LEAVES, MACHINES, AND COLOR USURPED: Group show featuring work by Nancy Julia Hicks, Eso Malflor, Mathew Zefeldt, Sophia Chai, and Cameron Patricia Downey

 

Leaves, Machines, and Color Usurped, the third exhibition in our New York location, tells a story that is exciting and elusive, a coalescence of ideas and objects from five artists important to the HAIR+NAILS program that defies easy thematic labeling. Each picture and object stands on its own, tells its own story and is also in communication with the overall whole, contrasting with, reinforcing, and creating new context for the disparate parts, allowing unexpected throughlines and insights to emerge. In Leaves, Machines, and Color Usurped the gallery acts as assemblage and incubator of something not yet seen.

The five crisp black and white photos by Cameron Patricia Downey were first shown in her 2023 breakout solo show at HAIR+NAILS MPLS, Lord Split Me Open.
In Cameron’s words:
“(My work) concerns itself with the prevaricating nature of local memory, archive, human refuse and paramountly, those soft and foul things- sprawling, cursory, bogging, and minute, that mean and perhaps always will have meant that we’ve lived. Mysticism, affect, dust and remains take central and material form in Split Me Open’s attendance to and obsession with accumulation and the sweet, parsing cleave that follows.”

The seven black and white Polaroids from Sophia Chai sit alongside Downey’s in counterpoint, a different rhythm of scale and content, though alike in affinity of media. The collection of photos, called Instances, were made from 2006 to 2016 and several have been exhibited at HAIR+NAILS as part of our 2022 group show FUTURE FUTURE.
In Sophia’s words:
“These Polaroids served as visual notes while I constructed corner compositions in my studio, akin to preliminary sketches made before committing to final exposures on color negative film. Through them, I could preview how the lines and shapes I was drawing and painting in my studio corner would translate through the lens of my 4×5 view camera. Unlike the slow, exacting process of drawing in anamorphic perspective, these shots were made quickly and spontaneously, where the remnants of the process – a T-square, pencil, or ruler – were often left visible in the frame. Polaroid Type 55, specifically designed for 4×5 view cameras, ceased production in 2008, replaced by Fuji’s alternative until it too became obsolete in 2016. The transience of the photographic medium, accelerated with the rise of the digital, resonates with me still. At day’s end, I would choose one test shot and tuck it into my notebook. On my subway ride home, I would hold that small frame in my hand, studying the day’s work captured within – a moment held.”

Nancy Julia Hicks contributes two sculptures to the show. Thorough in the destruction of the valley (monster trucks) and Another body lowered to the ever grateful earth were both included in Hicks’ recent solo show at HAIR+NAILS MPLS, titled Sallow. Another body… is a very flaccid and very pale gun form made from silicon whose stock is imprinted with the words “the tall mass, usurped of color”. This partly informs the title of the exhibition.
In Nancy’s words:
“My work visualizes the body as a machine used to extract labor and resources from other bodies and the natural environment.  Pairing materials that rest between resilient and gentle with seemingly precarious forms and structures I implicate the body’s relationship to the social environment. Through materials like human hair and silicone, building materials like chains and motors, and natural materials like dirt, I create visual narratives that represent the entanglement between the body, constructed objects, and land.”

Minneapolis artist Brooks Turner considers Thorough in the destruction of the valley (monster trucks) Hicks’ twinned kinetic sculpture in his short writing:
In (title) two ceramic monster trucks meet atop a pedestal, each hovering in the air affixed to wires which twitch and turn, animated by hidden mechanics. Atop this stage, the trucks become like actors, their jerking, squeaking noises—a by-product of their mechanized movements—become like dialogue in an absurdist play. Each truck loops its performance asynchronously, infinitely generating new conversations from the same repeating phrases of nonsensical screeches, scrapes, and chirps. Despite their appearance as monster trucks, each character behaves more like a trapped mouse, their potential for movement and destruction unfulfilled by their material manifestation. These are absurd figures, like Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting for Godot, capturing the existential purposelessness with which we spend our lives chattering away. Of course we don’t know if these monster trucks are waiting, or what they might be waiting for, or even the specifics of their conversation, but their form recalls so much of the world as we experience it today: reality TV, the endless proliferation of podcasts, even the staged conversations between an artist and curator. Perhaps Shakespeare’s observation in As You Like It might be better updated to “All the world’s a television screen, and all the players merely static.” But before we let this observation lead us somewhere bleak, remember that the scratching, crackling, flickering, fractal pattern of static contains leftover radiation from the Big Bang. Everything can be found in nothingness; and as such nothing is absolute.

Eso Malflor has contributed a color photographic diptych and a sculpture utilizing found and fabricated materials. Both artworks were included in their November 2024 solo show at HAIR+NAILS MPLS, titled The Earth is a Body in Transition.
About the photographs, in Eso’s words:
“KROPP / BODY / CUERPO is a primarily photographic series of site-specific land art. Inspired by Ana Mendieta’s ‘siluetas’ series, I began creating my own silhouettes using the natural materials found in Kjerringøy, where my grandfather was born. I am the fourth generation of Tverbakks on that land (called Tverrbakkan) and have spent time there each year since birth; I am deeply connected to the landscape. The mountains, waters, and trees have all grown and changed alongside me, and have also witnessed my transformation over time. By creating these human-shaped silhouettes, I explore how my human body, and the body in general, is in relationship to the land. This series of photographs makes visible our ephemerality and insists that we humans see ourselves in the landscape. To save our only home and its resources, we must see ourselves as part of the land, and the land as part of us. The silhouettes are roughly the size of my body and are portraits of the landscape. I use seashells, algae, branches, stones, and soil that reside there to arrange the easily recognizable form of the human body. I began this work in 2023 and when I returned in 2024, I traveled back to these sites to photograph the silhouettes in their return to the earth. This series is ongoing.”

Mathew Zefeldt has contributed three new acrylic paintings to the exhibition. The subject of the paintings are “natural” elements, foliage and rocks in repetitive grid-like patterns, from the video game Grand Theft Auto V. One of the compositions, Leaves and Machines, partly informs the exhibition title.
In Mathew’s words:
“I create paintings of simulated worlds. Resembling the world we know, they are virtual mirrors where time and mortality cease to exist. I am a virtual plein-air painter, choosing to set up my easel at the edge of a screen as opposed to that of a sea like J.M.W. Turner or valley like Frederich Edwin Church. Our aesthetic sensibilities are shaped by the worlds we inhabit, and for centuries, artists, particularly painters, have documented their worlds through mark-making. I continue this history in a contemporary context by using traditional strategies of painting to capture virtual scenes I encounter while playing video games, capturing and leveraging a new set of aesthetic principles and possibilities unique to digital media.”