Chinatown, New York
Group Exhibition
Leaves, Machines, and Color Usurped
Hair + NailsSophia Chai Cameron Patricia Downey Nancy Julia Hicks Eso Malflor Mathew Zefeldt Hair + Nails is pleased to present Leaves, Machines, and Color Usurped, a group show of sculpture, photography and painting. Leaves, Machines, and Color Usurped, the third exhibition in Hair + Nails’ New York location, tells a story that is exciting and elusive, a coalescence of ideas and objects from five artists important to the gallery’s program that defies easy thematic labeling. Each picture and object stands on its own, tells its own story and is also in communication with the overall whole, contrasting with, reinforcing, and creating new context for the disparate parts, allowing unexpected throughlines and insights to emerge. In Leaves, Machines, and Color Usurped the gallery acts as assemblage and incubator of something not yet seen. The five crisp black and white photographs by Cameron Patricia Downey were first shown in Lord Split Me Open, the artist’s 2023 breakout solo show at Hair + Nails MPLS. In Cameron’s words: "(My work) concerns itself with the prevaricating nature of local memory, archive, human refuse and paramountly, those soft and foul things — sprawling, cursory, bogging, and minute, that mean and perhaps always will have meant that we’ve lived. Mysticism, affect, dust and remains take central and material form in Split Me Open’s attendance to and obsession with accumulation and the sweet, parsing cleave that follows.” The seven black and white Polaroids from Sophia Chai sit alongside Downey’s in counterpoint, a different rhythm of scale and content, though alike in affinity of media. The collection of photos, called Instances, were made from 2006 to 2016 and several have been exhibited at Hair + Nails MPLS as part of the 2022 group show Future Future. In Sophia’s words: “These Polaroids served as visual notes while I constructed corner compositions in my studio, akin to preliminary sketches made before committing to final exposures on color negative film. Through them, I could preview how the lines and shapes I was drawing and painting in my studio corner would translate through the lens of my 4x5 view camera. Unlike the slow, exacting process of drawing in anamorphic perspective, these shots were made quickly and spontaneously, where the remnants of the process - a T-square, pencil, or ruler - were often left visible in the frame. Polaroid Type 55, specifically designed for 4x5 view cameras, ceased production in 2008, replaced by Fuji’s alternative until it too became obsolete in 2016. The transience of the photographic medium, accelerated with the rise of the digital, resonates with me still. At day’s end, I would choose one test shot and tuck it into my notebook. On my subway ride home, I would hold that small frame in my hand, studying the day’s work captured within - a moment held.” Nancy Julia Hicks contributes two sculptures to the show. Thorough in the destruction of the valley (monster trucks) and Another body lowered to the ever grateful earth were both included in Sallow — Hicks’ recent solo show at Hair + Nails MPLS. Another body... is a very flaccid and very pale gun form made from silicon whose stock is imprinted with the words “Color usurped by the shadow of the tall mass”. This partly informs the title of the exhibition. In Nancy’s words: “My work visualizes the body as a machine used to extract labor and resources from other bodies and the natural environment. Pairing materials that rest between resilient and gentle with seemingly precarious forms and structures, I implicate the body’s relationship to the social environment. Through materials like human hair and silicone, building materials like chains and motors, and natural materials like dirt, I create visual narratives that represent the entanglement between the body, constructed objects, and land.” Eso Malflor Has contributed a color photographic diptych and a sculpture utilizing found and fabricated materials. Both artworks were included in The Earth is a Body in Transition, their November 2024 solo show at Hair + Nails MPLS. About the photographs, in Eso’s words: “Kropp / Body / Cuerpo is a primarily photographic series of site-specific land art. Inspired by Ana Mendieta’s ‘siluetas’ series, I began creating my own silhouettes using the natural materials found in Kjerringøy, where my grandfather was born. I am the fourth generation of Tverbakks on that land (called Tverrbakkan) and have spent time there each year since birth; I am deeply connected to the landscape. The mountains, waters, and trees have all grown and changed alongside me, and have also witnessed my transformation over time. By creating these human- shaped silhouettes, I explore how my human body, and the body in general, is in relationship to the land. This series of photographs makes visible our ephemerality and insists that we humans see ourselves in the landscape. To save our only home and its resources, we must see ourselves as part of the land, and the land as part of us. The silhouettes are roughly the size of my body and are portraits of the landscape. I use seashells, algae, branches, stones, and soil that reside there to arrange the easily recognizable form of the human body. I began this work in 2023 and when I returned in 2024, I traveled back to these sites to photograph the silhouettes in their return to the earth.” Mathew Zefeldt has contributed three new acrylic paintings to the exhibition. The subject of the paintings are “natural” elements, foliage and rocks in repetitive grid-like patterns, from the video game Grand Theft Auto V. One of the compositions, Leaves and Machines, partly informs the exhibition title. In Mathew’s words: “I create paintings of simulated worlds. Resembling the world we know, they are virtual mirrors where time and mortality cease to exist. I am a virtual plein-air painter, choosing to set up my easel at the edge of a screen as opposed to that of a sea like