Samantha Nye & Todd Stong

Split Fountain pairs the work of Samantha Nye and Todd Stong in the first joint exhibition of their work. Nye and Stong are Philadelphia-based artists who share a friendship and rich dialogue that is strongly influenced by art historical themes, citing narratives and visual sources from Baroque, 19th and 20th century art, and pop and camp visual culture in their work. Both artists foreground the centrality of queer actors in familiar stories of art, pleasure, and history.

In Split Fountain, Nye presents three new oil paintings depicting women in lavish states of desire and repose. Adapted from lifestyle photographer Slim Aarons' work from the 1940s to 1990s–in which beauty and affluence appear available to only a select few–Nye coyly reimagines Aaron's privileged spaces populated with older female and non-binary figures. In her 2022 exhibition with the gallery, Attractive People Doing Attractive Things in Attractive Places, Nye's paintings' compositions were action-packed and overflowing with revelers. Here, solitary or paired figures are languid and dreamy, set in intimate interior spaces replete with a baroque excess of patterns, fabrics, fruits, and fauna.

Stong presents work from a series of monotypes begun during his graduate studies in Rome that reinterpret the life of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the 18th century art historian who dedicated himself to the study of ancient Greek and Roman statues and spearheaded the Classical Revival. Over the past three years, Stong has imagined a historical fiction that is encyclopedic, personal, and epic in scale, exploring details of Winckelmann's biography as a gay man in 18th century Germany and, later in life, in Rome. Male figures are depicted at work and at play, surrounded by classical sculptures, lush gardens, and in the most recent work, as tangles of angels and men that ascend and descend against cloudscapes. A new body of small-scale frescoes further develops imagery of celestial peril and rapture, while harkening to the grand allegorical murals of Italian baroque and renaissance painters that both Winkelmann and Stong encountered while living and studying in the Eternal City, two and a half centuries apart.

The title of the exhibition, Split Fountain, refers to a printmaking process used to create a smooth gradient between multiple colors by running a brayer over the separate ink colors repetitively, deftly employed by Stong throughout his work in this show. The title also playfully suggests colorful and erotic themes that appear in both artists' work– celebrating ecstatic moments of bodily agency, freedom, and joy.