JF_Soft Goods (1)Stranger Things, an exhibition featuring Jes Fan, Tamara Santibañez, Kenya (Robinson), Nakeya Brown, Ted Mineo, Erik Ferguson, and Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. invokes visceral reactions within the body and highlights unconventional or otherwise strange relationships and interactions between humans and objects. In the spectrum of the uncanny, each work finds itself both above and below the scale of human likeness causing perverse familiarity and cognitive dissonance. Still lives of lanthionization products, scrub brushes made with the hair of caucasia, silicone prosthetic and more can be found in company.

Curated by Doreen Garner at Outpost Artists Resources.

Opening reception: June 9, 6-9pm
On view: June 9 – July 7, Wednesday-Sunday, 10am – 6pm or by appointment

Jes Fan

Jes Fan is an artist born and Canada and grew up in Hong Kong. Fan’s practice is based on a material inquiry into otherness as it relates to identity politics. They received a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design. Fan is the recipient of various fellowships and residencies, such as Pioneer Works Artist Residency, Edward and Sally Van Lier Fellowship at Museum of Arts and Design, CCGA Fellowship at Wheaton Arts, and John A. Chironna Memorial Award at RISD. Fan has exhibited in the United States and internationally. Selected solo exhibitions include No Clearance in Niche at Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Ot(her) at Brown University (Providence). Selected group exhibitions include Whereabouts at Glazenhuis Museum (Belgium), Material Location at Agnes Varis Gallery (New York), and Remembering Something without a Name, performance at Chrysler Museum of Art (Virginia). Fan is currently based in Brooklyn.

Tamara Santibañez

Tamara Santibañez (b. 1987) is a multimedia artist living and working in Brooklyn. Her work is rooted in subcultural semiotics, drawing from the worlds of fetish, punk, Chicano art, and tattooing. She probes the weight objects hold as symbols and the ways in which style-based cultural signifiers function as shorthand for a coded communication, and asks the viewer to confront their own assumptions about gendered participants. For her recent show at Miami’s “This Is Meant to Hurt You,” Santibañez adopted the traditional prison art medium of ballpoint on handkerchiefs and applied it to painstakingly recreating the band tees of her youth on white cotton shirts, exploring devotion to subculture and reconciling her disparate identities as a punk and Chicana raised in the South.

Kenya (Robinson)

Kenya (Robinson) is a community-taught artist from Gainesville, FL. A past resident of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s WorkSpace Program, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and the Triangle Arts Foundation, she begins her residency at Pioneer Works in May 2017. A member of the 2014 class for the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, she currently hosts #ST4NKLOV3, a live stream radio show produced by Clocktower Productions. In addition, her sculptural work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the 60 Wall Street Gallery of Deutsche Bank. Her sculpture, Commemorative Headdress of Her Journey Beyond Heaven, was acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture for their permanent collection in 2014. She has presented performance work at Sid Gold’s Request Room; MoMA PS1; JACK; The Kitchen; Thomas Hunter Project Space; The Museum of Modern Art. And, in 2011, her durational project, The Inflatable Mattress, was featured in the Home Section of The New York Times. (Robinson) has been a contributor to The Huffington Post and Intercourse Magazine. Most recently, she was included in the October/November 2016 issue of Modern Painters with her essay, “The Fate of Excellence”, and was the inaugural resident for Recess Arts’ online residency ANALOG. An iteration of her Creative Capital funded project, CHEEKY LaSHAE: Karaoke Universal, will be included in the Out of Line Series for the High Line during the Summer of 2017.

Nakeya Brown

Nakeya Brown was born in Santa Maria, California in 1988. She received her BA in Visual Arts and Journalism & Media Studies from Rutgers University and her Master of Fine Arts from The George Washington University. Her photography has been exhibited at the McKenna Museum of African American Art, Woman Made Gallery, Transformer Gallery, and Hamiltonian Gallery. Brown’s work has been featured in publications such as New York Mag, Saint Heron, Dazed & Confused, The Fader, and NYLON, and has been published by international publications, Hysteria and Elephant.

Ted Mineo

Ted Mineo earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. His work has been shown at numerous venues in New York and abroad, including Deitch Projects, the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, The Rhode Island School of Design, Portugal Arte 10, and Galerie Loevenbruck in Paris. Recent projects include the creation of the art for the Matmos album Ultimate Care II. He is currently finishing an album of music with the group Voider, and is illustrating a translation of the I Ching by the writer Sheila Heti. He teaches at the Moore College of Art and Design and Brooklyn College and lives and works in Brooklyn.

Erik Ferguson

Erik Ferguson is a half Scottish half Norwegian artist, working with computer generated animation and stills. His work often explores skin and skin-like tissue moving in an organic and physically realistic manner, detached from its natural surroundings. From his studio in Bergen, Norway he works on look-development, concept and creature design for feature films. Recently he has created visual content for Rihanna at the MTV music awards (2016), and music videos for Zhu and Reid Willis. He is also currently developing a series for the TV-network Adult Swim. In 2017 his work will be exhibited in galleries in New York and Istanbul. He has directed and created the short films VEv (2015) and Kometh (2014) that have been screened at several international film festivals. For a decade Erik has worked as a vfx-artist and compositor in the film and advertising industry. Productions include Pyromaniac (2016), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Into the White (2012).

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. is a conceptual photographer working on ideas related to intimacy, vulnerability, and social perception. The resulting images, set within biographical, private, and public spaces, aim to capture a person in a place of presumed comfort, grounding the bizarre or glamorous into a moment that feels lived in; a gesture or pose that speaks to an experience and is less prepared; incorporating an element of ordinary as a way to value the person photographed through several stages of expression; to offset what it means to be respectable and dignified within a photograph.

As an extension of his visual practice, Elliott is also the organizer of DATE NIGHT, an interdisciplinary exhibition set in various homes.

Doreen Garner

Doreen Garner (b.1986) is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Philadelphia, PA. Select exhibitions include White “Man on A Pedestal” Pioneerworks (2017) “Surrogate Skin: The Biology of Objects” MoCADA (2016), “Ether and Agony” Antenna Gallery NOLA (2016) “SHINY RED PUMPING” Vox Populi Gallery (2015),“Something I Can Feel” curated by Derrick Adams at Volta Art Fair (2016) and “Pussy Don’t Fail Me Now” Cindy Rucker Gallery (2015). Garner has completed residencies at LMCC Workspace Program (2015) Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014) Abrons Art Center (2015-16) and Pioneerworks (2016). She holds a BFA in Glass from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and an MFA in Glass at the Rhode Island School of Design. Currently Garner is practicing as a sculptor and inscriber of flesh.