QUEER PERSPECTIVES
John Brooks, Jess Dugan, Hank Ehrenfried
Liz Hickok, Dylan Hurwitz, Matt Lifson
exhibits run July 29 - August 30
John Brooks, Los Angeles, CA
Brooks holds a BFA from Charleston Collage and additional studies at Central St. Martins College of Art & Design and Hampstead School of Art in London.
John Brooks’ contemplative paintings investigate queer identity combining personal experience in the context of history, art, and literature. His paintings exist somewhere between memory and fantasy – combining the nostalgia of dappled sunlight on the skin and an unbridled sense of adventure with the solemnity of isolation and longing.
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Jess Dugan, St. Louis, MO
Dugan holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Master’s degrees from Harvard University and Columbia College (Chicago.)
Dugan is an artist and writer whose work explores the complexities of personhood, relationships, desire, love, and family. While their practice is centered around photography, it also includes writing, video, sound, drawing, and installation. Their work is informed by their own life experiences, including their identity as a queer and nonbinary person, and reflects a deep belief in the importance of representation and the transformative power of storytelling. Dugan creates intimate portraits that are not only about seeing people, but equally about people being seen.
Hank Ehrenfried, Oklahoma City, OK
Ehrenfried holds a BFA in painting from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute.
Hank uses trompe l’oeil to produce wonderfully rich paintings. On his studio wall he constructs compositions of torn and folded pages that he uses a subject matter. He pulls from magazines and books, using references from art history, architecture, design, animation and male eroticism. The manipulated subject matter offers fragments of imagery combined to create rich tapestries of thought with multiple points of entry for viewers to engage the work.
Liz Hickok, San Francisco, CA
Hickok holds a Bachelor’s degrees from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University and earned her MFA in photography from Mills College.
Liz Hickok’s work often begins with the construction of microenvironments to convey the impermanence of human-made construction and the consumptive properties of nature. The Metamorphosis series of works further her investigations with the use of augmented reality to create interactive environments that move beyond the surface of her photography.
Dylan Hurwitz, Brooklyn, NY
Hurwitz holds a BFA in painting from School of the Museum Fine Arts and an MFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design.
Dylan Hurwitz uses shifts in scale to blur the lines between the human form, landscape, and abstraction; creating push and pull between a flat surface and perspective. Dylan’s canvases push to the edges, cropped in way that allows for ambiguity of narrative. His landscape paintings have a depth of field that serves to invite the viewer into the landscapes of beaches and dunes and watersheds that he depicts while his paintings of the male form are cropped so closely they make you feel like you are already there.
Matt Lifson, Los Angeles, CA
Lifson holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (NY) and an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design.
Matt Lifson leans into the erotic but ultimately aims to explore the human condition by exploring myths of queer relationships. Lifson draws his subject matter from a combination of personal experience, pornography, B movies, and art history, creating provocative scenarios that are absurd and nostalgic.
Jialun Tong, New York, NY
Tong holds a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology.
With a background as an art director for photography and video campaigns, Jialun Tong is a skilled draughtsman and painter. He is comfortable shifting from realism to expressive gestural abstraction. Tong explores themes of queer identity and religious belief. Jialun’s work oscillates between euphoria and guilt, striving to find harmony of his queer self while honoring his Tao Buddhist upbringing.
Sherry Wiggins, Boulder, CO
in collaboration with Luís Branco
Wiggins earned both Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree from University of Colorado.
Wiggins is a multidisciplinary artist who has worked on socially conscious art using a variety of media including drawing painting, photography and collaboratively with artists around the world. Her work over the last 8 years has used performative photography to embody the roles of female archetypes as described through research and literature. In her most recent work, Wiggins ties past to present, portraying Claude Cahun on the coast of France. Wiggins’ work uses the mask as a device to suggest to that none of us is only one thing and not another.