure is depicted in a ghostly outline, exerting an ethereal presence of being which hovers throughout the imagined landscapes they self-govern. Weightless bodies ascend into the deep twilight and the liminal thresholds they occupy; intertwined in moments of embrace and touch, they project their own interior lives in contemplative states of self-discovery. The protector figure is often represented by the recurring female incarnation, evocative of the artists’ relationship to the women in his family, as the bearers of knowledge and heritage. Dangling pull chain and hardware evoke notions of Lady Justice, confronting the viewer with a renewed sense of justice, favoring those who spread their wings and rise. Riding the Wind’s Back, a title borrowed from a poem and a work included in the exhibition, alludes to the idea of journey and agency; giving the figures the ability to be free floating and fluid in a renewed movement. Shrobe forms the identity of his characters by collaging together conceptions of time to create portals into transitory spaces and new understandings of existence.

moniquemeloche is pleased to announce Karen Reimer’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery – Sea Change. For this exhibition, Reimer will present a new body of quilt and textile works, existing at the intersection of the decorative and the linguistic, using data visualizations pulled from the discourses of global climate change. Reimer’s meticulous embroideries confront the enormity of environmental disasters through replicated scientific graphs plotting increasing heat waves and severe droughts, as well as extreme precipitation events, the reality of imminent disaster in its most palatable form. Yet through juxtaposing different visual and cultural languages the information begins to destabilize, creating graphic puns in the form of pattern, an optical illusion existing between fact and form. The handworked objects present as an ongoing physical meditation on the notion of reuse, utilizing found textiles, a tangible manifestation of an ethic of salvage. Each component has been dyed and redyed, reconfigured, and resewn, bringing forth many iterations of its life as material and evoking the potential for plurality of existence. Reimer works to establish something more complex and ambiguous than the traditional and oppositional binaries that ground contemporary culture’s relationship to knowledge and existence, the continuous search for some sort of Zeno’s paradox within the literal climate of the future. . Born from a legacy that prized craftsmanship and the ingenuity of making, Reimer’s work presents a true romance with labor and repetitive action, disrupting linearity in a way that seemingly stops time and catalyzes thought processes through the long-established methods of decorative craft. Nothing is strictly contemplative, each work functions as a living object; while visually resonant, the potential of value through possible functionality is always present. Reimer pushes concept and material, art and labor, prompting the viewer to reflect upon the metrics through which we gauge virtuosity, the conflicting value systems applied to art and to other objects. The resultant work inhabits the gap between intellectual and physical knowledge, and codification of the empirical that now becomes experiential. By combining the tactics and tropes of minimalism and conceptual art with those of domestic decoration, Reimer’s uses form and material as a means to deliver content, creating an optical and tactile rumination on the larger collapse of cultural foundations and our capacity to coexist with the earth’s ecosystems. Karen Reimer (American, b. 1958, lives Chicago) is a conceptual craft artist based in Chicago, IL. She has a BA from Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas and an MFA from the University of Chicago, IL. Reimer is a recipient of the Artadia Individual Artist Grant, the Richard A. Driehaus Individual Artist Award, and the Women's Caucus for the Arts President's Award. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Outside In, LAXART, Los Angeles (2019), Unravelled, Beirut Art Center, Lebanon, (2016), Shoretime Spaceline, Hyde Park Art Center (2016), Material Gestures: Cut, Weave, Sew, Knot, Rhona Hoffman Gallery (2014); ; Wall Text, curated by Zachary Cahill and Monika Szewczyk, Logan Center Exhibitions, University of Chicago (2012); and Endless Set, at Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago, and Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University, New Brunswick (both 2012). Endless,—the first major publication on Karen’s pioneer craft aesthetic—was published by Gallery 400 and WhiteWalls in 2015.

