NYAB Event - Jonny Fenix "The Show Up"

Jonny Fenix "The Show Up"

Leo Kesting

This event has ended.

Jonny Fenix, Los Angeles renegade currently hiding out in Portland, Oregon, brings fresh canvas this May to Leo Kesting Gallery for his first solo exhibition at our new Manhattan space. His latest collection entitled, The Show Up, solidifies Fenix’s satirical approach to digesting the contradictions of mass media and the reality they gloss over.

Catholic imagery engages this new collection in a mass of visual dialog. Fenix’s recent painting, “A Note to All Indigenous Peoples Everywhere”, can be viewed as a “reaction to the sanitation and colonization of native people everywhere, being ‘saved’ by the church is a synonym for native cultures introduction to disease, slavery and reform,” explains Fenix.

This composition could also be viewed to contradict the laissez-faire attitude plagued in the “Jesus is my Homeboy” t-shirt mentality breeding in youth culture. ”Jesus is a person whom all people of the world can relate to one way or another,” illustrates gallery director John Leo. “Fenix uses this common bond to communicate Jesus’ message to us, in a way not unlike the Pope.”

The “new uneasy works” of Jonny Fenix are a vessel to create discomfort. While politicians are using religion to obtain power in this already overly non-secular world, Fenix plays on this by contradicting all that is socially acceptable.

Jonny Fenix’s politically charged raw materials such as motor oil and blood, construct screen prints and collages that invite cultural critique with cheeky humor and charm. This new collection, The Show Up, gives the viewer ample reason to view the positive sides of our modern life.