​A Romantic Comedy

Andrew Allison, Kajahl Benes, Sammy Bennett, Joe Bochynski Adam David Brown, Lauren Comito, Victoria Crayhon, Sandra Erbacher, Flyweight Projects presenting Irini Miga, Kevin Frances, Garrett Gould, Kay Healy, Kyle Hittmeier, Jared Hoffman, Jon Laustsen, AJ Liberto, Haley Matis-Uzzo, Cleo Miao, Holly McGraw, Amanda Nedham, Caleb Nussear, Barbara Rink, Megan Stroech, Amanda Thackray, Estefania Velez, Justin Wood, Andrew Woolbright, Tianyi Zhang

Wallplay is pleased to present Sophia Sobers and Steven Pestana’s ​A Romantic Comedy​. This 16,000 sq ft exhibition group exhibition explores romance in the 2020s through immersive installations, sculptures both miniature and gigantic, and vibrant, sometimes monumental paintings bursting with color and movement.

Situated at 25 Kent, a new construction just off the Williamsburg waterfront, the artwork in ​A Romantic Comedy​ casts a playful eye on with ideas of courtship (what society presents to the world versus what is hidden), domesticity, online dating, and the workplace.

The exhibition features over 50 works of art created by over 28 international and local artists, as well as a unique standalone exhibition by alternative art space Flyweight Projects featuring Irini Miga.

A Romantic Comedy​ is curated as a three-part, multifaceted narrative writ large. The first portion of the show imagines the flights and tolls of romantic fantasy. The second half of the show explores the images and accoutrements of domesticity and the shared abode - wallpaper, bathtubs, and house plants. The third and final portion investigates the invisible logics of romantic union, from the hidden architectures of the workplace and home, to the facades of social engagement which cloud the line between consent and coercion, and the abstract complexity of the senses.

About the Curators

Steven Pestana​ is an artist, educator and occasional art critic living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He earned his BA in Art History from NYU and his MFA in Digital Media from RISD. Pestana’s conceptually wide-ranging practice explores the relationship between authority and its visual language. He has exhibited in numerous venues including the Rubin Museum, Knockdown Center, Spring/Break Art Show, Satellite Art Show, BRIC, Invisible Exports, Grin Providence, Rhode Island College, and Space 776. He was the recipient of a Puffin Grant for Fine Arts and has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Mass MoCA, and Santa Fe Art Institute.

@stevenpestana http://www.stevenpestana.com

Sophia Sobers​ is an artist and educator specializing in installations and site specific work. Sobers holds an MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BS in Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She has exhibited her work nationally in institutions such as the Rubin Museum, New Bedford Art Museum, and Westmoreland Museum of American Art, and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the University of Pittsburgh, AS220 Providence and Find & Form Space. Sobers has created public art in Newark, NJ, Providence, RI and at Pittsburgh’s historic Carrie Furnaces and has been honored to receive numerous commissions and grants, including the Puffin Foundation Grant.

@sobers__ http://www.sophiasobers.net

About the Exhibition

A Romantic Comedy​ explores the ambiguities of romance through the actions and objects which become its expression in everyday life.

Victoria Crayhon​’s photos of run-down cinema marquees in middle-America brandish amusing phrases dealing with the complications of break-ups and would’ve-could’ve relationships.

Jon Lauststen​’s full-scale absurdist fragments of domestic architecture foreshadow a curatorial arrangement at the heart of the exhibition: a quasi-domestic space composed of artistic interpretations of the home. ​Amanda Nedham​’s life-sized bathtub made of paper, ​Sammy Bennett​’s painting of a couch, ​Estefania Velez​’s hi-chroma paintings of a tombstone and plants all bring a distinctive feel of lives shared (sometimes unto death).

Opposite that arrangement, ​Kyle Hittmeier​ has recreated the molding of the entrance to Paul Manafort’s Brooklyn residence from the actual sales flyers left on his doorstep, and ​Sandra Erbacher​’s mixed media installation evokes an oppressive work environment. Both propose complicated understandings of place, and in this exhibition, imagined as spaces of intimate beginnings or endings.