moniquemeloche is pleased to announce the gallery’s debut solo exhibition with Antonius Bui – The Detour is Where We Are. Bui will present a new series of intensively hand-cut paper portraits, a visualization of hybrid identities and histories, told through an intersectional queer AAPI lens. Each portrait presents an intimate reflection on the kinship shared within the queer AAPI community, found through moments of radical mundaneness. Rather than concentrate on notions of assimilation within a oppressive Western rubric, The Detour is Where We Are explores a renewed sense of identification no longer concerned with adapting to constrictive binaries. Their subjects include friends, colleagues, family (both chosen and biological), all captured in moments of love and embrace, unapologetic displays of community that have been previously absent from mainstream stereotypical depictions of Asian dynamics. Their rigorous paper-cutting process is exceptionally meditative; each sheet of paper is carefully and intuitively crafted to embody an archive of memories and oral histories. The reductive process deconstructs the traditional white canvas in order to both metaphorically and physically carve out space for narratives which are so often omitted from whitewashed histories. While the stratified linework evokes a porous and flexible form, weaving through lines throughout the figures themselves as well as the organic environments in which they’re grounded. The use of paper considers both the archival documentation used to reconcile formerly lost AAPI narratives, while also drawing from the importance across Vietnamese culture. Allusions to the spiritual significance of Joss paper, an incense paper used both to imitate value and as a form of blessings, position each work almost as an offering to honor queer communities, Bui’s subjects in particular. In contrast, the importance of archival photographs as essential tools for reconstruction of misrepresented and forgotten refugee histories, likens Bui to one of many intergenerational architects, reclaiming authority over how their story is told. Bui utilizes the transformational properties of their medium to excavate a narrative that no longer places trauma and displacement at the forefront. Rather, each delicately woven work inhabits the body in a way that honors a reinvigorated sense of identification while echoing a fluid notion of interdependence and community. Antonius Bui (b. 1992, Bronx, NY) is a queer, gender-nonbinary, Vietnamese American artist. They are the child of Paul and Van Bui, two Vietnamese refugees who sacrificed everything to provide a future for their four kids and extended family. Born and raised in Bronx, NY, Antonius eventually moved to Houston before pursuing a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MIC/A). Since graduating in 2016, Antonius has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Kala Art Institute, Tulsa Artists Fellowship, Halcyon Arts Lab, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Yaddo, Anderson Center at Tower View, The Growlery, and Fine Arts Work Center. Antonius has exhibited at various institutional, private, public, and underground venues, including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, IA&A at Hillyer, Lawndale Art Center, Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, Artscape, Satellite Art Fair Austin, Blaffer Art Museum, Laband Art Gallery, and Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building.

moniquemeloche gallery is pleased to present How Far Between and Back, an exhibition of new works by Brittney Leeanne Williams. This is Williams’ first solo show with the gallery, following her participation in the summer 2019 group exhibition SHOW ME YOURS. Williams’ figures are shapeshifters, each one represents a multitude of women: the artist, the mother, the daughter. The figures become architectural forms, yet also grounding landscape through which resonances of Williams’ childhood terrain in Southern California are captured in red planes. In response to the classical Eurocentric depiction of the nude female form, Williams presents a series of nude figures in various states of transformation. Rather than a fixed pose – the seductive recline, the pudica, the contrapposto – each figure evokes fluidity, physical yet beset by emotional or psychological entanglements. The landscape and the body adjoin through the surreal; defying the boundaries of ground and figure, gravity and reason. Each scorching figure is grounded in a terrain of grief, the desolate topography presenting a manifestation of psychological and emotional experiences. Space in the work often evokes notions of internal psychological and spiritual distance from the external, physical world. The bridging of these interior and exterior distances is part of Williams’ investigation of the spiritual. Rather than inviting an appraising gaze of the female form, Williams positions her figures as solid architectural structures, a vault through which to reimagine the body. Williams’ work draws on Zadie Smith’s reading of Rembrandt’s Seated Nude: “This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age and experience--These are the marks of living.” (On Beauty)Through her abstracted figure’s ever-changing form, Williams’ female becomes evocatively complex, more difficult to locate, lust after, or fully understand.

