Western Exhibitions’ booth at the 2022 NADA New York fair will showcase work by Jessica Campbell, Edie Fake, and Aya Nakamura. While they have similar sensibilities towards tactility, surface, and the handmade, each veers outward in a uniquely idiosyncratic direction. Free-form carpet giants and adornments will anchor the booth alongside intimate collages and saturated abstractions that encourage careful looking. In addition to these two-dimensional works, the Western Exhibitions booth will feature two new publications by acclaimed comics artists: Rave, a graphic novel by Jessica Campbell, published by Drawn & Quarterly, and The Pieces, a zine by Edie Fake, published by Nieves.
Access the NADA New York website here
To request a preview, please contact Scott Speh: scott@westernexhibitions.com
For images/information, please contact Hannah Cusimano: hannah@westernexhibitions.com
Schedule:
VIP Opening Preview by invitation:
Thursday, May 5, 10 am – 4 pm
Open to the Public:
Thursday, May 5th: 4 pm – 8 pm
Friday, May 6th: 11 am – 7 pm
Saturday, May 7th: 11 am – 7 pm
Sunday, May 8th: 11 am – 5 pm
Special event: Book signing with Jessica Campbell and her newest graphic novel, Rave, on Saturday, May 7, from 4 to 7 pm in the Western Exhibitions booth, #3.02.
Artist bios:
JESSICA CAMPBELL’s large, brazenly-coloured anthropomorphic figures are freed from the constraints of a picture plane. Constructed from collaged carpet scraps, her giants strut and pose across the walls. While working with these scraps in the studio and juggling external stress during the pandemic, Campbell’s internal dialogue entertained two voices: the role of defender of her beliefs as well as its antagonist. This led her to consider Gigantomachy, the struggle between the gods and the giants in Greek mythology. These representations from antiquity depicted the shift from barbarism to civilized society and victory in specific battles. In a parallel manner, Campbell’s figures, pieced together from scraps, come to be metaphorical representations of the demons and battles in her own mind. Her giant forms will be accompanied by a newer freeform collection of Man Cave Decorations.
EDIE FAKE’s intricate collages are inspired by his sandy surroundings in the California high desert and continue to explore themes of queer community which have been at the core of his work for years. The collages recall illustrations from natural history catalogues and science textbooks and offer a representational foil to Fake’s better-known abstract paintings. The collages are informed by looking at diatom art, desert sand, cellular and viral behavior, rising ocean levels, and as always with Edie Fake, the audacity of queer utopian imagining. His artistic practice mines the grammar of architecture to carve out space for bodies that have been othered and invalidated by dominant systems of knowledge. As with all of Fake’s work, abstract representations of community form and collapse, cohere and dissipate, reflective of the real experience within queer lives and their ever-shifting constellations.
AYA NAKAMURA’s drawings —colored pencil on handmade paper of different sizes and shapes— have a subtle but irregular surface which asserts itself during the drawing process. Variegated lines navigate across, alongside and into fields of color, assembling into amorphous compositions that appear to simultaneously build and dissolve. For Nakamura, abstraction is a way of relating intention in the moment. It is a kind of wayfaring, or of following the signs and guideposts that reveal themselves along a path in order to arrive at an end point. Nakamura works in pencil, as this slows down time enough for her to deliberate while drawing. She thinks of each element in the drawing as a consciousness that engages directly with its neighbors and aggregates into a larger entity, like an anthill. The result is a series of encounters, a permeability of space and form, embedded sensitivities, and touch.