Jupiter is pleased to present a group show featuring work by Daniel Mandelbaum, Stephanie Pierce, Dylan Rose Rheingold, and Marcus Leslie Singleton. Collectively, these artists reflect the ethos and mission of the gallery, which seeks to encourage dialog amongst varied artistic perspectives and sociocultural backgrounds—enabling diverse and often international conversations to take place in a localized settling outside the normal reach of the art world.
This presentation at UNTITLED includes artists working across media and forms, but who through all their differences speak to experiences shared across space and time. The ceramic sculptures and wall-based tile works by Mandelbaum are, for example, marked by personal signifiers that nevertheless translate to a universal audience, as they allude to Greek and Roman architecture as well as various characters, celestial bodies, animals, and figures, such as Kachina (2020) which draws upon the indigenous doll of the same name. His handmade ceramic tiles, which foreground their own materiality and are assembled in such a way that they create the illusion of a woven tapestry, serve as the building blocks of his distinct visual lexicon.
By painting New York through her window, Pierce does not look to art history as Mandelbaum does, but rather situates her practice in the present. Slow looking and quiet observation of the outside world from an interior space results in Pierce’s fractured and refracted layering of colors in varying degrees of opacity, which coalesce in moments frozen in motion—a state of static flux. The majority of her paintings serve as responses to her surrounding environment, and thus feature domestic spaces, city views, plants, and portraits. Though discernible in their subject matter, the paintings that result from her meditative practice nevertheless lean towards abstraction, a heightened experiential intensity, and perhaps even a hallucinatory sensation.
Similarly representational and yet bordering on abstraction, Rheingold’s paintings delve into the affects and experiences of girlhood within American contemporary culture. Her practice foregrounds symbols of adolescence, femininity, and a heterogeneous cultural background. By re-presenting these elements in occasionally unexpected configurations, she threads a non-linear narrative throughout her oeuvre, populated with family, friends, and ambiguous representations of the artist herself. The stories that spill forth highlight everyday emotions and quotidian spaces which exaggerate the details and often vailed truths—such as the braces, oily skin, acne, birth control, heavy periods and stretch marks—of the teenage feminine experience.
Scenes of daily life also take center stage in Singleton’s paintings which shine a refreshingly prescient light and playful wit on his figural subjects and the spaces in which they’re engaged. Seemingly quotidian scenes of joggers, friends, daily life, and domestic spaces all reveal latent and unexpected, though resonant, truths about Black life in America. The binaries that characterize the pictured environments—private/public, home/office, casual/professional, physical/virtual—echo the duality of such a position while his jovial application of paint to canvas effectively communicates both the joys and realities of widely relatable experiences.
In tandem, the works on view speak to a range of identities and experiences that do not only teach us something about the artists but also about ourselves.