GROUP SHOW
FEATURING WORKS BY: MALIK ROBERTS, VERNON O’MEALLY,
MELVIN “GRAVE” GUZMAN, COREY WASH, EALY MAYS & ARDEN SURDAM
ABXY PRESENTS:
GROUP SHOW | FEATURING WORKS BY: MALIK ROBERTS, VERNON O’MEALLY, MELVIN “GRAVE” GUZMAN, COREY WASH, EALY MAYS & ARDEN SURDAM
ON VIEW (BY APPOINTMENT): DECEMBER 14, 2020 - FEBRUARY 15, 2021
LOCATION: ABXY Lower East Side | 9 Clinton Street | New York, NY 10002
SOCIAL MEDIA: @abxyles | abxy.co
FOR ALL PRESS INQUIRIES PLEASE CONTACT MELANIE KIMMELMAN
MALIK ROBERTS
MALIK ROBERTS (b. 1990, Brooklyn, NY) is a Brooklyn based painter and multimedia artist creating works of figurative abstraction, which address contemporary social issues like police brutality, exclusionary politics, and systemic racism. Prismatic fragmentations of form, his deconstructed portraits convey complexities and tensions too-often masked by his subjects’ appearance. His work has been covered by publications including: The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, PAPER, Whitewall Magazine, and Milk. Roberts has collaborated with brands like American Express, Nike, Adidas, and Bombay Sapphire. Celebrity collectors include: Adrien Brody (actor), Paige Reifler (model), and Slick Woods (model).
In the tradition of artists like Kehinde Wiley or Roy Lichtenstein, Roberts manipulates recognizable images and conventions from art history and the media to dismantle the viewer’s perception of reality. The artist begins by breaking down a familiar-feeling icon or landscape into its most basic geometric forms. He then reconstructs the picture, layering charged source imagery and cartoonish extremities onto the geometric x-ray of his subjects. In this unique artistic language, Robert’s articulates haunting similarities between reality and caricature as fluently as he expresses their spiritual dissonance.
Artist ig: @malik.roberts.art
COREY WASH
COREY WASH (b. Baltimore, 1993) works across a diverse range of media as she explores the ideas evolving around environment, culture, and identity today. Her work has been featured in Vogue, Whitewall, Glass, Nylon, Office, Document, i-D, High Snobiety, and Fader.
In the tradition of artists like Red Grooms and David Shrigley, the doodle realm illustrated in Wash’s work serves as a lightly veiled caricature of the world we live in today. But here in the artist’s universe, characters confess thoughts and feelings they’d be more likely to Google or tell their therapist than say to someone’s face. Whether she draws a single figure on a sheet of construction paper or fills an oversize canvas with characters spilling out of comic-style windows – the artist’s unfettered honesty, sharp wit, and thoughtful restraint animate scenes capable of instantly captivating the viewer. In contrast to the veritable media frenzy we experience daily in contemporary life, Corey’s work has the uncanny ability to immediately capture the viewer’s attention and direct our focus inwards.
Through her characters’ confessional nature, the artist appeals to our humanity while revealing and an age of anxiety perhaps unparalleled in human history. In thought and speech bubbles which read like snappy Instagram captions, Willoughby and his pals give us a glimpse into the effects of a rapidly changing world on a generation attempting to move forward into an ever uncertain political, environmental, and technological future. By connecting to our inner lives, Corey’s work succeeds in producing moments of self-consciousness, introspection, and thoughtfulness in the viewer and in so doing – provides the fertile psychological ground required to heal this planet, ourselves, and each other.
Artist ig: @coreywash
MELVIN (GRAVE) GUZMAN
MELVIN (GRAVE) GUZMAN (b. 1989, Harlem, NY) works in photography, performance and monumental mixed-media. While Guzman pursues a range of distinct technical practices, his artwork consistently explores the oscillating relationship between city and self today. The artist often collaborates with fellow cultural revolutionaries like Onyx Collective, Kiki Kudo, Miho Hatori, Kembra Pfahler and the girls of Karen Black. His work has been featured in publications including High Snobiety, Hypebeast, and Whitewall Magazine.
Whether he’s sneakily snapping a photograph, orchestrating an otherworldly theatrical production, or carefully assembling an assortment of luxury advertisements into a sprawling tapestry, Guzman creates images, objects and performances, which explore the relationship between environment and identity in the Digital Age.
