PAST EXHIBITIONS
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THE VIEW WE SEEK
August 18th - September 17th
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Michael Alvarez
Miranda Byk
Jurell Cayetano
Shaun Crawford
Aryo Toh Djojo
Veronica Fernandez
David Leggett
Tidawhitney Lek
Adeshola Mohammed
- Jean Naga
- Andrew Park
- Sabrina Piersol
- Javier Ramirez
- Henry Swanson
- Mirjam Vreeswijk
- Augustina Wang
- Shingo Yamazaki
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Anthony Gallery and Sow & Tailor proudly present The View We Seek, a collaborative group show featuring 18 artists. This exhibition is an exploration of the nuances of human existence, functioning as a space for the experiencing of shared truths. It is a carnival of Americana, where pop culture symbology, utopian aspirations, existential alienation, and domestic strife bleed together, disrupting notions and categories of fine art. The show functions as altogether a platform for truth, a celebration of authenticity, a testament to desire, and an evocation of memory.
Co-curated by Isimeme “Easy” Otabar and Karen Galloway, the exhibition crafts an entity that is genuine and unapologetic, existing as a grouping of matter-of-fact sentiments that plainly state their cause. Each artist is grounded in the particular judgment of their subject. Rooted in a genuine quest for life itself, the show contains both individual convictions and shared sentiments. The show is a vessel for poignant sensations, giving way to inclusivity, allowing everyone to feel. Comprehension of an array of sentiments gives way to fostering an appreciation for all of life itself. - An amalgamation of personal, sentient truths give way to combined experience. In pursuit of attentive fascinations, the exhibit meshes together in a curatorial experience that is visceral as much as it is accessible. The View We Seek is an experience simultaneously grounded in material reality and ephemerally untethered, creating a physical space to imagine what might happen when the outsiders are welcomed in.
- Michael Alvarez (b. 1983, Los Angeles) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena in 2007. Alvarez draws from the wellspring of his own experience living and working in the city to produce intimate yet sociological paintings that capture the particularities of civic life within the vast metropolis. Steeped in nostalgia, his works offer a closely-observed, hyperreal reconstruction of LA: its people, its culture, its politics, and the public and domestic spaces that constitute its visual landscape.
- Influenced by graffiti culture and its transformation of the urban sprawl, Alvarez uses a combination of oil and spray paint to build up multilayered, diffuse surfaces which oscillate between the uncanny daze of a dream and the misty nostalgia of a memory. In preparation for his social-scapes, Alvarez undertakes multiple site visits, traversing the terrain to experience it from every possible angle. Always towing a digital camera, he takes dozens of reference photographs of the scene to capture both key features and the most minute of details.
- Miranda Byk was born in 1994 in Ventura, CA, and lives in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, CA (2017).
- In her work, Miranda Byk creates dream-like vignettes that are both haunting and immersive. Her practice explores deeply personal narratives, drawing from her dreams, traumas, and anxieties. Byk often paints references from her childhood inspired by her familial relationships and early ideas. Her work uses nature — including plants, dew drops, and fauna — as common motifs that explore themes ranging from the passage of time to the transience of existence.
- Jurell Cayetano (b. 1992 in Brooklyn, NY) is a visual artist currently living and working in Atlanta, GA. Born to parents of Honduran and West Indian descent, the artist uses mixed media (oil paint, graphite, gouache, and colored pencil) on paper to capture an array of Afro-Diasporic experiences. In 2014, Cayetano received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work has been exhibited in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and Charlotte.
- Following in the legacies of early 20th-century painters, Jurell Cayetano’s work explores new ways of expressing elegance, beauty, luxury, and humanity – without relying on the conventional notions of the artist preceding him. He transforms photo references of peers and other people of color into narrative paintings full of expression and realism. The artist thrives in creating around individuals and locations he has emotional connections to.
- Shaun Crawford uses a complex process of dyes made from his own unique formula, tying in characters such as the Smurfs and Mickey Mouse — along with critiques on social and political events — across paper, canvas, and muslin. Having collaborated with Arc’teryx, BAPE, and Engineered Garments, Crawford’s artwork feels versatile, jumping off the medium as if viewing them spray painted on the New York City subway or a neighborhood billboard.
- Crawford’s aesthetic is raw and energetic, his body of work examines the way bad habits and negative thinking can hinder the artistic journey, with the ultimate goal of overcoming them and gaining an enlightened perspective on the world.
- Djojo (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He attended Art Center College of Design where he received a BFA. The artist melds science fiction and satire, while occasionally using iconic Los Angeles landmarks as his setting. Djojo’s refined skills in airbrushing often leave viewers questioning whether they are surveying a blurred photograph, or sharing in that obscure moment when Djojo’s consciousness converges with his subconscious. Purposely using the alluring borderline kitsch aesthetics of movie stills, advertising posters, and other seductive ways of depicting real-life, Toh Djojo's work can be seen as a metaphor for taking a different way of handling the unknown, which we've experienced an abundance of in recent months. And indeed, the use of exceptionally soft, stencils or tape-free airbrush acrylic technique, adds to the dreamy veneer of Toh Djojo's apparition-like snapshots. Even the technical way of its application onto the canvas surface goes in hand with the disconnection and distance present in each of the works. Feeling both authentic or documentary while having the artificial atmosphere of the movie/commercial set the whole body of work is existing on the thin line between lived and perceived experience.