she is land... she is soil... she is home... she is nourishment... she is time... she is the wailing... she is the memory... she is the mourning... moniquemeloche gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new large-scale tapestries and hand-cut paper works by Ebony G. Patterson. This is her fifth solo show with the gallery. Emerging from the framework of her immersive post-colonial garden-like installations, Patterson’s recent practice further considers the rich, expansive possibilities of the garden – a space for life and death, a complex entanglement of race, gender, class, and violence. Opulently embellished with a myriad of materials such as glitter, beading, and varied textiles, these new works hold images of figures in graceful sorrow, utilizing gestures of mourning as a lens through which to consider the measurement of women, vehicles weighted with the obligation not just to care for those lives that have been lost, but to demonstrate and lead others in the act of lamentation. The female form constitutes the site for life, nourishment, first love and joy, while also the impulse for grieving. Each form bravely assumes a posture of distress, the onerous emotional and physical labor required to conduct acts of devotion, the soul care that grants permission to confront historic and inherited traumas. These complex gardens offer a space for beauty, burial, transformation, and conservation. There is a ubiquitous and undeniable heaviness in the materiality, the cumbersome burden bestowed on those who mourn echoes throughout the furrows of patterning and adornment. Figures are hauntingly woven into the landscapes, disappearing within the lush flora of each tangled tableau. Their headless torsos, decorated in luxurious and glistening wares, are positioned in various gestures of anguish. Disembodied limbs assume their own forms of silhouetted expression throughout the landscape; while those seldom few that remain animate evoke a suggestion of skin, of a life prior, a reminder of the violence inflicted upon the invisible, eternally reverberating through those figures who are left behind to grieve. Large embellished sculpted vultures gaze keenly from the floor upon the mourning figures on the wall. While rapacious in nature, there is much more to their scavenge; they’re integral forces within the greater stratification, they’re cleaners who tend to the remnants of physical form, an act of collective survival that honors the lost and cultivates the land. Elaborate and beguiling, these works put forth an environment of ominous beauty and pervasive decay. They are spaces in which life and death coexist, where traumas are exposed and healed through the grace of the solemn mourners. The gallery is excited to introduce Layo Bright (b. 1991, Lagos, Nigeria) who will present a series of new glass and ceramic portrait works in the gallery’s viewing room. A multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the migrant experience throughout the African diaspora, Bright’s sculptures present visual compositions that address themes of culture, identity, family, and collective West African histories. Each distinctive work is cast from her own face, dipped in gold pigment and adorned with Ghana-Must-Go bags which she carefully fastens in the style of a headwrap. Together, Patterson and Bright operate in the figurative realm, using novel material interventions as a means to challenge notions of representation, visibility, and perception, arriving at new avenues for reflection regarding the formation and influence of legacy.

moniquemeloche is pleased to present The Answer is the Waves of the Sea, an exhibition of new paintings by Maia Cruz Palileo. This is her second solo show with the gallery. Informed by her family’s Filipino heritage, Palileo investigates the malleable language of painting, offering a panoramic lens through which to investigate the larger questions pertaining to forgotten histories and how best to honor these stories in perpetuity. Divesting from the confines of a linear narrative, Palileo seeks to resurrect and memorialize the legacy of invisible histories, creating a reflective space to consider the potentials achieved when we invest in our ancestral inheritances. Through gestural layers Palileo collapses time and space, visually dissolving the borders between past and present, offering the emblematic ability to stand alongside her elders within one endless picture plane. The complex linework of her lush fauna serves as a compositional mechanism through which the eye can traverse the circular paths of each canvas; there is no start, no stop, just continuous progression of breath and life, unfettered by the confines of temporality. Further investigation into the dense layers of foliage reveals mysterious figures shrouded by overgrowth and shadow. Each disappearing form echoes the selective means through which history is presented, a nod to colonization’s conscious erasure of lineages and records less suited to the more dominant narrative. This disregard for an absolute history has allowed for cerebral weeds to overtake and whitewash the landscape of the past, disappearing the rich truths that also inform our