The Armory Show: Zarouhie Abdalian, Troy Lamarr Chew II, Liam Everett, Laeh Glenn, Chris Johanson, Koak, K.R.M. Mooney, Alex Olson, Will Rogan, Kikuo Saito, Didier William

Troy Lamarr Chew II lives and works in Los Angeles. Chew explores the legacy of the African diaspora and how it reverberates through American culture. His work looks methodically at systems of coded communication and how this is translated and mistranslated within the diaspora and throughout the mainstream. His rich visual language draws heavy inspiration from hip hop culture. A highly skilled realist inspired by European painting techniques, Chew utilizes these art historical traditions to underscore their exclusion of Blackness.

 

Part of his Out the Mud series, the artist’s most recent paintings, the roc and the blueprint, reference kpokpoi, or country cloth, from Bo, Sierra Leone. Country cloth is a thick material traditionally made from locally grown cotton that is spun into thread, dyed, and woven into strips on a tripod loom. Historically regarded as a sign of wealth or prestige, Chew brings this material in conversation with, and repositions it within, contemporary rap culture.

Koak lives and works in San Francisco. The artist creates emotionally charged portraits, often of female figures, imbuing her subjects with a sense of agency and inner life to challenge patriarchal views of the feminine. Engaging hierarchies of gender as well as form, Koak interrogates commonly held cultural assumptions defining women as passive objects of desire. Drawing on the visual vocabulary of comics and often translating this into sculptural form, the exquisite technique Koak is known for allows her line-making to appear beautifully effortless, but is in fact the result of a rare type of generous and hand-made master craftsmanship.

Liam Everett lives and works in Sebastopol, CA. Everett has established the studio as a site of both investigation and rehearsal. His practice is mediated by a set of open-ended, continually shifting questions as to the influence of gesture, material, obstruction, and the environment upon his work. Rather than offering definitive answers, however, Everett's paintings further elaborate these questions and act as record of the material encounters that occur within them.

Zarouhie Abdalian lives and works in New Orleans. The artist typically employs modest materials to produce subtle conceptual or formal effects that stage an alteration or a shift of perception within the immediate environment. Rooted in the particularities of site and context, her work often responds to the specific attributes of a given location, architectural setting, or social landscape. Using sound, performance, and sculpture, she draws attention to the overlooked by framing a space and restoring forgotten aspects of its layered history.

 

For message (lower parts) iii, Abdalian presents the anatomy of a firearm, cast in cement and rubbed with graphite, in a way that reads as a kind of code transmitted in relief.

K.R.M. Mooney lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. The artist's work often occupies intermediary positions between abstract, autonomous, and site-specific sculpture. Distilling observable and imperceptible properties by installing works directly on the floor, overhead or in passageways, his work inherits architectural details such as the conditions of light or a site's neighboring morphologies. Each project is a means to consider the affective, embodied and relational aspects of site and space.

Alex Olson lives and works in Los Angeles. Through the use of color, layering, and texture - both in terms of three-dimensional impasto and implications within visual patterning - she controls surface tensions in at once a meticulous and playful manner. Layers appear to peel away to reveal other layers, suggesting several paintings imbedded in one, some of which remain forever concealed. Pulling from both historical abstraction and contemporary design, Olson's paintings consider the juggling act between the eye and the brain to parse out evidence and desires, sources, and analysis, past and present.

 

In Sea Script, two elements coexist simultaneously. The painting's ground is comprised of calligraphic scribble that is made visible through the brushwork on the surface. With this work, Olson was interested in considering the fixity of text, as well as the ways one can present something that contains two truths at the same time.

Will Rogan lives and works in West Brookfield, VT. His multifaceted practice often reflects on the prosaic manifestations of time's passage that he identifies in his local environs. Taking the form of photography, collage, sculpture, or video, Rogan's work possesses a subtlety and quietude that inspires thoughtful consideration of the material effects of time and space. Entangling his work with organic elements and ecological processes, he alludes to the impacts of environmental destruction and the multitude ways in which different registers of time are perceived.