Adam David Brown​’s light-sculpture ​Moon​light e​vokes the commerce and lunacy of romance as a commodity, suggesting the shifting meanings underlying iconic, targeted messaging. Similarly, Tianyi Zhang​’s ​99 Agreements​ compiles video footage in which Zhang, in various guises and situations, says the word “yes”. The nature of the situations often leave open the question of whether “yes” is in fact what she meant.

Relationships appear throughout the exhibition, both between people and among the works themselves. ​Caleb Nussear​’s ​Hands Knot​ takes two hands through a twisted overlapping path to their eventual meeting, while ​Amanda Thackray​’s Valentine-hued mesh ​Caul Veil ​seems to echo the networks and trappings of intimacy.

Romance has never been simple, but that hasn’t stopped people from attempting to grasp its meaning. Without suggesting any happy endings, ​A Romantic Comedy​ comes together with whimsy, confusion and fantasy but without the cliches of the struggling Hollywood genre.

Artist Bios

Andrew W. Allison Andrew W. Allison is an American multidisciplinary artist, poet and experimental musician, born in Wichita, Kansas and raised in Pittsburgh. Through intuitive sculptural installations, hand-made mixed media objects, paintings, poetry, drawing and sound, Allison considers to what extent our obligation is to connect, not only with ourselves but to all entities around us. He also examines how our environments, traumas, and objects generate our understanding and need for symbolic forms and spirituality. Allison began making things early on in order to engage with his experiences with night terrors.

Kajahl Benes Kajahl was born and raised in Santa Cruz, CA. In the fall of 2008 he received a BFA from San Francisco State University and spent his final year studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze, Italy. In the spring of 2012 he received his MFA from Hunter College in New York City.

He has exhibited work in group shows including 30 Americans; Next Generation, Contemporary Wing, Washington, DC and at MoCADA, emerging; Visual Art and Music in a Post-Hip-Hop Era, Brooklyn, NY. In 2012, Kajahl exhibited his first solo show at the University North Carolina Wilmington Arts Gallery, Wilmington, NC. In 2013 Kajahl was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant. In 2016 he participated in the Joan Mitchell Center, Artist in Residence in New Orleans, LA. Also in 2016, Kajahl exhibited in ‘In Context: Africans in America’, Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, ZA. In 2017 Kajahl had his first solo show in New York City titled “Obscure Origins” at Tillou Fine Art and his second solo show at Richard Heller in Los Angeles, CA.

Sammy Bennett Sammy Bennett appropriates imagery from both high and low visual culture specifically referencing the history of sexuality in Western art. Interested in the divide between public and private spaces, home interiors become the backdrop for these narratives to play out.

Joe Bochynski Born in Buffalo, NY in 1986, Bochynski was an elementary school safety patrol member from 1996-1997, blood donor from 2002-2009, and a father since December 2016. He received a BA in Mathematics and Studio Art from Hobart College in 2008, and an MFA in painting from RISD in 2013. His first artist book was published in 2016 by CEPA Press with support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He is participating in the Emerging Artist Fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY in 2017 and had a fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in 2015. Bochynski has shown his work throughout the northeast as well as in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Adam David Brown Adam David Brown is a multidisciplinary artist from Toronto, Canada. Guided by the principle of “less is more”, his work is generated by an interest in science, language and the passage of time.

Victoria Crayhon BFA Photography Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, NY, NY.

MFA Photography Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI.

Ms. Crayhon’s work has been exhibited, published and collected both internationally and throughout the United States. Her work has been prominently featured in publications such as British Journal of Photography, The Christian Science Monitor, Slate Magazine, Huffington Post, Fraction Magazine, Zero_Cento Editions, La Journal de la Photographie, Fade to Black, Art/Photo Magazine, and The Photo Review top ten of 2019 and 2014. It is also included in museum, corporate and private collections, among them The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Harvard/Fogg Art Museums, and Citigroup in NYC.

