eye candy
ESTHER RUIZ
DINA NUR SATTI
EMMA CHILDS
ANNA ORTIZ
ALEXIS NUNNELLY
TAMARA SOLEM AL-ISSA
DANIEL FREAKER
FEBRUARY 16 - MARCH 29, 2024
508 W 28th St
New York, NY 10001
INSTALLATION VIEWS
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
VIEW AVAILABLE WORKS
Anna Ortiz, Chicxulub, 2022 (detail).
eye candy highlights the dynamic interplay of color through the artist’s works, each offering a unique and captivating exploration of the visual spectrum. From canvases bursting to life to sculptures embedded with vibrant hues, the exhibition invites visitors to experience emotions and perceptions through color and storytelling traditions.
The paintings by Ortiz and sculptures by Ruiz both reference places that hold importance in their practice. Ortiz learned painting from her grandfather in Guadalajara, Mexico, and her surrealist landscapes speak to her experience as a second-generation American. The works are influenced by Aztec and Mayan mythology while reflecting on her personal life—a mix of memory and imagination, invented spaces and actual places. Ruiz’s sculptures, made from found objects and sourced materials, are relics of imagined spaces. She draws on emotions, memories and impressions to decide on materials, often creating abstract works that allude to domestic objects and discoveries from cerebral landscapes.
Nur Satti and Al-Issa work with ceramics, crafting beautiful vessels that draw inspiration from their respective cultures and lived experiences. Nur Satti, originally from Sudan and Somalia and raised in Kenya and France, studied African art and Pre-colonial African societies, gaining interest in ritual objects and spatial design. The ceramic sculptures she makes facilitate her exploration of personal purpose and growth, as well as her connection to collective traditions and cultural storytelling that she observed in her travels to Africa to study those upholding this ritual-based craft. Al-Issa’s ceramic works pull from memories of the architecture and practices within SWANA and Southeast Asia, conveying the preservation of time. Utilizing familiar shapes, colors and textures from these regions allows Al-Issa to bridge the metaphysical gap between the physical self and the essence of Home, existing in multiple places at once and finding peace in the yearning.
In both clay and canvas, the artworks have an outward physicality coupled with a deep exploration of the self. Nunelly and Freaker paint abstract depictions of people and places, evoking personal responses from the viewer. The juxtaposition of vibrance and darkness, accident and intention, and order and chaos can be examined in Freaker’s work, complicating feelings of longing with warmth. In the same way, Childs' abstract paintings are characterized by a push-and-pull quality, with colors and shapes jumping from the canvas, both energizing and contemplative. The works are simultaneously self-contained and outward-looking.
From the cosmic to the earthly, from the abstract to the structured, each artist brings a distinctive voice to this exhibition, creating a tapestry of colors and textures that captivate the senses and bring brightness to these winter months. As visitors wander through the gallery, the hues will surround them, provoke emotions, and open their eyes to the boundless beauty of color in painting and sculpture. eye candy is a celebration of the limitless possibilities that color offers to the art world.
Installation Views
About The Artists
ESTHER RUIZ
Esther Ruiz (b. Houston) received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art from Rhodes College in 2011. She has shown nationally and internationally at various galleries with solo exhibitions at CHART Gallery in New York, The Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon, Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, yours mine & ours in New York, New York, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Platform Baltimore.
She has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions at galleries including Tripoli Gallery, CHART, Monaco, Sobering Galerie, Deslave, LVL3, New Release Gallery, Carvalho Park, Torrance Art Museum among others. She has been featured in The Washington Post, Art News Magazine, Art F City and VICE. She has also been a visiting lecturer at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, New York, School of Visual Arts, New York, New York, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Santa Barbra City College among others. Ruiz currently lives and works in Brooklyn and has an upcoming solo show at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut this spring.
DINA NUR SATTI
Dina Nur Satti is a Brooklyn-based ceramic artist and designer originally from Sudan and Somalia. She was raised in France and Kenya and has called NYC home for 18 years. She holds a bachelor’s degree in International & Intercultural Studies with a focus on the cultures of Africa and the Middle East. Her pursuit of ceramics was born out of her studies in African art and pre-colonial African societies, and an interest in learning how ritual objects and spatial design elevate experiences.
