ANTI-REALITY
Curator: Yuntong (Momo) Wu
Artists: Lindy Giusta, Wade Stanley, Mayra Villegas
This exhibition features three artists who share similar representations with bold colors, expressive brushstrokes, and surreal imageries.
Taking reality as primary source, the artists transform the struggles and happiness of life into sensuous paintings and ingenious three-dimensional works depicting partially-abstract figures, animals, and imaginary characters. The subjects in the artworks are deeply rooted in daily life, integrated with artists’ personal narratives and contexts. Each artwork that creates a world for audiences to get lost not only manifests the artist’s perception to the real world, but also reveals the
unperceivables in our subconsciousness.
As art has been regarded as one of the therapeutic tools in modern society, this exhibition attempts to examine and re-define what we see and what we feel by visualizing the desire, anxiety, and joyfulness in the artworks. In another word, it questions so-called reality, and brings more possibilities of interpretation to this concept. We encourage our audiences to immerse themselves in the expressive colors, pure paints, and the fictional world.
Virtual Tour:
Artists:
Wade Stanley paints self-portraits on a variety of surfaces including canvas, paper, plywood, and other people’s finished paintings His techniques have evolved since he first started painting twenty years ago. When he puts brush in conscious control. So he started dripping and tapping the canvas as a way of making the images less predictable and more energetic. He has also been known to bake his paintings to create unexpected bubbling and cracking effects. In other words, he likes to knock his paintings on the ground and stick them in the oven simply to see what happens.
Mayra Villegas is a painter and felt stitcher. Her work offers an alternate universe that tries to empathize with us, but also distract and reveal a mythos that is unlike our own. Through her creatures, scenes of heart break or of sham encounters (to name a few), are reenacted. Relatable and recognizable scenarios to many. But her creatures also depict their own lives, a life that still believes in sympathetic magic and cohabitates with existing forces that can save you from literal destructive evil.
Artworks:
Artist Interview:
Presented by The Progress Gallery 2021