- Veronica Fernandez (b. 1998, NJ, USA) is a mixed-media artist. She studied fine art at the School of the Visual Arts in New York (BFA, 2020). Her work explores the intricate relationship between people and their environment, drawing from personal experiences to illustrate the complexities of everyday life.
- Using family photographs and art history, Fernandez creates pieces that blur the line between personal memories and collective nostalgia. Her deliberate transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar emphasizes the fluidity of human emotions, and her open-ended narratives invite audiences to interpret her work for themselves.
- Using family photographs and art history, Fernandez creates pieces that blur the line between personal memories and collective nostalgia. Her deliberate transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar emphasizes the fluidity of human emotions, and her open-ended narratives invite audiences to interpret her work for themselves.
- Leggett (b. 1980) moved to Chicago in 2003 after completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He was greatly influenced by the Chicago Imagists, a group of representational artists whose work was known for its complete un-involvement with New York art world trends, and had the opportunity to work with a few of them at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago while taking classes toward his Masters of Fine Arts degree, which he received in 2007. Leggett works in painting, drawing, printmaking, bookmaking, and installation.
- His work is heavily influenced by popular culture and both personal and cultural relationships. He has shown at the Hyde Park Art Center along with many other galleries in Chicago. He was also the recipient of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Trustee Scholarship. Leggett is currently teaching himself stop-motion animation and how to play the cord organ. He plans to apply the two together in the future.
- Tidawhitney Lek (b. 1992, lives and works in Long Beach) is a Cambodian-American painter. Her work plays with narrative and the Asian experiences of first-generation Americans. She received a BFA from Cal State University of Long Beach (2017). Her narratives are relative to their own experiences growing up as a female Cambodian- American in Southern California.
- Lek plays with traditional and conventional mediums like pastel, acrylic, and oil paints on canvas. Her textures interchange as pictorial spaces recede and soften, and narratives take shape in composition to light, landscape, and figures. Her art is a mix of past nostalgia by mundane objects and history juxtaposed against the architectural space of a home.
- Adeshola Makinde (b. 1990) is a Nigerian-American multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois. He was raised in the Chicagoland suburbs and in his younger years attended predominantly white schools. His mission statement of his art practice is to educate by sharing the information that he learns on his personal journey of Black consciousness.
- Makinde is drawn to highlighting Black life in his work because he feels as though it’s that is often neglected. The social justice themes found throughout his work is his way of advocating for those without a voice.
- Nikkolos Mohammed is a fine artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. He received his BFA with an emphasis in painting from Otis College of Art and Design in 2013. In 2014, he and fellow artist Mike Reesé founded DREAMHAUS, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and multifaceted art collective. DREAMHAUS is dedicated to implementing arts as an educational tool and a vehicle toward universal innovation in South Los Angeles.
- As a visual maker, he has collaborated with brands such as Coors Light on a global campaign, the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) for a social justice cause, and has featured works in television and film sets.
- Mohammed’s drypoint etchings reference printmaking techniques referencing methods dated back to the 15th century. Nikkolos Mohammed recognizes the symbiotic relationship between art and sports. Both the artist and athlete perpetuate life through being in a constant state of reinvention.
- Jean Nagai is an artist (b. 1979 Seattle, WA) and has spent the last few years in New Mexico and California. He received a BA from The Evergreen State College in ’04 and his work has been shown mostly along the West coast.
- By engaging in a meditative process by which the sum of many individual dots accumulate to form a larger synergic whole, Jean’s work both creates and explores a spiritual microcosm and macrocosm that shifts between the physical, digital and political landscape. He is motivated by a spiritual connection to nature and the vastness of the universe.
- Andrew Park (b. 1996) is a painter who lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA in Illustration, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California in 2018.
- His works are rooted in a desire to display the human condition while exposing its inherent and fallible nature. The use of nostalgic imagery is a common practice for the artist, as he uses them to convey connections between memory, image, and how the two recall one another.
- Andrew Park (b. 1996) is a painter who lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA in Illustration, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California in 2018.
- Andrew Park seeks for onlookers to consider their own memories, reflecting on the present and all they’ve endured and overcome. The artist’s work calls for a coming to terms with all that was, is, and has been – navigating these themes through advanced airbrush techniques on gessoed wood panels
- Sabrina Piersol (b. 1995, Greenwich, CT) is an abstract painter and printmaker based in Southern California and Colorado’s Western Slope he graduated from Colorado College with a BA in Studio Art and Classics, and graduated from the University of San Diego with her MFA in 2023.