Made exclusively from found materials like torn magazine ads, shopping bags, boxes, and posters once discarded by consumer society, his sculptures, costumes, sets and sprawling mixed media works trace the artist’s travels through the world’s urban jungles. Repurposed in his thoughtful constructions, the refuse of contemporary culture invokes our brand lust and sentimentality at once, bringing awareness not only to our material desires, but also - to the inevitably tattered demise of what we consider “valuable” today. Like a fun house mirror, Guzman’s absurdist creations reflect the distorted image of our own false appetites in real time - each a whimsical parody of the irrational fantasies contemporary media culture effects on our ideas of beauty, value, truth and relevance.
Artist ig: @grave_
EALY MAYS
EALY MAYS (b.1959) Hailed as one of the most outstanding African-American artists of his generation, Ealy Mays is a painter’s painter who believes art should be accessible to all. Born in 1959, in Witichita Falls, TX, today, the Paris-based artist creates action packed paintings, which animate history in a visual language all his own. Like painted tapestries, Mays’s meticulously detailed canvasses brim with narrative symbolism, weaving together the various political events, technological developments, and cultural attitudes, which have produced the scene depicted.
He has exhibited in such distinguished institutions as The Guggenheim Museum, (New York), the Louvre (Paris), Hammonds House (Atlanta), Galeria Clava (Mexico), and many more. His work is included in such prestigious collections as The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art, the collection of Larry and Brenda Thompson, as well as those of Reggie Van Lee, and George N’namdi.
Artist ig: @ealy_mays_atelier
VERNON O’MEALLY
VERNON O’MEALLY (b. 1989, Atlanta, Georgia) is a New York based visual artist creating paintings sculptures and installations, which visualize the invisible forces that stimulate our senses and animate our lives. Working across a diverse array of media, the artist interprets intangible powers like music, energy, and emotion into electrifying visual abstractions, often taking shape in orchestral linear compositions and psychedelic fields of color. Using this unique artistic language, O’Meally is able to vividly describe both his sensory experience of the world around us and the profound sense of wonder it produces. His work has been featured in publications including Garage, Milk, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, VICE, High Snobiety, Art Zealous, and L’Officiel.
Artist ig: @vernonomeally
ARDEN SURDAM
Arden Surdam (b. 1988 New York, NY) received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2015 and her BFA from Oberlin College in 2010. Her work has appeared in GARAGE Magazine, CARLA, Tzvetnik, Singing Saw Press, Kubaparis, Paris Photo Parcours, TERREMOTO, and Photograph Magazine among other publications. Recent exhibitions include: NAUSEA, Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, TX (2019); Hold Your Breath, SLOAN Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Not All There, Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA (2018); A Curious Herbal, GARDEN, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Real Shadows for Mere Bodies, College of the Canyons with Stephanie Deumer, Santa Clarita, CA (2017); Exposed with Jo Ann Callis at the California Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Paris Photo (2017), and Solid Liquid at The Situation Room, Los Angeles, CA (2016).
ARTIST STATEMENT:
“My studio practice employs photographic methods to activate food matter. This occurs in multiple forms including social practice events, sculptural installations, and still life photography. My interest in food lies in its ability to be engaged as a social sculpture as well as a medium for sensory experiences. Moreover, I am fascinated by food's capacity to connote class, art history, and tradition. My most recent work for my 2019 exhibitions has been specifically focused on offal –the entrails or internal organs of newly slaughtered animals. I am interested in the historical use of these foods, most determinedly their cultural patterning and consumption by the lower class. The variable value of food by society, –an animal part considered precious in one century and collectively repugnant in another, is a fluctuating system of likes and dislikes that has become a focal point of my current practice.
In my latest works, I have inserted food matter like liver, ray fish, oysters, and pig intestines into traditional still lifes. This gesture, inspired by the canonical images of Soutine, Bacon, and Chardin, is intended to visually signify the tension between delectability and repulsion. In addition to food materials, the still lifes feature photographs taken from the pages of American 1970s international cuisine cookbooks, which present visual directions on how to cook “sophisticated” intercontinental meals. By re-photographing these images, my desire is to challenge the intentionality of ‘food worldliness’, questioning traditional notions of value through ideas of food loathing (elementary and archaic forms of abjection) and food worshipping.”