| The exhibition Marked features six young artists, Chino Amobi, Alison Blickle, Brendan Lott, Jenny Morgan, Reuben Negron, and Robin Williams, all taking hold of the figure as they represent and reflect their strong, fertile, and multilayered independent narratives. The artists in this show use various methods, from mark-making to layering materials and concepts, to forcing an outsider’s view. Observed together or apart, these methods reveal mixed literal and “figurative” connections, and the result is a collection of fictions built from facts. Morgan, Negron, and Amobi are three artists represented by Like the Spice Gallery, who can be said to have redefined, reinvested, and reinvigorated the established tropes of figurative art. Though each follows his or her own path, the three artists still use their personal designs to open the door for many unconventional explorations. |  |
Marisa Sage
The exhibition Marked features six young artists, Chino Amobi, Alison Blickle, Brendan Lott, Jenny Morgan, Reuben Negron, and Robin Williams, all taking hold of the figure as they represent and reflect their strong, fertile, and multilayered independent narratives. The artists in this show use various methods, from mark-making to layering materials and concepts, to forcing an outsider’s view. Observed together or apart, these methods reveal mixed literal and “figurative” connections, and the result is a collection of fictions built from facts.
Morgan, Negron, and Amobi are three artists represented by Like the Spice Gallery, who can be said to have redefined, reinvested, and reinvigorated the established tropes of figurative art. Though each follows his or her own path, the three artists still use their personal designs to open the door for many unconventional explorations. The trio chooses the figure as a way to create something timeless and relatable, while also binding within it the spirit of this specific moment and age.
Amobi expressed it best, considering himself “trapped by the figurative mode of expression, just as each one of us is trapped inside our bodies.” Amobi’s multimodal work puts figure traditions beneath the gloss of our digital age, mixing photography, realism, and abstract painting with tribal mark-making, as well as delicate hints of tone and melody. The application of such diverse ideas becomes what he defines as “hot media,” and ultimately, this is what carries the viewer along behind his piping tune.
In a more concrete approach, Morgan tears to the center of her subjects, steeping her work in the deep colors which locks the canvas to memory and strong emotions, and speaks to the inside of our bodies. Morgan’s view of her friends and herself highlight the beauty that can only, truly, appear when you love the weaknesses along with the strengths.
Much the same, Negron investigates those moments in a relationship that no stranger ever sees. In watercolor he paints the shared intimacies that we all can understand, from moments of naked weakness to the communions that erase all others. Negron shows us to ourselves, and reveals the beauty we cannot always find in moments we already carry.
Inspired by these three above-mentioned artists, as well as their difficult choice to conquer what some have called a “dead” subject, I began to see the many other emerging contemporary artists who could open our eyes to a new type of story: a tradition of the narrative as functional as seen in the caves of Lascaux, France, yet from wholly fictitious beings as seen in the paintings of Dali. A perfect example of this functional fiction can be seen in the work of Williams. Williams’ work glosses nostalgic. Her portraits invoke a darkness that somehow keeps all its color, like the bright and curious monsters of childhood, or the warning patterns on a poisonous plant. Those figures inhabiting her world are calm and know no other life, but the story of their world leaves us astonished, unnerved, and intrigued.
So too does Blickle exaggerate her figures and forms, ending up with a fantasy self, inhabiting a world filled with a sense of freedom. Blickle’s narrative occurs as she builds from emotion, instead of any real being. In this way, Blickle captures moments full of the feelings she chooses to portray, rather than the truthful persona from which she, or we, could be escaping.
Lott also takes the path of escape, but along a different route, less traveled. By acting as the omniscient narrator to the story he defines, Lott allows us to see ourselves as we might not expect to be seen. Lott picks his images from shared online folders and sends them to China, where painters reinterpret the events that strangers have lived. Freed from clear context, the paintings are now behind a smokescreen, and, without clear condemnation, force us instead, to confront our own collection of youthful mistakes. In the vacancy offered, we are each allowed to find our own reasons, and invent our own paths.
These figural artists each attacks pre-existing context, but not maliciously. What they shatter is taken to be used again, creating something that is exciting from what was before overlooked. The end result of Marked is a show which proves there is still much to explore within the figure.