present and future. As a remedy for this disparity, Palileo considers the universal energies that move throughout all living entities; the ontology of a harmonious existence rooted not in domination or extraction, but in a conscious and symbiotic connection to the land we inhabit. In opposition to the ambulatory and destructive nature of imperialism, she presents a reminder of the rich and diverse archive of stories saturated within the land we inhabit; a visual account through which she can interlace the visible and invisible, exploring the many possibilities of past lives both remembered and forgotten. Informed by her family’s Filipino heritage, Palileo investigates the malleable language of painting, offering a panoramic lens through which to investigate the larger questions pertaining to forgotten histories and how best to honor these stories in perpetuity. Divesting from the confines of a linear narrative, Palileo seeks to resurrect and memorialize the legacy of invisible histories, creating a reflective space to consider the potentials achieved when we invest in our ancestral inheritances. Through gestural layers Palileo collapses time and space, visually dissolving the borders between past and present, offering the emblematic ability to stand alongside her elders within one endless picture plain. The complex linework of her lush fauna serves as a compositional mechanism through which the eye can traverse the circular paths of each canvas; there is no start, no stop, just continuous progression of breath and life, unfettered by the confines of temporality. Further investigation into the dense layers of foliage reveals mysterious figures shrouded by overgrowth and shadow. Each disappearing form echoes the selective means through which history is presented, a nod to colonization’s conscious erasure of lineages and records less suited to the more dominant narrative. This disregard for an absolute history has allowed for cerebral weeds to overtake and whitewash the landscape of the past, disappearing the rich truths that also inform our present and future. As a remedy for this disparity, Palileo considers the universal energies that moves throughout all living entities; the ontology of a harmonious existence rooted not in domination or extraction, but in a conscious and symbiotic connection to the land we inhabit. In opposition to the ambulatory and destructive nature of imperialism, she presents a reminder of the rich and diverse archive of stories saturated within the land we inhabit; a visual account through which she can interlace the visible and invisible, exploring the many possibilities of past lives both remembered and forgotten.

moniquemeloche is thrilled to present Ben Murray’s third exhibition with the gallery, If I Needed You. Well, if I needed you Would you come to me Would you come to me And ease my pain? – Townes Van Zandt (1972) Operating between painting’s long history of image-making and the immediate vanishing of images in film, If I Needed You is in direct conversation with works created by pioneers of Avant Garde cinematography, such as Rose Lowder, Hollis Frampton, Joseph Cornell, and Steve McQueen. While inspired by the oeuvres of other artists, this new body of work reflects a deconstructed vantage point of Murray’s life at the time of applying paint to canvas. Drawing its name from the celebrated Townes Van Zandt song, If I Needed You recalls Murray’s complicated relationship with the notion of home, surveying both the solace and suffering that can be experienced when strongly tethered to family histories and responsibilities. Layered marks embedded on both sides of raw unstretched muslin utilize a range of opacities, transparencies, and refractive hues, as if to composite a myriad of enigmatic moments through deposits of paint. Each mark, a record of the artist’s physical movements through his recollected history, while also paralleling durational movements in the films from which each work’s brilliance is inspired. Selected for both their formal considerations as well as their structuralism, each experimental film is played on a continual loop in Murray’s studio, integrating within the artist’s vernacular and embracing the precarious relationship to time and brevity of the present. The ever-changing landscapes of Lowder’s Bouquet’s charges the works with transformational images that exist somewhere between urban and native ecological systems, echoing Murray’s coexistence between the city and the Indiana Duneland. While Cornell’s ‘Rose Hobart’ reflects Murray’s personal narrative related to the bonds and obligations of caring for family. They are active participants, destabilizing each image to create works that acknowledge interminability through the movement of light and form and the transition of imagery. If I Needed You offers a window through which to reexamine and re-experience the different stages of Murray’s life as they relate to the inescapable pull of one’s past and homeland. Depicting fragments of intermittent images and memories stitched together, Murray’s captivating works bring significance to a collection of stages of development sustained all at once in past-present-future-tense.

