OUT HERE: BIANCA FIELDS, OLIVIA STERLING, BRITTANY TUCKER AND SKYE VOLMAR
Steve Turner is pleased to present Out Here, a four-person exhibition featuring new works by Bianca Fields, Olivia Sterling, Brittany Tucker and Skye Volmar. Each of the four artists creates personal, idiosyncratic, and provocative work, informed by their perspectives as Black women. Out Here is Brittany Tucker’s description of her artistic journey and it applies equally to the other three artists. She intended “out” to describe herself as not being inside the arms of society and “here” to describe her unwillingness to be invisible. Out Here features four strong, unapologetic artists who create works that defy expectations.
Bianca Fields (born 1995, Cleveland) creates paintings of screaming animals that the artist considers stand-ins for the psyche of her six-year-old self, one who spent hours watching cartoons as a child. Her works have thick flourishes of lustrous colors as well as scratched lines and text that convey violence and vulnerability, something that Fields routinely experiences as an African American woman.
Olivia Sterling (born 1996, Peterborough, United Kingdom) creates paintings which address questions of blackness and whiteness in twenty-first century Britain. She depicts colorful scenes of celebratory mayhem to critique racialized biases.
Brittany Tucker (born 1996, Brooklyn) creates paintings that combine her own likeness with that of a cartoonish image of a generic white man. She misrepresents the white figure in order to address the uneasy relationship between American blackness and whiteness and to offset the stereotyped characters from minstrelsy. By rendering herself realistically, she makes herself the primary subject while the white man is the joke of the painting. The awkward situations highlight the growing divide between the races and the sexes in the post-Obama era.
Skye Volmar (born 1997, Livingston, New Jersey) creates drawings and paintings that highlight her connection with Black and Haitian American (sub)urban girls and women. Her works are feminine and energetic, colorful and patterned. They are meant to simultaneously entice and repulse the viewer, so that the closer one looks, the more opportunities there are to make connections.