“Summertime…” Exhibition
Jenkins Johnson Projects
This event has ended.
Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York presents Summertime…, a group exhibition featuring works by Tim Etchells, Shawn Huckins, Vadis Turner, and Christine Wong Yap. The exhibition features works of varying media and content, though all embody the dedication to contemporary art and mastering their media that Jenkins Johnson Gallery strives to propagate.
Shawn Huckins’ whimsical paintings blend historical scenes with 21st century lexicon, including Facebook status updates, tweets, and texting acronyms, as an attempt to analyze the evolution of person to person communication. His paintings are a hysterical combination of serious, historical matter coupled with bawdy, casual text often indistinguishable at first glance, but as Huckins writes, “Does how we communicate govern the value of what we communicate?” – these works delve into answering that question. Huckins has shown widely across the United States, including a recent exhibition at The Housatonic Museum in Bridgeport, CT. His work has been reviewed in The Hartford Courant, and an upcoming issue of Art & Science Journal will feature an interview and a number of his pieces.
Vadis Turner has created a visual language from textiles and mixed media that reimagines gender roles, rites of passage, and the classification of heirlooms in a contemporary cultural context. Her work, laden with ribbons, yarn, fabric, and other media woven together and affixed to canvas marries Turner’s mixed media palette with her painting background; she “paints” with layers of ribbon, dyed clothing, and hand-sewn textiles, which become the marks, drips, and washes of her canvas. Turner’s work has been shown at: the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Brooklyn Museum; and the National Gallery, Prague, among others.
Exploring ideas of optimism and pessimism, Christine Wong Yap’s installations pair the ideas of mundane materials with the irrational expectations, emotions, and experiences that they inspire, like enlightenment, skepticism, artifice, taste, exuberance, or pleasure. She uses straightforward techniques, references to visual culture, and common materials to create experimental and idiosyncratic works featuring major touchstones like language, light and dark, and psychology. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as in New York, Los Angeles, Manila, Osaka, and London, among others. She has received the Jerome Foundation’s Travel and Study Grant, the Center for Cultural Innovation’s Investing in Artists grant, and a Murphy Fellowship in the Fine Arts. She is currently completing a residency in printmaking with Studioworks and the Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Maine.
Based in performance and fiction, Tim Etchells’ work involves the deconstruction of language and the implications of events unfolding in time through installation, improvised text performances, interactive audio-experiments, new media, SMS performances, and fiction, as well as publicly sited text works, neons, and LED signage. The text-based neons included in Summertime… have a performative aspect, demanding interplay and reaction from the viewer. Etchells was recently the Legacy: Thinker in Residence at Tate Research and LADA in London, and one of his large-scale text works was commissioned for the Mayor’s Thames Festival and was subsequently shown throughout Europe during 2011 and 2012. His work has been exhibited at: Tate Liverpool; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam; ArtFutures, Bloomberg SPACE, London; and The Centre for Book Arts, Canada, among others.
Also featured will be new works by Julia Fullerton-Batten, including pieces from her A Testament to Love series as well as the still-developing Tokyo series, which looks at the contemporary woman in Japan and how her role has transitioned from in the home to on the street. We are pleased to debut these new works in the United States. Fullerton-Batten’s work has received much critical acclaim and has been featured in The New Yorker, Financial Times, Vogue Korea, and Le Monde, among others. Her work was the covering image for Thames and Hudson’s 2009 book A Guide to Collecting Contemporary Photography. She has been show at esteemed international institutions like the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; and a solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
[Image: Shawn Huckins “Major James S. Rollins: HAHAHA AHAHAH HAHAHA” (2013) acrylic on canvas, 32 x 24 in.]
Media
Schedule
from June 27, 2013 to August 30, 2013
Artist(s)
Tim Etchells, Shawn Huckins, Vadis Turner, Christine Wong Yap