NXTHVN

RECLAMATION

Sean Kelly, New York

June 30 – August 11, 2023

NXTHVN - RECLAMATION - 展覽 - Sean Kelly Gallery

2022-23 Fellows Cohort 04 Photo by John Dennis Courtesy of NXTHVN

Sean Kelly and NXTHVN are proud to present RECLAMATION, a group exhibition featuring works that embody the multiplicities of human experience through painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, installation, and performance. This culminating exhibition presents artists from NXTHVN’s Cohort 04 Fellowship Program; Anindita Dutta, Donald Guevara, Ashanté Kindle, Athena Quispe, Edgar Serrano, and Capt. James Stovall V, it is curated by Curatorial Fellows Cornelia Stokes and Kiara Cristina Ventura. These artists have created forms that contradict the viewer’s expectation of recognizable materials and icons, as a means to challenge the perceptible limits of our social conditioning and humanity. Throughout RECLAMATION, each artist interrogates and reclaims the power of Western consumption as it relates to notions of beauty, art history, religion, spirituality, and sexuality.

ANINDITA DUTTA

"When victims and perpetrators remain silent about heinous crimes, the truth remains obscured and inaccessible. I wonder who holds the truth? Who is the witness to the events that transpired? Who is the knower of all thoughts and feelings, pain and suffering, stigma, and depression?"

Anindita Dutta, Sex, Sexuality, and Society - GRENADA, 2023. Hand-dyed marriage gown, hand-dyed used boots, hand-dyed chair. 82 x 76 x 20 ½ inches. © Anindita Dutta Photo: Chris Gardner Courtesy: NXTHVN and Sean Kelly

Anindita Dutta’s sculptural and performance practice centers around reclaiming silenced voices, untold stories, and concealed horrors. Through her new series, "Sex, Sexuality, and Society: Chapter Two," she retrieves the memories of objects that remain silent witnesses to sexual trauma. Utilizing sensuous materials such as used clothes, boots, shoes, rawhide, horns, silk, and velvet, Dutta gives voice and power to these mutated materials in the pursuit of truth and justice for millions of victims around the world.

ARTIST AUDIO GUIDE

Sean Kelly - Collect Wisely. · NXTHVN - Anindita Dutta - Artist Statement

Sean Kelly - Collect Wisely. · Anindita Dutta Performance Audio Statement

DONALD GUEVARA

"It is in this dance, that the display of contradictory bodies and settings superimposed and cut together become a new whole; the cyborg of cultural mixture in a new virtualized arena where the procession of time can be known but not yet felt."

Donald Guevara, Nuevo Ángel, 2023. Acrylic paint on panel, oil pastel, watercolor, fabric, bracelet from Copan, wings of a straw angel, Sandeply wood. 62 1/3 x 46 x 2 1/2 inches. © Donald Guevara Photo: Chris Gardner Courtesy: NXTHVN and Sean Kelly

Donald Guevara constructs vignettes of AFK (away from keyboard) glitch spaces, where images of cultural and religious icons, bodily forms, team sports, magazine ads, and trading cards are twisted, wrapped, layered, and superimposed into complex and, at times, contradictory composites. Guevara utilizes collage, drawing, and painting as visual methods of interrogation into the glitch to explore how dissonant matters can forge a cyborg amalgamation where culture, race, and gender openly coalesce together.

ARTIST AUDIO GUIDE

Sean Kelly - Collect Wisely. · NXTHVN - Don Guevara - Artist Statement

ASHANTÉ KINDLE

"Abstraction is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

Ashanté Kindle, Total Adoration, 2022. Hair bows, knockers, beads and barrettes, black obsidian, glass stones and acrylic on canvas. 84 x 80 inches. © Ashanté Kindle Photo: Chris Gardner Courtesy: NXTHVN and Sean Kelly

Ashanté Kindle utilizes the textures, curl patterns, and styling of Black hair to envision new realities of personal existence that defy standards of conformity. Through her abstract paintings and video work, she challenges easily digestible ideas of Black femininity. By magnifying the hair strand on canvas, accentuated by stylish adornments, the cellular properties of the hair follicle begin to symbolize the infinite space of the cosmos.

ARTIST AUDIO GUIDE

Sean Kelly - Collect Wisely. · NXTHVN – Ashanté Kindle - Artist Statement

ATHENA QUISPE

“By harvesting and painting with Cochineal, I embrace and honor the authorship of inherited Andean knowledge... I transmute this consciousness to balance fundamental principles and philosophical frameworks around spirituality, tradition, and symbology.” - Athena Quispe

Athena Quispe, Andean Amalgamutation of Prison Art, 2023. Quadriptych. Cochineal, chlorophyll, human fluids, ink, polymer, steel, pulverized citrine,, and powered pigment. 48 x 42 inches. © Athena Quispe Photo: Chris Gardner Courtesy: NXTHVN and Sean Kelly

Athena Quispe re-indigenizes the discourse of painting. Rooting her work in Peruvian pre-Hispanic painting and artistic production, Quispe creates sculptural paintings to honor her ancestral bloodline through blood memory and inherited knowledge. This act intrinsically deconstructs European interdictions of pre-columbian art and traditions.

EDGAR SERRANO

"By layering contrasting imagery, I foreground the alienated “other,” the symbolic monster, and the masks of canonical art history; I construct subjects that contain their own complexities and agency."

Edgar Serrano, Demons Never Die, 2023. Oil on canvas. 72 x 50 inches. © Edgar Serrano Photo: Chris Gardner Courtesy: NXTHVN and Sean Kelly

Edgar Serrano's paintings critically confront the canon of traditional Western art and artistic portraiture by critiquing European art's misappropriation of indigenous artistic and cultural traditions in Africa and Latin America. Serrano's works deceive the eye with loose expressionistic brushstrokes and tightly woven embroidery-like patterns that call attention to the surface of the canvas. Through his methodical style and play with optical appearances, his paintings incite reactions of amusement, trickery, and wonder as they slowly reveal meaning.

ARTIST AUDIO GUIDE

Sean Kelly - Collect Wisely. · NXTHVN - Edgar Serrano - Artist Statement 1

Sean Kelly - Collect Wisely. · NXTHVN - Edgar Serrano - Artist Statement 2

Sean Kelly - Collect Wisely. · NXTHVN - Edgar Serrano - Demons Never Die

CAPT. JAMES STOVALL V

"My work is influenced by the improvisation of jazz and sampling of hip-hop music; the line work; contrast and humor in comics; the vastness of art history, the complex simplicity found in nature, the spiritual connection to who I am, and the peace found in where I am from."

Capt. James Stovall V, Jesus and the bird “1st and the 3rd”, 2022. Paint and charcoal on canvas. 57 ½ x 53 inches. © Capt. James Stovall V Photo: Chris Gardner Courtesy: NXTHVN and Sean Kelly

Capt. James Stovall V creates a relatable image of Christ and other biblical figures to comment on the relevancy of these idols’ appearance to the spiritual experience. By masking the figure, Stovall V intervenes in the correlation between whiteness and divinity, employing images that contradict the traditional physical appearance of these figures. His compositions also challenge convention as the tag-like drawing style and partially rendered figures refute religious iconographic historical paintings.

The works included in RECLAMATION remind viewers to be critical of the things we covet as a means of unearthing the systems that prescribe our longing. These artists show us the potential to liberate desire and image from corrupted ideologies that inform our understanding of art, history, beauty, religion, and sexuality. The new forms they create demonstrate to the viewer the necessity for reclaiming power structures to break through into new realms of human experience beyond simple classifications.