moniquemeloche is thrilled to present of Royal Specter, an exhibition of new paintings by Kajahl, his first exhibition with the gallery and in Chicago. Emerging within the 17th-19th centuries, Europe’s most prestigious sculptors and painters were commissioned to create depictions in the form of decorative objects known as the Blackamoor. During a time of colonial expansion and exploration, these objects satisfied and appeased the illusions of the elite and their desire to learn about the ‘specter’ residing in unknown territories, –who were these people and what did they look like? Displaying a mixture of factual documentation and pure fantasy, the artists who imaged the Blackamoor took liberties when imagining what they presumed to be these “others” from uncharted lands. In many cases the iconography was derived from written text or engravings from the distant past, the artists themselves often had no contact with the mythical subjects they were attempting to accurately characterize. Royal Specter provides a portal into a realm where the artist’s own Royal Court of Sovereign Entities reside. Kajahl depicts this elite class of courtly nobility through the medium of oil painting. Images of the Blackamoor are used as source material, now reanimated through elegant paintings of warriors, scholars, scientists and oracles, all rendered with painstaking detail and elevated to a grandiose status. Disconnected from their original historical context, these Blackamoor sculptures are reimagined through a hybridized narrative, creating fantasy paintings about a fantasy. Expounding the notion of inaccuracy and fantasy, Kajahl sets the stage for anachronisms and speculative fiction to lie bare, amplifying the indeterminacy of such foreign realms. Large-scale depictions of a scantily clad ‘Huntress’ figure appear astride a snarling crocodile, festooned in gold jewelry and a feathered headdress, and armed with a shield and spear in hand. While an aggrandized figure of an astronomer gazes in solitude through an elaborate astrolabe, surrounded by his celestial globe and tools to help navigate explorations through the constellations. Kajahl manipulates the raw Blackamoor material in order to create a scene that diverges in time and place, effectively creating a hypothetical world for these statues to exist as people. They are reborn as theoretical rulers in a bygone era, with Kajahl positioned as the appointed ‘court painter’ of their mythical domain. This Royal Court of Sovereign Entities creates a complex and complicated historical myriad of reverie; Kajahl states ‘My fantasy is gazing back at their fantasy. I am their fantasy and they are mine… I am the specter of their Imagination.’ Kajahl (b. 1985 in Santa Cruz, California) lives and works in New York. Through painting, he resurrects objects that are lying dormant in historical archives. He endlessly scours and sifts through books, online images and visits museums in order to gather source material. Kajahl takes these finds from his excavations and hybridizes entities that eventually become grandiose figures. Although the characters he constructs belong to a multiplicity of time periods, locations and cultures, they foreground the forgotten past and reanimate minor artifacts of history into what amounts to a transformative assemblage. He received his BFA from San Francisco State University in the Fall of 2008, and spent his final year studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze, Italy. In the spring of 2012 Kajahl received his MFA from Hunter College in New York City. His previous solo exhibitions include, “Kajahl: Obscure Origins,” Tillou Fine Art, Brooklyn, NY (2017); “Unearthed Entities,” at Richard Heller Gallery (2017) and University North Carolina Wilmington Arts Gallery, Wilmington, NC (2012). Kajahl has exhibited his work in numerous group exhibitions at Lower Eastside Print Shop, New York, NY (2020) Coherent Brussels, Brussels, Belgium (2020); Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, ZA (2016); MoCADA, Brooklyn, NY (2013); Contemporary Wing, Washington, DC (2012); and Rush Arts Gallery, New York, NY (2011). In 2013, he was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant. In 2016, Kajahl participated in the Joan Mitchell Center, Artist in Residence in New Orleans, LA, and the New Holland Residences, Studio Program, New York, NY. In addition, Kajahl has traveled extensively throughout Western Europe, Central America and parts of Africa including Morocco, Ethiopia and Kenya in search of inspiration. His travels have been centered on direct work with the photographic archives of the Warburg Institute, Ethnological Museum of Xalapa, Mexico City and Berlin.