Lauren Comito Lauren Comito is a Brooklyn-based visual artist, educator, and curator. She received her Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. Comito’s work has recently been exhibited at Marymount Manhattan College in New York, NY, and at Chashama: A Space to Present in New York, NY. She published a limited printed edition with Eminence Grise Editions that has been shown at the Editions and Artists’ Book Fair in New York, Art on Paper in New York and the Soon Paris Art Fair in France.

Sandra Erbacher Sandra Erbacher is a German artist living and working in New Jersey and New York. She has earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2014) and her BFA from Camberwell College of Art, London (2009). She also holds a BA and MA in Sociology from Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Erbacher has exhibited nationally and internationally, at Spring/ Break NYC, ISCP NYC, Stellar Projects, Grin Providence, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Parisian Laundry, Montreal, Space, Portland, Umbrella Gallery, Leeds, and Five Years, London.

She has participated in the 2019 Artist Alliance Inc, LES Studio Program, 2017-18 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency and the 2015 NARS Foundation Residency. She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, the 2014 Chazen Prize to an Outstanding MFA Student, a University of Wisconsin fellowship and the Blink Grant for Public Art 2013.

Kevin Frances Kevin Frances is an artist who lives and works in New York City. He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013, and his BA from the University of California, Davis in 2010. In 2012 he was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been shown at the International Print Center New York, the Knockdown Center in New York, Cheymore Gallery in New York, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, the Kala Gallery in Berkeley, and Galleri CC in Malmö, Sweden.

Garrett Gould Garrett Gould is an artist living and working in Boston. He is a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a BFA concentrated in Sculpture. He has exhibited nationally with recent exhibitions at Gallery 1993, Los Angeles CA; Godine Gallery, Boston MA; Elephant Gallery, Nsahville, TN; Elevator Mondays, Los Angeles CA; Seymour2017, Los Angeles CA; How’s Howard?, Boston MA; and Lens Gallery, Boston MA, and GRIN, Providence RI.

Kay Healy Through her life-sized drawn, painted, and screen-printed fabric installations, Kay Healy investigates themes of home, loss, displacement, and resilience with interview-based projects. Healy received a BA from Oberlin College, and a MFA from the University of the Arts. Her installation Coming Home was purchased by the Pennsylvania Convention Center, and her work has been supported by the Independence Foundation’s Fellowship in the Arts and the Leeway Foundation. Healy has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Madison Park in New York City, Gallery Septima in Tokyo, Japan, the Windgate Gallery in Fort Smith, Arkansas, the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. She has recently completed residencies at Cooper Union in New York and with the Women's Studio Workshop in Malmö, Sweden. She lives and works in Philadelphia.

Kyle Hittmeier Kyle Hittmeier (American, b. 1983) received his Bachelor's of Art from the University of California, Davis, and subsequently moved to New York in the summer of 2008. In 2014, Hittmeier graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a Master's of Fine Arts in Painting. He was a resident mentor for the Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Residency in Abu Dhabi, UAE; resident artist for the Digital Painting Atelier Program at Ontario College of Art and Design; and the Wassiac Summer Residency Program. Hittmeier has recently exhibited in Nancy Margollis Gallery, the Boston Center for the Arts. the Lamar Dodd School of Art, Ontario College of Art and Design, Project ARTSpace, Sister Gallery, Spring/Break, Super Dutchess Gallery, and Transfer Gallery. As curator, Hittmeier has curated with Super Dutchess Gallery, Spring/Break, Warehouse421 & 411, Sol Koffler Gallery, and 92Y Tribeca. Hittmeier lives and works in Brooklyn, NY where he teaches at Rhode Island School of Design.

