Awkward Threesome
Christine Wang | Kim Ye | Raphael Noz
June 26 – August 1, 2015
Alter Space
1158 Howard St
San Francisco CA 94103
Opening & Performance: June 26th, 2015 | 7-10p
Awkward Threesome is an exhibition that features new work in painting, performance, and sculpture by Christine Wang, Kim Ye, and Raphael Noz. Challenging states of complicity, confusion, identity, and ambivalence, each artist examines their own process and situation. In turn, experience becomes symbolic of the contradiction between thought and feeling. As motivations surface, we grow increasingly aware of an oscillation between idealism and conflict, ambition and guilt.
Christine Wang’s work sheds light on her role as a culprit in the problems that affect her practice where painted slogans proclaiming, ‘OIL PAINTERS DON’T NEED WATER’ and ‘I AM A WAR PROFITEER’, see her straddling both the personal and social implications. Collections, sculptures, and found objects from Raphael Noz examine accumulation in relation to the loss of wealth, power, and authority in a seemingly rigged system. Kim Ye’s reproductions of studio items in latex paint appear mutated by the the quality of the process itself, existing in a perpetual state of becoming.
On the opening night there will be performances by each artist. In a continuation of his lifelong Double Portrait, Noz will paint on two canvases simultaneously, each positioned within an arm’s-length stretch from the other, in an attempt to navigate aspects of endurance, physicality, and identity. Wang and Ye utilize the atmosphere of the gallery’s Jail Cell studio as the setting for their collaborative performance, Art Scene, an homage to the painful yet pleasurable symbiosis that is artist-gallerist relationship.