She often travels throughout Africa from Morocco to Ethiopia to meet with communities upholding ancient methods of craft, and to research the use of objects in ceremonial traditions. Dina connected to clay as a medium not only because of a passion for design and ceramics. Ceramics is a vessel, a container through which she explores ideas of personal purpose and growth, as well as our collective transitions, cultural storytelling, and communal rituals.
EMMA CHILDS
Born in 1996, American painter Emma Childs graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA in General Fine Arts. In this current body of work, Childs, a Baltimore native, has been developing a language of painting that allows her to explore the way we exist in the world we build around us. Childs’ work explores moments of chaos and mundanity, freedom and containment, isolation and contact. She is interested in the ability of a work to evoke an energetically emotional response from the viewer as well as creating objects that physically interact with their environment, to walk a line between creating something self-contained as well as reaching outward.
Childs has been featured in British Vogue, UK House and Garden, Create! Magazine, Artmaze Magazine London, and New American Paintings Issue 154. Childs’ work is held in collections across the United States as well as around the world, including the UK, France, Canada, and the Netherlands.
ANNA ORTIZ
Anna Ortiz is a Mexican-American painter living in Brooklyn. Growing up in Worcester Massachusetts, Ortiz spent much of her childhood visiting her family in Guadalajara Mexico. There she studied art with her grandfather Alfonso who was a professional portrait painter as well as with her aunt Lolita, a professional sculptor. Ortiz’s surrealist landscapes reference the cultural divide she and so many second generation Americans feel. Their narrative nature references ancient Aztec and Mayan mythology while reflecting back on current and personal events. Out of the ruins of their previous existence, these new creatures inhabit a borderland between memory and imagination. Dualities define them; they give them shape. Weaving together invented spaces with references to actual places, the paintings take both a familiar tone and a sense of the uncanny.
Ortiz has had solo exhibitions at Dinner Gallery and Proto Gomez in New York. She has shown with Monya Rowe Gallery, Huxley-Parlour in London and My Pet Ram. Her work has been featured in Art Forum, Make Magazine, Art Maaze. She has also been interviewed on the Sound and Vision Podcast and currently has a solo show at Deanna Evans Gallery.
ALEXIS NUNNELLY
Alexis Nunnelly is a visual artist from Indianapolis, IN, currently based in Ridgewood, Queens, NYC. Through a blend of vivid colors, intricate symbolism, and ethereal strokes, Alexis invites viewers to embark on an introspective journey, connecting with their innermost emotions and aspirations. Her paintings serve as a powerful conduit for her spiritual insights and personal growth. Her canvases breathe them. With a soul-driven passion for self-expression and intuitive exploration, Alexis seeks to inspire others to embrace their innate artistic potential and reclaim their intuitive sovereignty.
Alexis received a BFA in painting from Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, IN and an MFA in painting from The New York Studio School in Manhattan.
TAMARA SOLEM AL-ISSA
Tamara “Solem” Al-Issa is a Syrian/Filipina Toronto-based sculptural artist with a focus on conveying preservation of time. She believes we have the ability to revisit timelines - to return to a place that may feel lost, or one that has never existed - through finding peace in yearning. To find peace in yearning is to bridge the metaphysical gap between the physical self and the essence of Home, and therefore, exist in multiple places at once.
Solem’s work pulls from memories of the architecture and practices within Southwest Asia and North Africa and Southeast Asia through exploring familiar shapes, colors, and textures from these regions in which she found comfort. To Salem, clay is a multidimensional mirror. It is affectionate, communicative, intuitive, and confrontational.
DANIEL FREAKER
Daniel Freaker received his MFA from the Slade School of Art in London in 2000, where he explored the painterly qualities of print, video, film and photography and his paintings are reminiscent of film scenes and fragments of a broader narrative. Since studying, his work has evolved through lecturing in the U.K. and internationally.
Freaker’s paintings sit between abstract and figurative spaces where the way paint is applied is equally as important as the image itself. Some details are defined where others are more suggestive and evocative. These provide a rich tapestry of interwoven processes and a textural quality to the work. There are also more unusual processes generating a sense of nostalgia about moments that are both beautiful and painful. The subjects are often individuals, couples or groups of people in order to provoke thoughts of relationships or isolation. The scenes remind us of personal experiences, where the techniques and colours bring feelings of sentiment and longing with a contemporary twist of warmth and radiance. Distortions also exaggerate the emotional significance of the moment: connection, loss, vulnerability, or loneliness... This juxtaposition between vibrance and darkness, accident and intention, order and chaos, is what makes the work memorable.