Jared Hoffman Jared Hoffman (b. 1993) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based in Brooklyn, NY. Hoffman applies a range of media - lenticular prints, interactive digital installations, collage and sculpture - to express themes personal to him such as memory, nostalgia and techno-utopianism. After graduating Cornell University with a degree in Information Science, Hoffman published “The Stoner’s Coloring Book: Coloring for High-Minded Adults” with Penguin-Random House. Hoffman has shown recently in group shows at the Detroit Public Library and Mana Contemporary, and in a solo exhibition at the 14th Street Y in Manhattan.

Jon Laustsen Ever since walking through walls and knocking on gigantic hollow sculptures, ​Jon Laustsen has created sculptures and installations emphasizing interior and exterior divides. His work is often characterized by shifts in scale, material, and points of view. Recipient of numerous fellowships from Rhode Island State Council of the Arts, he has exhibited at The Soap Factory (Minneapolis), Dorsch Gallery (Miami), The David Winton Bell Gallery (Providence), AS220 (Providence) and his work is held in public and private collections. Laustsen is an artist, instructor and studio manager living and working in Providence, RI. This is his first time showing work in Brooklyn.

AJ Liberto AJ lives and works in Boston, MA, where he’s currently a Visiting Professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Haley Matis-Uzzo Haley Matis-Uzzo creates humanoid hallucinations referencing commercial and ethnological languages. With varying forms of collaboration, performance, and sculpture, they consider how the body and mind are shaped and mediated by objects and images through the lens of history, class, and desire.

Holly McGraw Holly McGraw makes queer objects. They embrace the simultaneity of falling in love, late nights dancing, confusion and heartbreak. friend and foe are part of dysphoric euphoria, a series exploring how we affirm our ability to love and be loved even as we feel disconnected from ourselves.

Amanda Nedham Nedham completed her BFA at OCAD University in Printmaking, her MFA at RISD in Painting, and resides in Brooklyn. Her practice is interdisciplinary with an emphasis on drawing and sculpture. Nedham recently published a book of letters and drawings titled, ​My Boyfriend is a Peacekeeper.​ Recent exhibitions include ​I’ll draw you a fly​ at Field Projects (NYC), ​Frida Smoked a​ t Invisible-Exports (NYC), and ​Extract IV Young Art Prize a​ t GL Strand (Copenhagen). Nedham recently attended the Wassaic Artist Project residency and the ARTHA studio residency. She runs workshops on alternative love letters in New York City and co-founded Super Dutchess Gallery in the Lower East Side.

Caleb Nussear Caleb Nussear is an American artist living in New York City: his work suggests a higher dimensional order and the equivalency of the human figure with a complex recursive geometry.

He is comfortable working in drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance; perhaps his favorite method of working is within project-based collaborative ventures with fellow artists and thinkers from a wide range of disciplines.

His work here focuses on contemporary Japanese paper-folding patterns named the Muira; in this work the influence of Shunga and Ukiyo-e is also present.

Barbara Rink Barbara Rink (1978) lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. After receiving a BFA from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague her work has been shown in group and solo shows in The Netherlands and internationally at (a.o.) Dedee Shattuck Gallery, Bergarde Gallery, Kers Gallery, Bradwolff Projects, Haus34a. She has participated in various artist-residencies including URRA Argentina, Santa Fe art Institute, Vermont Studio Center. She is a (guest) tutor at Eye Film institute and ArteZ Institute of the Arts. Her artistic practice includes installation, photography and painting and revolves around color and space.

Megan Stroech Megan Stroech (b. 1986) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Stroech received an MFA in Printmaking with Exceptional Merit from Illinois State University in 2012 and BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. Recent exhibitions include: Undercurrent, (Brooklyn), The Cooper Union (NYC), Expo Chicago, Rockelmann& Partner (Berlin), Field Projects (NYC), Ortega Y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn), CES Gallery (LA) and a recent feature in New American Paintings Magazine’s Northeastern Issue #140. Stroech has been an artist in residence at The Cooper Union, Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Wassaic Project, Chicago Artists Coalition and ACRE. Stroech is Part-Time Faculty in Printmaking at Parsons School of Design.

