Story-telling is a connective tissue between all people and a marker of our evolutionary progress as humans. The artists featured in this presentation draw from familiar and imagined realities to weave modern mythologies that elicit déjà vu. Massadas, Fallon and Ramakrishnan are all active agents in the environments they portray. The settings range from domestic to landscape, imagined through a fantastical lens. The scenes invite commentary on contemporary social themes such as climate change, gender inclusivity and the consumption and commodification of cultural artifacts. 

Massadas draws from nostalgic memories of her homeland of Brazil, implying her eternal connection to a now distant land–and reminding us of our responsibility to the natural world. Ramakrishnan connects trans-Atlantic goddess mythologies to personal reflections and self-portraiture. Meanwhile, Fallon creates darkly humorous interior scenes in which gender-ambiguous figures challenge existing traditions of portraiture, and explore how the practice of collecting shapes the fashioning of our personal mythologies.

Each artist posits the cyclical impact of our built and natural environments in contrast to our bodies residing and living within these spaces, a question mythology has explored since the beginning of recorded history. Fallon, Massadas, and Ramakrishnan take this exploration a step further to position their accountability with their environment and role in modern myth-making. 

Chris Fallon’s solo exhibition Irresistible Deception opens at CULT on October 15; work by Ramakrishnan and Massadas will be included in CULT’s 2nd space opening in Oakland November 2021. Visit cultexhibitions.com for more information.

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Bruna Massadas (b. 1985, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) lives and works in Bozeman, Montana. She received a BFA from California State University, Fullerton and a MFA from California College of the Arts. She has exhibited on the West Coast and currently works as an adjunct professor at Montana State University, Bozeman. 

Chris Fallon (b. 1976, Princeton, N.J.) spent his formative years in Texas, Mexico, Massachusetts, New York and San Francisco. He has presented multiple solo exhibitions across the West Coast. His work is represented in the public collections of the Los Angeles Contemporary Archives and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles. 

Sahana Ramakrishnan (b. 1993, Mumbai, India) was raised in Singapore and lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. She completed her BFA in Painting at RISD. She has exhibited across the East Coast including the Rubin Museum, Fridman Gallery, and A.I.R. Gallery. She has completed multiple artist-in residencies and fellowship programs through organizations such as Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. 

Fraenkel Gallery is excited to present SIGNS, a body of work by Lee Friedlander that examines a fascination with texts in the American landscape that began in the early 1960s. For five decades, Friedlander has focused on the signs that inscribe the American landscape, from hand-lettered ads to storefront windows to massive billboards.

Made in New York, San Francisco, and dozens of cities and small towns in between, Friedlander’s photographs record milk prices, cola ads, neon lights, road signs, graffiti, and movie marquees. Depicting these texts with precision and sly humor, Friedlander’s approach to America transcribes a sort of found poetry of commerce and desire.

My first thought upon seeing the work of young portraitist Sung Jik was that he must like soup.

This relates to a comment my Mother once made after watching her two year old grandson, who is usually a very picky eater, earnestly ladle chicken broth into his mouth, and with limited vocabulary, pick up the empty bowl to demand “More, more!”

They say in some cultures that if you like soup, you are a sensitive soul, or one who has a lot of feelings. A valuable attribute for a portrait artist.

Sung Jik Yang (b. South Korea 1989, lives and works in Los Angeles) is interested in creating a prolific visual diary of the time in which he is living through the lens of his subject. His freely brushed colors take precedent over lines and contours, and emotive strokes are intentionally not blended or smooth, as if to capture the beautiful indeterminacy of youth. His figures are often suspended in some kind of act that produces meditative thought (petting a cat, smoking a cigarette, crossing a threshold or doorway) and reveal a solitude or pensive quality in stillness. Sung’s style is loosely reminiscent of post-impressionism, with painterly intuition that visibly privileges movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. His cited influences include Elaine De Kooning, Elizabeth Peyton, and Marlene Dumas; primarily for their palette, tenderness, and elegance. The subject matter is ordinary and everyday, although not mundane. His figures are always looking. Looking at him, looking out, looking away, looking in. There is always more to a person than what meets the eye, witnessed by our own version of nuanced commonplace as the ritual and routine of domestic isolation continues. As the bigger picture shifts beyond our control, we are forced to spend more time confronting our own journey; a voyeur unto ourselves, and at once, left to process an ever evolving frame of consciousness within the anatomy of quotidian gestures from everyday human life.

pt.2 Gallery is proud to present a preview of “Arrangements in Body and Boundary”, a solo exhibition by Molly Bounds opening on October 9th, and “Études”, a new series of works on paper by Chicago based artist Soumya Netrabile.

Ratio 3 is pleased to present a selection of works from Earth Hymns, an exhibition by Bristol-based artist, Martyn Cross (b. 1975), currently on view at Ratio 3 through October 30, 2021.

For his first solo exhibition outside of the United Kingdom, Martyn Cross presents an array of paintings and works on paper produced over the past two years. Painting primarily with oil onto canvas, Cross renders distinctive landscapes, figures, and glyphs in thin layers of dry-brushed pigment. Working across iterations of related compositions, Cross builds an immersive world through various recurring scenes and motifs. Rivers assuming the form of human limbs, skies with multiple moons or suns, human figures in various states of repose, contemplation, or distress—each suggesting an untold tale or unspecified set of fictions and mythologies.

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to share ‘Upcoming | Up & Coming,’ a presentation of works by four artists showing at the gallery in the forthcoming year.

Philadelphia based painter Anne Buckwalter explores female identity, intimacy and gender roles amidst obscure narratives that embrace paradoxes. Inspired by the folk-art traditions of her Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, Buckwalter’s flattened depictions of domestic interiors arrange disparate objects in mysterious rooms and ambiguous spaces. Rebecca Camacho Presents and Friends Indeed Gallery will partner in Summer 2022 to present a two-venue solo exhibition with Buckwalter.

Stephanie Crawford is a 79-year-old transgender visual artist and celebrated jazz vocalist living in Oakland. A fixture in the 1980s Downtown New York performance scene, Crawford later taught jazz vocals in Paris and received the prestigious ‘Django D’Or’ for Best International Jazz Vocalist in 1993. Throughout her years as a performing artist, Crawford remained committed to her solitary painting and drawing practice. She paints from observation, moving freely between representation and abstraction, her deliberate marks pool and bleed color across the surface of the page in an uncontrollable process akin to the improvisations of jazz. Crawford will open a two-person exhibition at the gallery on 5 November 2021, along with Meg Lipke.

Oakland-based artist Chris Duncan’s paintings employ a process akin to a photogram, where a photographic image is made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material and exposing it to UV rays, without the use of emulsion or chemical accelerant. Often in flux between maximal and minimal, Duncan’s work is a balancing act of positive or negative, loud or quiet, solitary or participatory and leads to questions regarding perception, experience and transcendence. Following his solo exhibition at the gallery in November 2020 Duncan will feature in art fair presentations throughout 2022.

Meg Lipke questions conventional notions of painting with her colorful, shaped abstractions. Working directly on canvas or cloth, Lipke cuts, paints, stains and sews her materials to create compositions that project from the wall, or rest upon the floor. Through approach and process, Lipke draws upon the legacies of past craft traditions, memories of her mother and grandmother’s creative practice, and canons of 20th-century modernism to make innovative work that reinvigorates the possibilities of contemporary abstract painting. Born in Portland OR and raised between Burlington VT and Cheshire England, Lipke currently resides in Upstate New York. Along with Stephanie Crawford, she will open a two-person exhibition at the gallery on 5 November 2021.