Housewarming

Brock Oakley Ailes, Ryan Bonilla, Josh Byers, Gerald Collins, Lorena Cruz Santiago, Maria De Los Angeles, Victoria Demetriou, Danny Epstein, David Flaugher, Leyla Godfrey, Tim Johnson, Moira Maloney, Glorimar Marrero Sanchez, Dominic Palarchio, Chad Unger

Hosted by Dominic Palarchio August 25 - September 29, 2019

Your presence is requested for the housewarming of Dominic Palarchio. Upon this joyous occasion we gather with beverages and hor d'oeuvres to wish many years of abundance and health. May this new home be a foundation for countless happy memories filled with laughter and love. Here’s to putting his feet up.

Congratulations Dominic!!!

Brock Oakley Ailes   (b. 1985 Lancaster, OH) draws from the visual language of his rural, working-class upbringing. Through sculpture, photography, and video, he aims to create widely accessible art and to initiate a space for tenderness and empathy within a critical discussion about the future of work and class in America. His work is absurdist by nature and inescapably Midwestern.

Ryan Bonilla   (b. 1977 Philippines) offers access to moments of intimacy and autonomy. Previously, he traveled the world as a sponsored snowboarder and skateboarder. Following his other escapades, Bonilla transitioned into fashion design and fine art while still maintaining the photographic practice that has followed him throughout his career. He currently resides in New York City.

Josh Byers   (b. 1980 Akron, OH) replicates and alters low-brow signifiers in his painting and sculptures, challenging the hierarchy of brand representation in art. By depicting the products associated with hard-labor, he makes space for the people too overworked to plead for it.

Gerald Collins   (b. 1995 Detroit, MI) constructs immersive environments that merge group viewership into a relational experience. Often incorporating non-tangible elements of light, sound, and scent, his installations posit a different type of materiality that build the omnipresent structures of experience and consciousness.

Lorena Cruz Santiago   (b. 1993 Santa Rosa, CA) takes cues from Chicanx pop-culture. Through an interdisciplinary practice that includes photography, video, and painting, her work considers a decolonized future through the lens of her family's experience as immigrants.

Maria De Los Angeles   (b. 1988 Michoacán, MX) integrates painting, printmaking, and wearables to portray the psychological impact of migration. She came to the United States undocumented at age 11 and is a DACA recipient. Her compositions of spontaneous drawings with images and actions, which reference the human experience of moving from one space to another, convey a fragmentary idea of displacement at large.

Victoria Demetriou   (b. 1995 Dearborn, MI) produces illustrations and sculptural work that grapple with mental health conditions in contemporary society. She offers inquiry at a human level on pressing issues of gender and health that often intersect.

Danny Epstein   (b. 1992 Chicago, IL) depicts classic seasonal scenery, tye-dyes, and commonplace objects in his paintings that evoke uplifted emotional states. His earnest efforts recall switching between reality and daydreaming.

David Flaugher   (b. 1986 Detroit, MI) uses the forms of drawing, painting, and sculptural assemblage. His work investigates themes of collective celebration, family values, and preservation in an era of economic uncertainty. With a subtle, site-specific process, he sifts through the material and ideological refuse of domestic spaces, considering the shifting values and associations that cast-off materials can hold. Taken together, these efforts comprise a contemplation of the functional, intellectual, and affective valences of everyday things, wherever “the everyday” is tinted by economic hardship.

Leyla Godfrey   (b.1995 Toronto, ON) works in a steadfast photographic and representational style. Spurred by the mystery surrounding her grandmother’s unspoken secrets, she has come to understand her grandmother’s privacy as a strategy for maintaining a form of independence. Over the course of many months, Godfrey orchestrated numerous photographic rendezvous with her grandmother, Disa Adelman. The result of her repeated probing is a large collection of intensely psychological portraits.

Tim Johnson   (b. 1988 Chicago, IL) incorporates bits of found objects, building materials, fabrics, and destructive mark-making, such as the application of heat or pressure, into his sculptures. These material combinations and actions function as portraits or stand-ins for experiences that are both affective and ubiquitous.

Moira Maloney   (b. 1991 Lansing, MI) uses sculpture, video, and performance to question how the economy, politics, and technology have altered the effects of power on culture, social relations, and individual identities. Drawing from digital platforms to unveil how innovations that are ostensibly designed to produce a better future actually reproduce and remix existing forms, as well as produce new forms of inequality and exclusion.

Glorimar Marrero Sanchez  (b. 1978 Barranquitas, PR) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist who examines the collective psyche as a result of colonialism in the Carribean. Her film projects include fiction, documentaries, and video art that conveys narratives driven by female characters set in Puerto Rico or Cuba.

Dominic Palarchio   (b. 1995 Howell, MI) provokes affect and expands topical discourse on working-class livelihood. Through a firsthand perspective, he focuses on instances of ingenuity that prolong the inevitable fall in social strata.

Chad Unger  (b. 1993 Framingham, MA) makes use of photography and video as a means of broad communication while drawing from his experience as a deaf person. Because of this, he is presented with a considerable barrier to certain types of social exchanges. His work examines public and private spaces that are devoid of humans and full of silence. For Unger, value is placed in slowing down and nurturing a specific moment in time.