Derek Fordjour & Yahsua Klos

DEREK FORDJOUR: EIGHT PAINTINGS In his most recent body of works, Derek Fordjour explores the medium of oil paint in a series of figurative paintings. Fordjour explores various ways in which ideas of vulnerability as it pertains to the artist himself and the broader human experience manifest through various recent societal shifts and user-generated news stories consumed primarily through social media. The title itself, “Eight Paintings” references an open-source approach to content creation. It aspires to a kind of objective documentation free of content or meaning in which the search of discursive context rests solely with the viewer much in the way that social media empowers us to derive and produce content largely from images. Through the use of such various sources as board and video games, carnival motifs and sporting imagery, Fordjour deplores a rich visual language to investigate the political and socio-economic forces that inform the distribution of rewards and sanctions in contemporaneous culture. “These paintings allow me an opportunity to perform a kind of questioning that is both personal and impersonal. I am able to interrogate individual vulnerabilities I bear in relation to the greater whole of society, which by extension becomes a search for underlying schemes that perpetuate and assign value through a variety of complex social systems. Much like game theory, there appears to be both an inherent logic and the element of seduction”, Fordjour remarked. “Eight Paintings” is a conflation between the diaristic impulse and critical self-inquiry. For Fordjour, the continual endeavor to understand the rules of engagement in life and to deplore individual strategies becomes more about the endeavor itself than the outcome. YAHSUA KLOS: HOW TO HIDE IN THE WIND In our current political and social moment we are witnessing continuous state funded police killings of unarmed Black youth throughout America's segregated cities. While Yashua Klos' native South Side Chicago is host to the highest murder rate in America, it is also home to resilient, powerful, and innovative Black communities. While the exhibition's title employs the tone of instructional language, what the title proposes is a physical impossibility. Klos' work deals with the deconstruction of the Black body in terms both physical and societal. Hiding, posturing, fighting, and mimicking are, therefore, strategies for the preservation of Black life. "We understood that our ability to know when to employ either strategy was key to our survival. This new series explores this dynamic: confronted with a grid-like structure, these head forms negotiate resistance and adaptation." Klos depicts these strategies in the formal building and fracturing of his paper constructions. Faces appear from hiding behind architectural forms, merging with planes, and breaking through them. Moments of abstraction in this work are arrived at through a formal deconstruction of the figure. While woodblock printing was canonically used to depict the lyrical landscapes of ancient Japan via masters Hiroshige and Hokusai, Klos employs the technique as a means to an end.He amasses an archive of hand-pulled color and texture swatches to be used as source material for his paper constructions. Deviating from those canonical predecessors, Klos' prints are cut, arranged, and compiled to translate the human form into a monumental form. Monuments in Klos' context, however, are as fragile as they they are solid - shifting while remaining stoic - heroic while in mourning.

Visit

4336 Degnan Blvd

La, NY