J.M.W. Turner or valley like Frederich Edwin Church. Our aesthetic sensibilities are shaped by the worlds we inhabit, and for centuries, artists, particularly painters, have documented their worlds through mark-making. I continue this history in a contemporary context by using traditional strategies of painting to capture virtual scenes I encounter while playing video games, capturing and leveraging a new set of aesthetic principles and possibilities unique to digital media.” Cameron Patricia Downey (b. 1998) is an anti-disciplinary artist born and raised in North Minneapolis, Minnesota whose work oscillates between photography, film, body, sculpture, curation and otherwise. Seeing instruction in the incidental, the precarious and the misremembered, their work strives to archive, unfurl, make-altar-of and bring fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation. Downey’s art has been exhibited by Hair + Nails, Minneapolis; Aronson Gallery, New York; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; Engage Projects, Chicago; as part of Midway Contemporary Art’s Off-Site program; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Strada Gallery, New York. Their solo show Super Deluxe is currently on view at Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis. They were the 2023 recipient of the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation's MN Art Prize and are a recent artist in residence with the Walker Art Center's Moving Image department, Juxtaposition Arts, Loghaven Artist Residency and Second Shift Studio Space of Saint Paul. Downey graduated from Columbia University in 2021 with a double concentration in visual art and environmental science and is currently a first-year MFA candidate in sculpture at the Yale School of Art. Eso Malflor (b. 1994, Houston TX) is a conceptual artist working across drawing, painting, sculpture, video, photography, installation, and performance. They are based in Mníssota (Minnesota) on the homelands of the Dakota people. Their work has been shown at Franconia Sculpture Park, Rochester Art Center, Hair + Nails Gallery, Clamp Light Gallery, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum, among others. Residencies include oak spring garden foundation (2024), The Medium Arts (2022), Blue Mountain Center (2018), and the Vermont Studio Center (2017). They are represented by Hair + Nails Gallery. Eso Malflor has previously exhibited with Hair + Nails (under the name Kieran Myles-Andrés Tverbakk) as part of group shows Freshly For You (NYC, 2024), Painting Show (2022), The Human Scale (Rochester Art Center, Rochester MN, 2021), Right Now (2020), and their solo shows But The Skin Of The Earth Is Seamless (2021) and The Earth is a Body in Transition (2024). Mathew Zefeldt (b. 1987, California) is Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Minnesota. He received his MFA in studio art from UC Davis in 2011 and received his BA in Art at UC Santa Cruz in 2009. He has had solo exhibitions at The Hole, NY; Celaya Brothers, Mexico City; Hair + Nails, Minneapolis; Big Pictures, Los Angeles; 5-50 Gallery, Long Island City; The Soap Factory, Minneapolis; Circuit 12, Dallas; Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis; Hap Gallery, Portland; and Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica. He has exhibited in group exhibitions at Lisa Cooley, NY; The Hole, Los Angeles; Better Go South, Berlin; Night Club, Minneapolis; MOHS Exhibit, Copenhagen; Galerie Fran Reus, Palma de Mallorca; Dreamsong, Minneapolis; Joshua Liner Gallery, NY; Left Field, San Luis Obispo; The Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul; Akron Art Museum, Ohio; Currier Art Museum, New Hampshire, and The Oklahoma Contemporary, Oklahoma City. In 2022, Zefeldt was an international resident at the Cob x Plop Residency in London, UK, and in 2023 was an artists in residence at the Moosey Residency in Norwich, UK. Mathew has a forthcoming book titled Mathew Zefeldt: Painting Constructed Virtual Worlds. Nancy Julia Hicks (they/them) is a non-binary installation and performance artist and educator from Houston, TX and based in Minneapolis, MN. Through visualizing the body as object, they illustrate and negotiate infliction of pain on the environment, space, and other bodies. They’ve exhibited work at Hair and Nails, the SOIL gallery (Seattle), the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Dreamsong, Nightclub at Night, Waiting Room, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the Concourse Gallery, the Soap factory, the Highpoint Center for printmaking, the Soo visual arts Center, and other locations. Sophia Chai (b. 1973, Busan, South Korea) is a Rochester, MN based artist. With her most recent body of studio-made photographs, Chai references the phonetic alphabet of Korean, her mother tongue, and enacts three key ideas of language, optics, and photography. She received her BA in chemistry from the University of Chicago and earned her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Chai has presented her work widely at sites including Luhring Augustine Gallery, the A.I.R. Gallery, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Knockdown Center, Marinaro Gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Hyde Park Art Center, among others. Solo exhibitions include 106 Green Gallery in Brooklyn, NY (2016), Rochester Art Center in Minnesota (2020), Hair+Nails Gallery in Minneapolis (2020, 2023) and Light Work in Syracuse, NY (2024). Chai has received financial support from the Jerome Foundation (2019-2020), Minnesota State Arts Board (2020, 2022, and 2023), and Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council (2019). Her first permanent public outdoor art project, commissioned by the City of Rochester and Destination Medical Center is scheduled to be completed in summer 2024. Chai is a recipient of a 2024 McKnight Fellowship for Visual Artists, funded by The McKnight Foundation and administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.