Untitled Art Miami Beach 2023 / Untitled Art Miami Beach 2023

Untitled Art Miami Beach

John Paul Morabito

Reyah

Lien Truong

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is thrilled to announce our participation in Untitled Art Miami Beach 2023, Booth B-48

Gender equality in the arts is a  dynamic that’s evolved beyond an arcane understanding of binary identity and sexuality. The three artists’ studio practices explore and confront their ideas and experiences within this fluidity. With their sharp focus of confronting and dismantling patriarchy, complexities compound when revisionist ideologies around culture, history, race, and religion enter the narrative. We’re pleased to present Reyah’s archival pigment prints; John Paul Morabito’s beaded tapestries; and Lien Truong’s mixed media paintings.

Reyah’s nude self-portraits are classic compositions, until the viewer registers yards of manipulated rope coursing round their body. Dre Hudson is an artist, who gave agency to his nonbinary alter ego Reyah, releasing Hudson from binary gender assumptions in the studio. Reyah composes, costumes, and photographs themself using rope as regal motifs of pageantry. Reframing rope from its legacy of violence and restraint liberates the artist from it’s historical weight. Alone in their studio, Reyah takes agency with all aspects of their process, constructing the rope costumes, lighting their body, and finally exposing the shot. Reyah advances a seductive coming of age story, Becoming Reyah.

We’re honored to debut the stunning series of archival pigment prints from Reyah, a self-taught artist, at Untitled Art 2023. Reyah’s body of work in self-portraiture represents a multi-year timeline of building knowledge and experience with their medium-format camera.

Tapestries were one of the more effective propaganda tools of early church and state and John Paul Morabito’s (they/them/their) tapestries enlist this same methodology. Morabito deftly reframes the stigmatization and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church toward Queer communities and culture by contorting the tropes of faith, bequeathing Queer assignation to that considered sacrosanct. Draped in saturated color, beaded and swathed in gold, their tapestries are a tribute to Queer life and community.

In 2022 Morabito was appointed Assistant Professor and Head of Textiles at Kent State University and now resides in Ohio. From 2013 to 2022 Morabito was Assistant Professor, Adj. of Fiber and Material Studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL.  They serve as Director-at-Large for the American Tapestry Alliance and Poly-Chair for the Queer & Trans Caucus for Art. Morabito holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In tandem with their studio, John Paul Morabito pursues a practice-led scholarship that positions weaving as a critical platform of cultural production. Their writing has been published in Art China, The Textile Reader 2 (China Academy of Art), The Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice, Textile: Cloth and Culture, and Bloomsbury’s forthcoming Encyclopedia of World Textiles. They are the editor of Weaving Beyond the Binary, a special issue of the international peer reviewed journal, Textile: Cloth and Culture. Their work has been included in numerous museum exhibitions, with upcoming exhibitions including the Art in Embassies Program, Washington, DC;  and Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, NC, The Threads We Follow, curated by Maya Brooks.

Creating a powerful fictive of female authority, Lien Truong (she, her) presents Asian female protagonists who are forceful, autonomous counterpoints to Western misogyny. Continuing her focus on the generational trauma and resilience of Asian women lived and portrayed throughout history, the new paintings address mysticism and archetypes.

Truong’s oeuvre can be viewed as Asian Futurism, born from the violent histories descended from Orientalist ideologies. Her work tests the hybridity and historic hierarchies of global painting techniques, materials, and philosophies as she fragments paintings, art, film, and family. She subverts color and values, staging a background layered with singed panels of painted floating silk and blended gestures of oil paint, amidst interpretations of historic textile patterns and emblematic and hegemonic iconography.

Lien Truong is an Associate Professor of Art in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, and fellowships from the Institute for the Arts & Humanities, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Jack and Gertrude Murphy Fine Arts Fellowships. Her work is included in national and international collections.

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