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Kareem-Anthony Ferreira: First Foundation presented by Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles

A masterful use of collage so nice, you have to look twice.

KAREEM-ANTHONY FERREIRA
First Foundation
at Nino Mier Gallery September 12–October 3, 2020

Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with Canadian artist Kareem-Anthony Ferreira, opening September 12th, 2020.

Kareem-Anthony Ferreira, a first-generation Canadian, completed his BFA at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario in 2012 and his MFA at the University of Arizona in 2020. Using a combination of painting and collage, Ferreira builds richly textured surfaces upon large-scale unstretched canvases, depicting intimate scenes that negotiate his Canadian and Trinidadian heritage.

psychological transport to the Caribbean, an unspecified fictional location whose primary purpose is to serve its visitors as a space of escape and entertainment.

“In my work, I am tracing patterns of personal, familial, and social identity within the genre of black portraiture. In an effort to shift the overly simplified perceptions that my two disparate familial communities hold toward the other, I offer visual re-creations of both identities, personal family traits, and events. The experiences and narratives that manifest in each work is the result of combining several vernacular photographs into a compositional arrangement. The paintings display an accumulation and assemblage of disassociated objects motivated by my family’s compulsive repurposing of ordinary materials. I similarly repurpose these materials by incorporating them onto the surface of my paintings. Patterns are taken from commercial representations of the Caribbean and are meant to be easily identifiable, cliché, and at times, sarcastic.

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The social imaginaries placed on these non-indigenous patterns and textiles satisfy North American desires for a mental state of ‘island life’ characterized by ‘island dress.’ The commercialized and mass-produced patterns serve as a mechanism for psychological transport to the Caribbean, an unspecified fictional location whose primary purpose is to serve its visitors as a space of escape and entertainment. The Caribbean and specifically Trinidadian identities are flattened and stripped of their historically transcultural and transnational complexities. In my paintings, I explore the island imaginaries through a personification of repetitive flora and fauna patterning, which sits in contrast to the emotional sincerity I convey through the human figures and expressions. My reverence for my hybridized community is conveyed through my portraits of the black body as individuals or groupings, the family unit, or community gathering to participate in the everyday lived experiences.”

- Kareem-Anthony Ferreira, 2020

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Kareem-Anthony Ferreira (b. 1989, Hamilton, Ontario; lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario) has exhibited works at Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York; Alice Yard Gallery, Trinidad and Tobago; the Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona; DeFacto Gallery, Ontario; and the Workers Art & Heritage Museum, Ontario.

Photos courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery

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Bendix Harms: Reversed Evolution—How it feels to be Mamon presented by Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles

A painter's painter, Bendix Harms operates a spartan palette to personify his farm's new leader, Mamon the cat.

BENDIX HARMS
Reversed Evolution – How it feels to be Mamon
at Nino Mier Gallery September 12–October 17, 2020

Who is MAMON?

"big enough to host the whole world inside her black and white body and impressing enough to be thrown back into the evolution: being Mamon."

Mamon is the new leader of our Danish farm Østerfælden - a cow-cat as a: weapon, a performer, a chief of forest, a melancholiac, a powerplant, a defender, a wanderer, a peacemaker, a connoisseur, a beauty, an h-bomb, an ignorant, a tactician, a killer, a yes-sayer, a charmer, a 48-name-cat, a no-sayer, a multi-radar-tracker - a huge conterpart - big enough to host the whole world inside her black and white body and impressing enough to be thrown back into the evolution: being Mamon. A perfect foundation for continuously delivering images to me - the Concrete- Contentist from Germany - because she is able to operate as a determiner and decision-maker – sending precise orders to my brain– as all my chosen and painted subjects do.

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It feels like being a reciever of commands that can only be processed, when the relationship between me and the subject climbs on a steel-like level - achieved through love, hate, overmotivated behavior, unexpected physiognomies, humans who put names to things and animals who put names to things…. then the subject overtakes the command-center - like my wife Mari with her square-built-rascal-face, the blackcap bird with his concrete-grey body and his unscrewed black monk‘s head or Rufus the black cat - the former owner of the farm we bought in Denmark – and now the new owner: MAMON.

For me it felt like a liberation from the traditional expressive brushstroke, because each new painting could start differently: dripped, scratched, thickly spackled -completed in one session or in 100 sessions

All are able to determine, and all are able to be formally reduced for generating a repeatable stamp - in my brain and on the canvas. These stamps let my right arm work like a machine - equipped with any kind of spatulas and scrapers, liquids for dripping and paint tubes for squeezing out words and linear elements.

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The selected subject shouts his precise orders: generate me only in that way, because it‘s adequate for me, its adequate for your paint, for your tools and for art-history - in the end of an artist‘s life only one thing matters: the difference of the work in relation to history.

For me it felt like a liberation from the traditional expressive brushstroke, because each new painting could start differently: dripped, scratched, thickly spackled -completed in one session or in 100 sessions….the narrative motif is the decisionmaker, and my job is to paint them in order to make them speak.

- Bendix Harms

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Heather Day: Ricochet presented by Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles

Ricochet is a guilt-free delight and a must-see.

Courtesy of Diane Rosenstein Gallery:

"Heather Day: Ricochet -- a solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper by the Bay Area-based artist. This is her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Heather Day makes abstract paintings comprised of scraped, smeared, and flooded pools of pigment. The compulsive energy of her work oscillates between rehearsed abandon and careful restraint. Her encompassing murals, large canvases, and intimate drawings study the mechanisms of sensory perception — mining what happens when the body interprets a sound as a texture, or a scent as a color.

The title of the exhibition – Ricochet – refers to the artist’s process of navigating her compositions as one mark leads to the next, without a predestined resolution. The title is also a metaphor for the global chain of reactions in our natural environment, social and cultural space, and intuitive relationships with each other. This body of work is a new chapter in her practice, beginning with the monumental diptych Fever Dream (2020), which serves as the bridge. The pairing of the two canvases recalls the seam of her sketchbook; and anticipates the new stitched paintings in this exhibition, such as Space Between (2020) which she describes as a “mind map.”

Earlier this spring, during the onset of the pandemic, the artist left San Francisco for Joshua Tree and was surrounded by the quiet and solitude of the desert environment. Here amid the desert spring, she was inspired by the wildflower superbloom and new colors seeped into these new paintings.

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The paintings in this exhibition were created during a transformative year. Like many artists who have seen their exhibitions canceled or closed, Day’s first solo museum show was closed early due to the pandemic. She feels so much gratitude and appreciation that the show was seen in person, if only for a few weeks. Since then, she has taken refuge in her studio – in the physical and emotional space that allows quiet and experimentation."

Heather Day: Ricochet will be on view to the public from September 12 – October 24, 2020. The gallery is open by appointment only.

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Photos © Heather Day, Courtesy Diane Rosenstein Gallery