![mysleves Curated by Joshua Friedman September 11 - November 4, 2020](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cdc37be4b0396942d19481/1602107879017-5WSBQLBSGCGW47CXZSUH/myselves_email.jpg)
Kohn Gallery is pleased to present myselves, a group exhibition curated by Joshua Friedman, which features over twenty-five contemporary artists who use medium as a lens to examine the ways in which identity is structured or fabricated. With an eye to the physical, social, and historical properties of their chosen media, these emerging and established artists portray the self in pieces—as fragments that may accumulate and amalgamate but never entirely cohere. Identity can be as fluid as a watercolor in which one color bleeds into another; as fractured as a collage composed of ripped strips of paper; as multilayered as a painting that has been built up lovingly and laboriously over the passage of time. It is through the physicality of medium that the works on view confront the myth of selfhood’s unchanging rigidity and turn instead to its fertile nebulousness—looking beyond mind over matter, toward matters of the mind.
A sweeping presentation of work concerning racial, gendered, sexual, and national identities, myselves will overtake all three of the gallery’s exhibition spaces. The show features pieces spanning a wide array of media: painting, collage, embroidery, drawing, sculpture, photography, and their variegated intersections. Viewers encounter the weavings of Erin M. Riley and Sophia Narrett, whose elaborate tapestries and embroideries examine the construction of the self on social media and the internet; the wax-infused paintings of Heidi Hahn, which grapple with the biographical realities of oft-idealized female bodies; and the slippery avatars of Emily Mae Smith, whose hyper-realistic paintings bring together and repurpose a deep lexicon of art history, framing the vast scale and range of human subjectivity. The exhibition also features the paintings of Salman Toor that consider the tensions between public and private identities of queer brown men; the performative work of rafa esparza, whose adobe panels serve as sites for brown and queer community-building; and the figurative assemblages of Chiffon Thomas, that interpret personal feelings of nostalgia, longing to belong and affirmations of self-identity. This materially diverse grouping provides insight into the many ways that medium and meaning can develop in tandem, as artists reflect upon selfhood’s unstable and ever-changing terrain. myselves brings what’s under the surface to the surface.
Artwork
Virtual Tour
Selected Press
Our identities are endlessly complicated — a strange mix of our own personal insecurities and ambitions, combined with the pressures of a society projecting its insecurities and ambitions onto us. Especially in a year with little distraction, we've been forced to sit with ourselves in months-long isolation, reflecting on who we are, what we've been and ways we can possibly adapt moving forward.
myselves is an opportunity to see and be seen by the artwork of emerging and mid-career artists as they probe into the architecture of identity. Featuring traditional painters, textile artists, mixed media artists, and photographers, Joshua Friedman has curated a broad foundation of unique makers to explore the shape-shifting theme of identity.
As far as anyone can know or prove, homebrewed existentialism is blossoming indoors—a philosophical trend as invisible as the poison in the air that prompted it. Like mold spores in a shower stall, a scentless gas leak, or this lingering unseeable virus, the pandemic has revealed ourselves to ourselves, whether we know it or not. The self likes it indoors. It’s why we have skulls.
myselves, a group show of 27 artists and curated by Joshua Friedman, explores themes of selfhood and isolation during a time of worldwide seclusion. These emerging and established contemporary artists delve into their mediums as a form of expression, and in that, share their experience of what it means to be inspired by our current circumstances of
What does selfhood mean during times of extreme isolation? This is only one of the many thought-provoking questions that Myselves, opening on September 11th at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, might be able to answer. The group exhibition, curated by Joshua Friedman, features over twenty-five established and emerging contemporary artists who use their medium as a means to examine the various ways that our environment shapes our identity.
How does an artist shape and portray their identity? Curator Joshua Friedman explores the question in myselves, a group exhibition at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles until October 31. The group show features work from 25 contemporary artists, including Amoako Boafo, Heidi Hahn, Bruce Conner, Loie Hollowell, Jesse Mockrin, Xiuching Tsay, and Naotaka Hiro.
A group exhibition curated by Joshua Friedman, myselves brings together 27 artists who investigate ideas about the fluidity of identity by deconstructing the conventions of their mediums. Examining the interlaced spheres of race, gender, sexuality, and heritage across painting, collage, sculpture, and mixed media, this anticipated exhibition offers not only a look at new art-making modalities, but at a generation of rising stars whose works, “confront the myth of selfhood’s unchanging rigidity and turn instead to its fertile nebulousness.”