Justine Do Espirito Santo

Justine Do Espirito Santo is Director at the gallery Arcadia Missa in London. The gallery was founded in 2014, after three years of operating as a project space. The main focus of Arcadia Missa's program is on emerging artists, whose practices are specifically geared towards highlighting contemporary struggles within the various fields of identity politics under networked capitalism. The gallery represents fourteen artists working in video, installation, performance, sculpture, photography and painting. Arcadia Missa also has a regular publishing programme of journals and artist books. Espirito Santo joined the gallery in 2018 and previously worked as an adviser and curator.

Cristine Brache

Born 1984 in Miami Florida. Lives and works in Toronto, Canada. 2016 MFA, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, England. 2007 BFA, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida.

"Cristine Brache often takes her personal and family history as a starting point to explore cultural erasure, the Caribbean Diaspora and codified behaviours related to womanhood. In recent works she has also explored the institutionalisation of women’s pain and illness, as well as the ramifications of gaslighting—the pathologization of female emotion and expression. To me, what distinguishes Brache’s approach to these subjects is how she articulates personal histories of female oppression with the wider context of history and art history."

Artwork Image: Woman Getting Reupholstered, 2020. Fabric, oak, foam, plywood, hardware. 50 x 28 x 20 in.

Gray Wielebinski

Born 1991. Lives and works in London, England. 2018 MFA, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, England.

"Working across various media, Gray Wielebinski explores how gender, sexuality and identity intersect with society’s power structures. What I find particularly interesting about their practice is how they unpick masculinity by looking at American pop culture, highlighting the mythologies around gender that pervade through fashion, sports and celebrity culture, as seen in some of their videos and their works based on their personal collection of childhood baseball cards. I also like the use of fabrics and clothes in Wielebinski’s work, highlighting the cultural values that we assign to certain materials and garments."

Artwork Image: Custom Baseball Cards, 2020. Childhood baseball card collection, leather, fur, paper. 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in. (per card).

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.

Born 1993 in Baldwin, New York. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 2016 BFA, New York University, New York.

"Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. is a really exciting conceptual photographer. I like how his practice blurs boundaries between genres, not only between editorial photography and art, but also between photography, architecture and sculpture. His fragmented portraits, where subjects seem to escape the picture plane, are preoccupied with showing moments of interiority, intimacy and marginality. Frames and sculptural assemblages sometimes further obstruct the image, as the artist explores the materiality of photography and its relationship with domestic architecture."

Artwork Image: Inherent distance, 2018. Archival inkjet print. 10 x 15 in.