We Buy Gold: SEVEN.
June 29, 2023–August 11, 2023
Jack Shainman Gallery
513 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011
Nicola Vassell Gallery
138 10th Avenue
New York, NY 10011
We Buy Gold has announced Seven., an exhibition at the Jack Shainman Gallery and the Nicola Vassell Gallery in Chelsea, New York. The exhibition was curated by Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels and will be on display from June 29, 2023 to August 11, 2023.
Seven. features ten artists: Max Guy, Renee Gladman, David Hammons, Nandi Loaf, Abigail Lucien, Kerry James Marshall, Lorraine O’Grady, Ashley Teamer, Charisse Pearlina Weston, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
We Buy Gold is a roving art space that presents exhibitions, commissioned projects, and events. It was founded in 2017 and launched with four exhibitions in Brooklyn, New York: ONE., TWO., THREE., and The Yard. It later collaborated with Moses Sumney on SUNSET., Nina Chanel Abney on FIVE., and Diana Nawi on SIX.
All of the We Buy Gold projects encourage people to dissect and deconstruct societal systems of power through art that exists at a cross-section of creative media.
This is especially evident in Seven., where artists disrupt the politics of language, time, and space to construct another world. In the artists hands, the foundational fractures within contemporary society become visible as time lengthens, bodies morph, and language slips. Seven. features emerging and established voices, harmonizing and upending figurative expectations to reveal a structure that dictates meaning.
This exhibition presents the question of how new worlds are constituted in the midst of contemporary crises, and answers that new worlds are the result of leaning into ruptures.
Renne Gladman
Renne Gladman is a writer and artist who is passionate about crossings, thresholds, and geographies in relation to the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. Gladman uses the drawing space as a laboratory, exploring exploring blackness, the nonvisible, structures of habitation, and fictional knowing.
Max Guy
Max Guy is an interdisciplinary artist who primarily works with paper, video, sculpture, installation, and artist books. He creates works that approach existential themes with conceptual and material levity. Guy describes his process as an act of tracing life’s contours as he contemplates the world around him and how individuals augment themselves to fit in it.
David Hammons
David Hammons is a conceptual artist whose work is deeply connected to found objects and assemblage. His manifold practice spans drawing, painting, printing, performance, sculpture, and video, confronting conflicts within the African American identity, community, and urban life. Hammons is committed to investigating and establishing what it means to create work as an outside in the art industry.
Nandi Loaf
Nandi Loaf implicates herself in investigating the existential state of the artist by implicating herself and creating the identity “Nandi Loaf: the artist.” This identity is a fetishization of the artist and creates a hermetically sealed practice that Loaf refers to as “hyperparticipation.” Loaf’s works move seamlessly between paintings, prints, acrylic sculptures, and home-build machines to create maximally reduced interventions. This practice causes her subject to be the social and financial sites of exchange in the art industry.
Abigail Lucien
Abigail Lucien is a Haitian-American interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on themes of (be)longing, futurity, myth, and place through considering inherited colonial structures and systems of belief/care. Lucien works across sculpture, literature, and time-based media, and her practice is auto-ethnographic, meaning that she references found objects and familiar surroundings. Lucien’s work interprets concepts such as love, loss, and grief as fluid processions.
Kerry James Marshall
Kerry James Marshall interrogates Western art history and challenges its canon to include themes and depictions that have been historically omitted. His work has radically changed what he called “the lack in the image bank” by featuring Black subjects in his paintings. Marshall was born in Birmingham at the beginning of the American Civil Rights movement, and later moved to the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles just before the 1965 riots, causing his work to be inspired by his own personal history.
Lorraine O’Grady
Lorraine O’Grady is a conceptual artist and art critic whose work addresses issues of diaspora, hybridity, and black female subjectivity. She is interested in issues of diaspora, hybridity, and black female subjectivity. Employing diptych as her primary form, O’Grady’s work attempts to address themes underpinning Western philosophy by expressing contradictory aesthetic attitudes.
Ashley Teamer
Ashley Teamer utilizes painting, sculpture, photography, and sound in indoor and outdoor architecture to expose the malleability of built environments. Her collage work builds and explores the relationships between the body, nature, space, and time, and she also uses painting, sculpture, photography, and sound. She hopes to intervene with indoor and outdoor architecture and reveal the malleability of our build environment.
Charisse Pearlina Weston
Charisse Pearlina Weston is a conceptual artist and writer whose work dynamically investigates literal and symbolic curls, layerings, collapses of space, poetics, and the autobiographical. Weston deals with themes of intimacy and violence through her material explorations.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a painter who creates untraceable fictional characters by merging the visual and textual. Basing her work on the language of poetry, Yiadom-Boakye illustrates figures who do not need to describe, explain, or justify.