moniquemeloche gallery is thrilled to announce tandem solo presentation of new works from artists Chase Hall and February James. Faced with navigating the new challenges introduced by the global pandemic, both Hall and James were offered a new entry point for intimate self-reflection, memorialized in these new bodies of work. With his vigorous portraits, Chase Hall aims to explore the absolute of biracial identity, redefining the duality of a mixed-race experience in terms that are both personal and cultural. A self-taught multi-disciplinary artist, Hall considers the internal dialogue of existing in between fixed identities, Black and white, reclaiming past histories and residual traumas in order to consider how the dynamics of race are foundational to America. Through his new series Half Note, Hall considers the longstanding erasure of Black achievement and the resilient lineage of Black Americans examined through jazz culture. The landscapes are evocative of sultry jazz clubs, a site through which Black identity, community, humanity, and expression flourished despite oppressions imposed upon them. Each painting is deliberate; raw cotton canvas remains exposed, a form of protest against white paint as a necessary ingredient to activate surfaces. Instead, Hall allows robust strokes of color to confront the vacuous nature of historically white spaces, rendering the scenes almost incomplete, conceptually and visually considering the conflict of biraciality. The use of coffee creates vivid hues evocative of black nuance, as tonal washes liberate each figure from the regulated and exclusionary canon of American portraiture. Hall engages history as vehicle to better understand the painful inheritances of the past, while reclaiming his legacy and creating space for increased cultural cognizance and reparation. While varied in their methodologies, each artist’s propensity for exploring the figure enriches the recent dialogues around identity, family history, and the human condition. It is through this deeper understanding of the inheritances of our past and their resonance that we arrive at new insights and avenues of reflection. Chase Hall (b. 1993, St Paul, Minnesota, lives and works in New York and Los Angeles) was raised across Minnesota, Chicago, Las Vegas, Colorado, Dubai, Los Angeles and New York. Hall has been included in exhibitions at Kuntsthalle Basel in Switzerland, Museo Tamayo in Mexico, Various Small Fires in Los Angeles, The Mass in Tokyo, Cob Gallery in London and Museo Nacional de San Carlos in Mexico, among others. Chase has been an artist in residence at The Skowhegan school of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, The Atlantic Center for The Arts under Catherine Opie in Florida, The Mountain School of arts in Los Angeles, the Macedonia Institute in Hudson Valley and The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Hall was recently nominated Forbes 30 under 30. Hall’s artwork has been featured in Vice, Vogue, ID, Dazed, Purple, Art Papers, Garage, The New York Times and T Magazine.

moniquemeloche gallery is thrilled to announce tandem solo presentation of new works from artists Chase Hall and February James. Faced with navigating the new challenges introduced by the global pandemic, both Hall and James were offered a new entry point for intimate self-reflection, memorialized in these new bodies of work. February James is a self-taught artist whose work is rooted deeply in autobiographical narrative, exploring the factors that influence identity formation and the human condition to expose the hidden emotions that exist between what we see and what we experience. Compelled by what she describes as the broken places, James meditates less on the physicality of her figures, instead aiming to capture their true psychological essence. Devoid of formal construct, each smeared, distorted, and seemingly hollow portrait is equipped with a confronting gaze that brings viewers to the nexus between the authentic self and the conflicted self. We Laugh Loud So The Spirits Can Hear represents an intuitive shift through which James developed soft portraits, evocative of family members and familiar figures whose memory offers a sense of sanctuary and comfort. Segmented lines serve as linguistic tools that offer space for a deeper exploration of fragmentation within the human psyche, while a daring color palette of deep maroons conjures the sensation of life, blood pulsing through the veins. Each portrait feels like a memory charged with the oral histories and lessons their subjects passed along, while considering how truth is conditioned by the frameworks through which it is received. More specifically how our family legacies influence our everyday life, vulnerabilities, expectations, and experiences, and how we can achieve a sense of harmony with these inherited pathologies. While varied in their methodologies, each artist’s propensity for exploring the figure enriches the recent dialogues around identity, family history, and the human condition. It is through this deeper understanding of the inheritances of our past and their resonance that we arrive at new insights and avenues of reflection. February James (lives and works in Los Angeles) is an auto didactic artist from Washington, D.C. She works primarily in oil pastels with a penchant for watercolor and graphite powder. Recent exhibitions include Luce Gallery, Turin, Italy (2020); Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA (2019); LatchKey Gallery, New York, NY (2019); Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Band of Vices, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Gregorio Escalante Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017); and Papillion Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2015). Her work has appeared in various television broadcasts and print publications and has been acquired by institutions and private collections across the U.S. and abroad.