Amanda Thackray Amanda Thackray is a multidisciplinary artist based in Newark, NJ. In 2019, she was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC. Her work is in over a dozen public collections including Mediatheque Andre Malraux, Strasbourg, France, Yale University, and The Library of Congress.

Estefania Velez Rodriguez Estefania Velez Rodriguez was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico and now resides in Brooklyn, New York. Her paintings and videos are a visual study of the relationship to the opposing worlds that surround her. Currently thoughts about artmaking center around language as a dual tongued individual; and how symbolic language of painting acts as a bridge between many cultures and spaces. Her artist practice involves painting on canvas and paper, and also includes experimentation with video formats inside physical paintings. Painting has taken a turn towards abstracted landscapes as well as non-objective paintings that are somewhat open field and bright. Tension between peacefulness of nature and agitating high key colors aim to break open a psychological space capable of revealing a human condition that accepts humility and power. Representation from Praxis New York.

Justin Wood Justin Wood is a New York City based artist and curator working at the convergence of the digital and physical worlds. His work addresses themes of environmentalism, climate change, artificial intelligence and simulation theory through immersive video installations and video paintings. His work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions. He holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (NY) where he studied painting with Jack Whitten, Michael Goldberg and Joanne Greenbaum. He is the founder of Syntax Projects, a curatorial and immersive event production platform. His work has been covered by ArtNews, ArtInfo, Artnet, Hyperallergic, Art Nerd, the Miami New Times and The Takeaway (WNYC).

Andrew Woolbright Andrew Woolbright (American, b. 1986) is an MFA graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design in painting. Woolbright attended the School of the Art Institute Chicago where he was greatly influenced by the work of the alternative figuration of Ivan Albright and Mary Lou Zelazny before being taught by Angela Dufresne at the Rhode Island School of Design. Woolbright has exhibited with the Ada Gallery, Nancy Margolis, and Coherent Brussels. His work has been reviewed in Two Coats of Paint, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Reader, and the Providence Journal and is currently in the collection of the RISD Museum.

Tianyi Zhang Tianyi Zhang (B. 1995, Hunan, China) lives and works in Beijing, & Brooklyn, NY. Earning an MFA (’19) Degree in Photographic and Electronic Media at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and a BFA (’17 & ’14) in Studio Photography, and Design respectively, from The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), in Beijing, China. The artists photography and video has been presented at ElijahWheat Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, CICA Museum in South Korea, the ICA Baltimore, Riggs & Leidy Gallery in Baltimore, ESMoA Video Art+Film Festival, CA, Squat Betty Avant Garde Film Night in London, UK. Zhang’s work has been reviewed or appeared in Artnet, Soleil Rouge, Art Zealous, and Punt Volat.

Flyweight Projects Flyweight is a 1:12 scale exhibition space for miniature solo projects organized by artists Clare Torina and Jesse Cesario. The stationary gallery is located in an over-the-closet nook in their Brooklyn apartment. The mobile version of the gallery, presented here, moves around the city in collaboration with other galleries, curators, and collectors.

Irini Miga Irini Miga (b. Greece, lives and works in NY ) studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, London’s Central Saint Martins College, and received her MFA from Columbia University, New York on a Fulbright grant. Recent international shows include: Reflections (solo show,) at Atlanta Contemporary; Away in Another Way of Saying Here (solo show,) at Essex Flowers gallery, in NY; Room for Failure at Piero Atchugarry gallery in Miami; Tomorrow’s Dream, at Neuer Essener Kunstverein in Essen; Scraggly Beard Grandpa, at Capsule Shanghai; The Best is the Least We Can Do, at Atlanta Contemporary; The Equilibrists, organized by the New Museum in New York, the Deste Foundation and shown in the Benaki Museum in Athens. Miga has been honored residencies by several organizations including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions program, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art Residency Program; The Fountainhead Residency; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Workspace Program; and The Watermill Center.