Raul De Lara

Priscilla Fusco

Clare Koury

Kian McKeown

Shayna Miller

Sarah Tortora

Raul De Lara is a sculptor whose work diligently intersects lines of craft and design, political conscience, and botany native to the borderlands. As a dreamer De Lara has at times expressed  his fears of deportation and the struggle to maintain his immigrant status as an artist in a society that continually devalues his paths. In his work, De Lara merges Tejano flora and the tools of day laboring with the political confinement he regularly faces. His sculptures function as sleeper cells of harsh political critique camped in the brocade of couture craft objects. His attention to construction, materials and methods, bolstered by a tireless work ethic make his works steadfast and beautiful, relating his experience, exuberance and love. 

Priscilla Fusco is a sculptor and ceramicist exploring animism, taxonomy, biology, puzzles and geological time. The timescales of rock and mammal merge, conjuring absurd associations revealing flaws in human thinking about mortality, defense and logic. In Fusco’s darkly humorous sculptures death becomes a prism of possibilities where perspective shifts from chronological to something after history, or inside it. The stains of aging inscribe patterns of play or mutation suggesting that life is teaming in ways we may not understand. The works in this exhibition are both seductive and repellant, stubborn as they both offer and withhold a promise of sustenance and further living. 

Clare Koury is an artist who does not subscribe to material boundaries whatsoever.  Koury’s sculptures relate her compulsive fascinations with the underground worlds of conspiracy, the paranormal, cloudbusting, astrology, nature under stress, xenophobia, colonialism, math and mysticism, and the strange junctures where these energies intersect and emerge. Koury was born and raised in Kentucky, and the raw resourcefulness of the bluegrass state is evident in her heavily researched sculptures, installations, videos and sound works. The Love Bombs selected for this exhibition conflate the militant aesthetics of colonial resistance in the Middle East with apocalyptic prepper culture and the online community of DIY cloudbusting. In these works Koury radiates confounding cross contextual signs that are both perplexing and holistic.

Kian McKeown makes drawings and sculptures that are rooted in the notion of inanimate objects having dreams and fantasies. Mckeown’s works share subjects across mediums projecting a joyfully misanthropic attitude onto objects. These objects function as social actors in unsentimental situations, often awkward or queer, or both. The highly finished, thoroughly touched, and velvety surfaces of McKeown’s objects are ripe with sensual postures and illusionism. The surfaces invite desire, but desire begins to feel misplaced when the viewer arrives at clunky subjects plagued by confusion and despair. McKeown is prodding at our age of appearances insisting that things aren’t as inflatable as they seem and surely not as sexy, that in fact they may be abject. 

Shayna Miller is an artist who makes works that stubbornly assert that the surface of a painting cannot be flat. Miller’s paintings protrude like a primordial ache of the rectangle: ‘Why must I be? How must I be?’ They seem frustrated, longing for meaning, angry at god. Their surfaces are sinewed with thick oily color. The protuberance lurches out like a body clawing for the sky and our attention. Miller’s paintings are deeply existential and embody an impulse to turn the question of a painting onto the viewer, as if to peer back blindly, as objects don’t have eyes. They are paintings haunted by painting. 

Sarah Tortora is a sculptor who makes complex abstract sculptures of mixed materials that often relate the body as an alphabet of display and discovery. Tortora engineers her manifold surfaces by cutting, sanding, hammering, modeling, casting, and carving while employing a multitude of materials such as foam, plywood, steel, cement, ceramic, and resin. Despite a long list of aggregated materials, Tortora’s sculptures delight with architectural facades that present a unified personality, although not without percolation and annotations. The totems selected for this exhibition find their structural origins in taxidermy and the traditional bust but read as vernacular poems spanning multiple visual histories. Tortora approaches the rift that exists between fixed and canonical versus ordinary and entropic material realities, positing that every equestrian monument is a Trojan horse.