moniquemeloche is thrilled to present Estoy Bien, an exhibition of new Air Paintings by Candida Alvarez. This is Alvarez’s first exhibition with Monique Meloche and her first solo gallery exhibition in Chicago. The work of Candida Alvarez is imbued with both personal and formal aspects which evolve through her relationship to color, light, and architectural elements. These unique paintings, on view for the first time in Chicago, originated as proofs intended for an installation as part of the inaugural Chicago Riverwalk Year of Public Art program (2017). The images took on a new resolve after a series of critical events, including the passing of the artist’s father, followed shortly by Hurricane Maria, and her mother’s decision to relocate from Puerto Rico to the United States. Amidst this period of transformation, Alvarez found herself drawn to the comforts of her studio, exploring the shifting panorama of Puerto Rico. Drawing inspiration from a specific phrase widely spoken by the hurricane’s survivors, Estoy Bien (I’m Fine) and the solastalgia of the island as her muse, her proofs took on new life as a series of paintings, serving as a palimpsest of growth and fortitude. Drawing from the narrative of place, Alvarez pulls from materials in her immediate world and her travels to build dreamlike narratives existing somewhere between fact and fiction. Patterns on the floor, memories from childhood, and photographs function as ways of infusing her world into each painting. This new series of work suspends carefully within an aluminum frame, allowing the image to grow beyond conventional restrictions, presenting as a dual-sided painting. Light plays a crucial role; the use of a paper thin pvc mesh as a canvas allows for light to permeate each image, creating the sensation of color and form existing without boundary, as if each painting can live unrestricted, floating within space. When creating each image on view, Alvarez engaged what she calls an active search, exploring the world around her with unremitting curiosity, investing thoughtful attention into that which is often deemed ordinary. This process offers Alvarez a unique way of seeing, incorporating material from her immediate world and everyday experience, arranging it in a way that is organic and surprising. “My work stumbles through what I think of as chatty abstract spaces to reboot both light and space so that they can conjure shape shifting and dream catching. These investigations allow for my paintings and drawings to build abstract narrative structures that mix and remix themselves, interweaving the narrative with the pictorial. My aim is to expand the hybrid space of painting all the while maintaining a crucial connection to daily life.” – Candida Alvarez Coinciding with the opening of Estoy Bien is the release of Alvarez’s much anticipated and comprehensive monograph, “Candida Alvarez: Here. A Visual Reader”, published by Green Lantern Press. The monograph follows her first major institutional exhibition, “Here”, which was on view at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2017, and will celebrate the artist’s creative career, spanning over four decades. Contributors include Terry R. Myers (Curator of “Candida Alvarez: Here”), Dr. Kellie Jones (Columbia University, New York), and Elizabeth Alexander (President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). Additionally, a fully illustrated digital catalogue will be produced on the occasion of Estoy Bien at moniquemeloche, featuring an essay by independent curator Melissa Messina. Candida Alvarez (b. 1955 in Brooklyn, NY) received her MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT 1997. Alvarez was commissioned by the City of Chicago to create four large paintings, installed along lower Wacker Drive on the Riverwalk in downtown Chicago, as part of the inaugural Year of Public Art, an ongoing city-wide public art initiative. Alvarez was also tapped by Rei Kawakubo, founder of international fashion house Comme des Garçons, who transformed six of her paintings into prints featured in their Fall 2017 menswear collection. Alvarez was honored with a solo retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center, Candida Alvarez: Here (2017), curated by Terry R. Myers. The exhibition marked the first major institutional exhibition, reflecting forty years of her painting. Other solo exhibitions include the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL (2012-13); Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2003); New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT (1996); The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (1992); The Queens Museum, Flushing, NY (1991); and Galerie Schneiderei, Cologne, Germany (1990). Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL (2018); the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO (2017); CAM, Houston, TX (2003); The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (1990); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (1985); and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY (1980). Her work is included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and El Museo del Barrio, New York City. Reviews of her work have appeared in various publications, including ArtForum, Art in America, Artnews, and The New York Times. Alvarez is a recipient of the 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation, Painters & Sculptors Grant. She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL where she holds the F.H. Sellers Professorship in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