- The artist’s environmental scenes reflect on temporal shifts, poetry, and the natural world. By producing rich compositions of carefully balanced botanicals and abstractions, she explores the natural world in terms almost beyond human perception.
- Piersol’s “landscape-informed” paintings collapse inner and outer vision onto the canvas. Looking to both the environment around her and imagined terrain, she crafts lavishly sensuous works of vibrant color, vertiginous perspective, and undeniable energy.
- Javier Ramirez (b. 1982, Los Angeles, CA) studied at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design (BFA, 2012).
- Ramirez uses the Southern California landscape and urban iconography as his muse, as well as elements of Ramirez’s personal and artistic trajectory in his relationship to Japanese culture and its aesthetics, such as wabi-sabi, mono no aware, tea ceremonies, ikebana, calligraphy, and classical Japanese films. Ramirez’s interest in Japanese culture led him to work at a bonsai nursery, where the concepts he learned while tending to plants transferred subconsciously into his approach to painting.
- Henry Swanson (b. 1993) grew up in Dallas, Texas. He graduated with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2016). The artist has featured work in a number of solo and group exhibitions both in the U.S. and internationally.
- Henry Swanson's oeuvre tugs at feelings of nostalgia as he toys with visual abstractions in his paintings and mixed media works that reference his upbringing in Dallas, Texas, his obsession with comics and everyday moments. Though he was raised in a Texan region where arts wasn’t really encouraged, Henry’s fondness for drawing cartoon characters such as Calvin and Hobbes in his younger years catapulted his interest to learn more about visual art and its proper techniques. His work achieves something shared rather than something overtly critical; a sense of unity with his viewers through Swanson's own experiences.
- Mirjam Vreeswijk's (Gorinchem, 1997) paintings explore the convergence of divergent realities produced in a space between mirror and mask, between revealing and hiding the subject. In doing so, she seeks to draw attention to the different layers of consciousness rippling through the painting’s surface and its subject. Narrative and continuity become illusory in this hybrid space, as each work contains new perspectives that combine opposites and defy easy coherency.
- The work originates from collages of objects or images that appeal to her in one way or another. From this archive of materials, she intuitively builds compositions, first in models, then on canvas. Step by step, Mirjam looks at what the image needs in order to eventually arrive at the perfect composition and perfect structures of paint. This intuitive or subconscious approach gives the paintings a surrealistic feel that touches on elements of product photography, still life and landscape painting. In her latest series the fairy-tale world makes its entrance. This can be seen in ritual objects and in the approach to landscapes that some of the paintings provide a glimpse of.
- Augustina Wang (b. 1999, New York, NY.) is a painter with a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. She grew up in the Flushing, Queens, New York City. She currently works in Long Island City, Queens, New York City.
- Wang’s work explores her Asian femme identity through lore and worldbuilding and investigations into the machinations of power. She considers painting as a way to allow her to “roleplay” power, a force that is seemingly unobtainable to her in her body as a first-generation, Chinese-American woman. She is inspired by her childhood self, a girl who browsed roleplaying blogs, fanfiction forums, and video game sites, as a way to experience agency and community in a world that lacked it for her. Wang sees roleplay, and therefore painting, as a way to heal her trauma, whether it be self-inflicted, sexual, generational, or even primordial.
- time and age. Wang reconciles with how these vessels, Asian and femme, may be forever subjugated. Instead of turning to fatalism, Wang seeks to build worlds where no such history exists.
- Shingo Shaun Yamazaki is a second-generation Japanese/Korean- American artist, born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Yamazaki studied at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and graduated in 2014 with a Bachelor of Arts focused in Painting.
- Wang is also inspired by her mother, an immigrant and single mom, whose life experience echoes her daughter ’s, despite the difference in
- time and age. Wang reconciles with how these vessels, Asian and femme, may be forever subjugated. Instead of turning to fatalism, Wang seeks to build worlds where no such history exists.
- Shingo Shaun Yamazaki is a second-generation Japanese/Korean- American artist, born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Yamazaki studied at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and graduated in 2014 with a Bachelor of Arts focused in Painting.
- His work revolves around themes of identity, cultural hybridity, and the definition of home. His paintings are reconstructed memories and remnants of the past, in which mark its existence from his personal history. Yamazaki’s work allows the home to become a vessel of collective identity through dialogues of everyday life. The work is a result of a studied combination; daily contemporary life with overlapping vestiges from the past coupled with images taken from an archive of family photographs.
- Embedded within a collection of ornate objects and paraphernelia, the bodies and spaces confront the viewer with hidden meanings behind what is held as precious and their connection to identity. Visual tensions between household objects and occupants describe the subconscious grappling with forms of selective memory, trauma, and cultural amnesia. Varying opacities and interjections create a visual narrative between objects and figures, simultaneously allowing and denying access to the viewer. These constructed spaces become something of an entirely new kind of setting, scenes that narrate a plausible history from his own point of access and internalized memories. These new spaces give as much as they take from the viewer, leaving them in an in-between space of memory and forgetfulness.