Isis Awad

Isis Awad is a curator, writer, and poet based in New York City. She is Founding Director of Executive Care, a curatorial initiative at the service of underrepresented artists, with a special focus on early-career artists from performance and nightlife communities. Awad has held curatorial positions at Townhouse in Cairo as well as the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art and Participant Inc in New York.

Max Colby

Born 1990, lives and works in New York, NY. 2012 BFA, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Boston, MA.

"Intricate, and brightly colored, Max Colby’s highly-detailed sculptures, installations, embroidered drawings, and paintings employ historically feminized forms of craft, such as needlework, to comment on patriarchal notions of labor from a trans, nonbinary lens. Sequins, lace trims, stuffed animals, and small, plastic gumball machine toys embellish soft, androgynously-phallic sculptures that appear to have been extracted from some alien, deep sea, yet somehow retained their shine, and luster. Evoking a ceremonial affect, Colby’s multidisciplinary practice draws inspiration from maximalist religious ornamentation to subvert those very forms and narratives."

Artwork Image: They Consume Each Other (#1), 2021. Crystal and plastic beads and sequins, found fabric, trim, fabric flowers, ribbon, costume jewelry, polyester batting, thread, glass stands, custom pedestal. 66 x 40 x 40 in.

Jordan Strafer

Born 1990 in Miami, FL. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 2020 MFA, Bard, Annendale-on-Hudson, NY. 2016 BFA, Parsons School of Design, New York, NY.

“Dark, camp, and humorous, Jordan Strafer’s work is often autobiographical, exploring the oppression and privilege perpetuated onto, and by, white American femme identitites. Her drawings on pink onion-skin paper, grotesque ceramic sculptures, and videos featuring morally-questionable characters all evoke a disdain for the slick form, and an appreciation for the depraved. Text also makes its way into Strafer’s multidisciplinary practice appearing as bad grandma jokes in exhibition press releases about her work, or traced onto drawings from news headlines. In her videos, prosthetics and special effects makeup adorn the characters’ faces to both draw attention to their ‘whiteness,’ and problematize the unavoidable representation of the actors playing them, who are often Strafer’s close friends or family members.”

Artwork Image: Peak Heaven Love Forever, 2021. Still image from video. Duration: 19:19.

Teona Yamanidze

Born 1988 in Moscow, Russia. Lives and works in New York, NY. 2018 MFA, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. 2012 Diploma, Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, UK.

"Teona Yamanidze’s large-scale oil paintings depict melancholic scenes of romantic domesticity. Bodies reclined or laid down together on soft surfaces, in bedrooms and living rooms, at dusk or dawn. Dim, white, daylight peaks through translucent curtains, surrounded by shady palettes of deep grays; the subdued glowing-blue of a tv screen perhaps left on while a body rests. These familiar modalities suggest the Georgian painter’s reckoning with, and proximity to, American home culture. Sometimes the surfaces of Yamanidze’s paintings appear crackled like having suffered the injury of a home fire, or like a faint memory, only half-recalled."

Artwork Image: With you, 2020. Oil on canvas. 50 x 50 x 2 in.