Planes, Trains & Automobiles

Nicolas Shake  is an artist working in painting, photography, and sculpture. A third generation Californian, his practice, in his words, revolves around “the soft power of California Culture.” Which he defines as the points of juncture between surf, skateboard, and car culture, as well as the counterculture literary, sociological, pictorial and musical movements of the late 1960ʼs and 1970ʼs. Through the sustained absorption and repurposing of these influences, his stretched works function as high performance objects which propose the ability to decode and address these narratives, lifting them out of their seeming mundanity. Language is often employed as a visual anchor and literal device to articulate these themes with his own personal history. Artworks contain appropriated language and fonts from signage common to car garages, where the artist worked as a mechanic in his youth or for language commonly associated with the conceptions of labor and freedom indissociable from the mythology and romanticism of the West. Shake works with what is endemic to the everyday: a road littered with billboard advertisements, debris, neon signage, gas stations, open calls for work, all located within a space where the vast expanse of desert and Pacific Ocean collide. Enmeshed, his work occupies the liminal space between the West as both an idealized and allegorical construct; much of the intent behind his practice is made up of their concurrent upholding and demystification. Shakeʼs stretched works flourish in this same realm, holding these notions as polemics, relishing in the visuality and mimesis of California culture while examining its influence, itʼs soft power, on American dogma at large and the economic systems which it exerts both on itself and the rest of the world; they attempt to act as binding or reconciling agents between both paradoxical notions. Created in Shakeʼs Los Angeles studio, as well as in the desert near Pearblossom, his childhood hometown, the canvas is hand dyed, exposed and weathered in the sun over varying lengths of time. By means of cardboard cutouts, Shake then builds the composition and applies the language which develops like a photograph in a mostly uncontrolled outdoor environment. Finally, the work is retrieved from the desert, washed and stretched; the process itself acting as a signifier for the repetitiveness of labor and the meditativeness of craft.

William Anastasi (b. 1933) is a contemporary American artist considered a pioneer of Conceptual and Minimal Art. As evinced in his series of Subway Drawings along with his many site- specific installations and sound works, Anastasi’s interests lie in meditation and everyday experience rather than creating a esthetically beautiful objects. Like his deceased friend and peer John Cage, Anastasi explores the relationship between the human condition and its recording mechanisms, through the mediums of visual art, sound, and experience. Born in  Philadelphia, PA, the artist moved to New York in the early 1960s where he became more preoccupied with Marcel Duchamp’s theoretical approach art making. In 2010, Anastasi was awarded The John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. His works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the NationalGallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago. Anastasi lives and works in NYC.

Marie Hazard (b. 1994) lives and works in Paris. She graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2017 in London with a BA in textile design. Her medium of choice is weaving and printing. Marie Hazard works with different concepts and sources, abstracts or not, highlighting memories and promises. Literature, disposable photographs from her travels, abstracts paintings, are used to question the displacement and the position of the viewer. This is particularly relevant in her “spiral” works, represented as a vortex following a single law: never being interrupted. In 2019, she went to Mexico City for her first artist residency. Three years later, Hazard came back to Mexico and visited São Paulo, Brazil to pursue her research in textiles. Today, Hazard’s work can be found in many private and international collections. She also participated in a performance project at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in 2019.

Charlotte vander Borght (b.1988) received her MFA at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre in 2013.Her work has been exhibited amongst others at A.D. Gallery New York/ CLEARING Brussels & New York / New Space, Liège, BE/ Deborah Bowmann, Saint-Gilles, BE / Centre Wallonie- Bruxelles, Paris, FR / Bunk Club,New York and WIELS, Brussels, BE.Upcoming : Sculpture Garden GenevaBiennale curated by Devrim Bayar She was artist in residence at WIELS,Brussels in 2016. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Alex Hubbard (b. 1975) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work encompasses video art and painting, exploring the boundaries of each via a cross-examination that invigorates both media in new and inventive ways. Constructed along parallel lines, his videos and paintings explore composition, mass, colour and depth of images in unexpected ways. Avoiding a single point of focus, Hubbard constructs his videos in layers, engulfing the viewer with bold colours, performative gestures and evolving, all-over compositions in which movement is multi-directional and time appears to be non-linear. Often described as 'moving paintings', the videos are a record of physical creation and destruction, with the hand of the artist tangible, and sometimes visible, in the frame.