It Never Entered My Mind
Curated by Michael Sherman
Music Direction by MELO-X
Sean Kelly is delighted to present It Never Entered My Mind, a group exhibition featuring fifteen artists working in painting and sculpture, curated by Los Angeles-based collector and producer Michael Sherman. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, May 18, from 5-8 pm.
Titled after Miles Davis’ rendition of the iconic showtune “It Never Entered My Mind,” each artist in the exhibition takes up the perennial concerns of art making — including place, personal and cultural history, and the body — in their own, distinctive manner, not unlike a great jazz ensemble. Eschewing an overarching theme, It Never Entered My Mind presents the singular talents and conceptual concerns of each artist, many of whom are exhibiting in Los Angeles for the first time. The exhibition brings together artists living and working in disparate parts of the world in a variety of styles and media. In addition to the works on view, It Never Entered My Mind features music direction by Los Angeles-based musician and record producer MELO-X, inspired by each artist’s studio practice.
Lindsay Adams is a writer and painter working in various media. Adams’ work serves as a reflection and extension of herself, challenging narratives of race and representation, drawing upon personal and collective histories, and mining the complexity of the Black experience.
Greg Breda is a self-taught contemporary visual artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Painting with acrylic paint on canvas, mylar and paper, his work explores the strength, resilience, and beauty of the human spirit.
Grant Czuj’s work draws from his familial ties within American working-class culture. His art practice uses materiality and abstraction to work through an embodied experience of prison life that resists the normative interpretation and visual language of incarceration.
Shanique Emelife is a queer Nigerian immigrant self-taught painter. Her work often centers on her experience as a first-generation immigrant, and explores family, culture, identity, and home.
Alexander Harrison’s paintings are perplexing, anxious spaces, incorporating symbols of American history and racism. Harrison’s still-lives, landscapes, and portraits play with the tension between longing, interiority, and entrapment.
Braden Hollis is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her paintings develop through an intuitive process of layering and removal, similar to choreography. Her works often begin with pure color, whilst also incorporating, and destabilizing, images from direct observation, or sourced from art history and popular culture.
Michael Igwe is an artist from Lagos, Nigeria working primarily in painting. In treating art as a critical exploration of the personal, his practice engages with the fluidity of human experience and memory.
Harminder Judge’s paintings, imbued with vibrancy and depth, reference Indian neo-tantric painting, as well as the Abstract Expressionist and color field movements of the 20th century. His process involves layering pigments into pools of wet plaster, followed by periods of sanding, polishing, and oiling.
Mario Moore’s paintings focus on the personal, social, and political implications of our segregated society. Presenting stories of his own life and those of friends and family, Moore weaves in multiple references to history, art, politics, and literature to complete the emotionally resonant narratives of his work.
Taj Poscé thematically constructs compositions by collaging archival research materials, construction materials, and studio-based materials. Employing iconographic and symbolic motifs, his paintings are loaded with emotional rigor, spirit and imagination that respond to, reconstruct, and reclaim imagery connected to Black histories, culture, and experiences.
Harmonia Rosales’s artistic practice centers on the empowerment of Black and Latinx women in Western culture. In her realist painting, she simultaneously challenges and derives inspiration from the aesthetics of Renaissance painting and Greek mythology to construct alternative narratives.
SANGREE is a Mexico City–based collaboration between artists René Godínez-Pozas and Carlos Lara. Within their wide-ranging practice, which encompasses photography, ceramics, and film, SANGREE has remained focused on materiality and the concepts of nature, pop culture, and technology.
Hammzat Tahabsim is an artist of Iraqi and Circassian heritage whose provocative amalgamations confront the legacies of displacement and cultural erasure. With a background in architecture and visual art, Tahabsim invites viewers to delve into the complex tensions inherent to his diasporic identity.
Thiang Uk’s paintings explore identity and ancestral memory through animism, metamorphosis, distance, mystery, and the medium of painting itself. Inspired by his family’s immigration to the United States from Myanmar in 2004, Uk’s practice involves abstraction of his personal experiences through experimentation with color, gesture, and the concept of landscape.
Chantal Wnuk uses her work to better understand and translate the experiences of pressure, weakness, and power resulting from diagnosis and indefinite treatment of metastatic breast cancer. Through figurative distortion and varied oil painting techniques, she works to complicate stereotypes of illness and highlight the intricacies of inhabiting the human body.