moniquemeloche is thrilled to present Restrain,a new body of work by multidisciplinary artist Brendan Fernandes. This is Fernandes’ second solo exhibition with the gallery. Drawing from his history as a trained ballet dancer, Fernandes skillfully intersects the movement and mastery of the body with contemporary art practices, while questioning the canon of ethnographic museum collections. Inspired by his recent performance at the Guggenheim in New York City, Ballet Kink(2019), Fernandes continues to explore the role and status of the body within the contemporary art apparatus through Restrain.This unique series of cast bronze sculptures presents as bound rope, characteristic of the patterns found within Shibari bondage, a form of BDSM that skillfully utilizes ropes, knots, braids, and harnesses to bind and adorn the body, creating patterns that contrast and complement the natural form. The sculptures are suspended within custom-built armatures designed to emphasize the position each bind would have had on the absent body, confronting viewers with a truly still evocation of the body’s removal, creating monuments to the absences. The practice of removing the body from forms recalls the artist’s early explorations of the absent bodies of African communities removed from cultural objects by western museological practice, bodies violently halted from carrying out actions of agency and resistance. This new series of sculptures further builds upon this study, inviting viewers to consider ambiguously present or absent bodies of queer, BDSM and kink practitioners––bodies which have historically been absent from visual spaces and continue to face censorship through ongoing practices of “Community Guidelines” and removal from social media. For these bodies, BDSM represents a space for exploration and release. Acting out consensual roles and scenes of instruction is for many a means of escape. It presents an opportunity to stage situations of real-world oppression similar to that which is frequently imposed upon the queer community, in order to renew a sense of agency and control. “In my work, the queer body is a political representation of deviation. Who we love, the ways we behave and where we come from are magnified through our bodies. This is especially true for queers of color, whose presence represents an intersection of race, gender and sexual orientation. For too many, this elicits prejudice and violence: in outbursts as we saw with the 2016 Orlando Shooting, and in the daily pressures of discomfort, suspicion, and unwelcomeness expressed toward us by a dominant culture. Our bodies are the site of these struggles. In my work, I explore the possibility that our bodies can also be the site for resistance and freedom of expression.” – Brendan Fernandes At a pivotal moment where queer bodies are marginalized and BDSM practices are largely demonized, Restrainserves to examine bondage as a metaphor for resistance, pain, pleasure, and freedom, while also examining our society’s penchant for removing the body; its pains and its pleasures; from public discourse and consideration.

moniquemeloche is thrilled to present One Day I’ll Turn the Corner and I’ll Be Ready For It, an exhibition of new paintings by David Antonio Cruz. This is Cruz’s first exhibition with the gallery and his first in Chicago. David Antonio Cruz explores the intersectionality of queerness and race through painting, sculpture, and performance. Focusing on queer, trans, and genderfluid communities of color, Cruz examines the violence perpetrated against their members, conveying his subjects both as specific individuals and as monumental signifiers for large and urgent systemic concerns. Using a vast trove of images mined from the internet, including the personal social media accounts of his subjects, Cruz brings these individuals out of the shadows and into the light. He inserts these individuals’ likenesses into lush, sensuous compositions directly inspired by the aspirational aesthetic of luxury and fashion, creating a dissonance that critically elevates his black and brown subjects while also emphasizing the extreme injustice of their plights. To further enrich these portraits with depths of meaning, Cruz employs a unique and coded visual vocabulary. Baroque background patterns reveal real plant types, whose native regions relate to locales where these victims lived or were found. Certain colors hold certain meanings (green relates to immigration, for example), a formal code that evokes the charged relationship between skin tone and identity. Organic, anthropomorphic forms peer out from behind figures, witnesses that break the fourth wall, inviting us in to these newly-transparent worlds. In this way, Cruz illustrates his subjects’ stories through portraiture, positioning them firmly within an art historical canon from which they have been largely excluded. In doing so, he further saves their narratives from the white noise of media coverage whose disregard bars such truths from entering our collective consciousness. Cruz humanely retrieves his subjects from this imposed invisibility. The new paintings on view present a timely development in Cruz’s examination and memorialization of this all-too-regular brutality: they extend the reach of his political discourse to include issues related to immigration and displacement at the US-Mexico border. His subjects’ stories convey specific ways in which queer and trans folks have suffered in this contested space. Roxana died while incarcerated after ICE denied her medication. Carlos’ deportation has separated him from his husband and son. While these injustices may be unique to this particular conflict, the collateral human suffering they yield is universal. Cruz’s deeply empathetic gaze enlightens the viewer to those overlooked but urgently salient experiences, facilitating a communion of humanity between seer and seen.