Aya Uekawa & Joseph Ayers

Neumann Wolfson Art is proud to present a two-person collaborative exhibition with Aya Uekawa and Joseph Ayers. Hailing from Tokyo and Gulf Coast, Florida, respectively, Uekawa and Ayers intertwine their unique global perspectives and interests together in Surivivors and True Lies to create a surreal, distilled space to contemplate today’s political colosseum: an arena where progress and true lies battle for survival.

Our contemporary milieu is a civil struggle between survivors of oppression and true lies that bind. Globally it seems that this is as it ever was and the pervasive fear is that the battle will only continue. Through this lens of contemplative concern for establishing the right to selfhood, the artists found an intersection of their praxes. The female subjects of Uekawa’s paintings represent timeless survivors, often historic references to heroic female figures who were lost in shadows of powerful men. Ayers’s minimalist, mixed media assemblages of wood and painted surfaces often integrate personal video and sound; creating simultaneously analog and digital records of the personal and universal subject which challenge the viewers' perceptions of what is real, and what is not.

In tandem with their mutual approaches to cultural perception, both artists utilize personal narratives in their work to create fragmented self portraits. Uekawa’s narrative studies of oppressed multicultural female perspectives spring from her own experiences growing up in a repressive sector of Japanese society. Survivors of difficult circumstances, her subjects are rendered in elegant gestures of triumph and masquerade. Ayers represents the self in the abstraction of materiality, using personal audio and video recordings, photographs, and found materials. Employing tools that he learned as the son of a handyman and carpenter from rural Florida, he often re-purposes building materials and live edge wood, combining it with new media devices and painted trompe l'oeil surfaces. By subtly challenging perceptions, the work contemplates the divide between the analogue and digital, and gleams a delicate balance within a world of true lies.