Brooke DiDonato, Rashawn Griffin, Chelsea James, Aitor Lajarin-Encina, Victor Machado, Carmen Mardonez, Cherish Marquez, Future Retrieval, George P. Perez, Camille Shortridge, Alexander Richard Wilson
May 8 – June 5, 2021
Friend of a Friend Gallery announces our latest exhibition, Here|There which explores of liminality after a period of cloistered domesticity. Selected artists examine the quiet breaks in awareness that have made the barriers between adjacent realities and our lived experiences blur. These slips have begun to creep into our perception in new ways over the past year, breaking up what has for many been a rather monotonous period of forced routine and seclusion.
Some of the artists in Here|There allow us to glimpse into the void between what is recognized and familiar and something entirely strange. Brooke DiDonato’s photographs are at once graceful and unnerving, capturing displaced bodies in stark interior spaces. Torsos slip languidly from ceilings and a pair of legs jut out from the cabinetry. Her images give viewers the sense they have inadvertently witnessed a glitch in the matrix and an unfortunate someone caught in its crosshairs. Victor Machado’s mark-making renders vaguely familiar shapes ultimately incomprehensible. The decided flatness of his simple compositions on untreated canvas tricks the eye into fading in and out of spatial awareness and recognition, as we try to locate ourselves in relation to them. Though their origins are humble, Carmen Mardonez’s sculptural pillows transform into new entities under her hands. They are somewhere between having a form and being formless, and their oddness at once attracts and repels.
Two other artists in the exhibition take us into entirely adjacent planes. Aitor Lajarin-Encina’s tongue in cheek work for Here|There presents an exhibition within an exhibition, allowing the FOAF co-directors to curate other artists into a painted space. We are forced then, to occupy two worlds at once, as we view the exhibition in the artist’s world while still physically occupying our own. Cherish Marquez has crafted an equally multifarious desert dreamscape. Using the symbol of the yucca plant, she encourages rumination, transformation, healing, and rebirth through the screen.
The price list for Here | There is available by request. The full gallery guide for the exhibition is available below. Also be sure to check out the exhibition page for There’s a Bunny in my Parking Spot the exhibition within an exhibition by Aitor Lajarin Encina.
