Remix

Christina Allan, Heather Benjamin, Matija Bobičić, Chris Chandler, John Copeland, Simon Foxall, Karim Hamid, Elliot Purse, Kyle Quinn, Kelly Shami

Alchemy Gallery presents: Remix, a collective exhibition featuring various artists who have previously been showcased by the gallery.

Heather Benjamin (b. 1989, New York) received her BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. Benjamin makes figurative work that revolves around a mystical feminine protagonist, who simultaneously serves as an avatar for her personal experiences of the traumas of womanhood, as well as a manifestation of power, resilience, and self-embodiment. She lives and works in New York City.

Simon Foxall (b. 1983, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) lives and works in Italy. He grew up in the UK and graduated in 2006 from Brighton University, United Kingdom where he obtained a BA in Painting and later received an MA in Painting from Royal College in 2012. Foxall’s work explores a unique dichotomy between old world art, and contemporary culture. Heavily influenced by the intricately elaborate imagery of medieval and gothic genres, Foxall seeks to create similar escapist portals with his small-scale paintings.

Christina Allan (b. 1995, Toronto) is fueled by the individual and collective anxieties that surround the human condition and psyche, one's self, and one's relation to the world. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from Parsons the New School for Design in 2017 and was awarded the institution’s Dean’s BFA Scholarship. Her paintings can be found in private collections throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. She lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Chris Chandler is a self-taught artist who fell into a passion of art and printmaking after acquiring his first Vandercook Press in 1996 and has exhibited his works across the Pacific Northwest and in New York City, Los Angeles and Oklahoma. Chris works in modes of deconstruction and reconstruction with modular type and letterpress printmaking. Primarily utilizing the Alpha-Blox and Future Schmuck fonts – enlarged into large custom woodblocks for use on his Vandercook 232P proofing press – Chandler transposes letters, words, and shapes into abstracted assemblies of wheat-pasted prints.

Matija Bobičić (b. 1987, Maribor, Slovenia) lives and works in Maribor (SI), graduated in art education from the University of Maribor under the mentorship of painters Ludvik Pandur and Oto Rimele. In recent years, he has managed to achieve considerable visibility, breaking onto the international contemporary art market. Bobičić’s works explore the intersections of science fiction, pop culture, and Balkan folklore, weaving together threads from the past, present, and future.

Kelly Shami (b. 1991, New Jersey) is a first-generation American artist of Syrian and Lebanese descent, living and working in New York City. She completed her B.F.A. from The School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2013, where she learned about the ideals of Surrealism, especially with women being seen as an object or "muse" and never the creator herself, which she found paralleled the restraints of growing up as an Arab woman. Shami’s intriguing paintings routinely combine the natural and unnatural. Flowers altered with piercings turn stationary objects into lifelike forms.

Elliot Purse (B. 1989, Chicago) is an artist based in Brooklyn NY. Purse’s work engages themes of masculinity, sports entertainment, and classicism in sharply rendered charcoal drawings and paintings. Purse’s techniques echo works which are now part of the Western art canon, however his decontextualization of those limbs and body parts breaks free from what Marcel Duchamp famously called “retinal art”, offering a dynamic interaction between almost photorealistic representations and cultural symbolism.

John Copeland is an American artist who creates paintings using predominantly acrylics and oils. He seeks to translate his questions about the obvious but silenced and awkward moments of life into captivating large-scale paintings. Born and raised in California, he went on to pursue his passion for painting at the California College of the Arts and Crafts, and in 1998 he received his BFA . After graduation, Copeland migrated east from his home state of California to set up shop in New York City.

Kyle Quinn, (b. Okinawa, Japan 1987) is a Brooklyn based artist whose artistic practice shifts between drawing, painting, graphic design and sculpture. He is the owner, publisher, designer and curator for the queer publishing house Raw Meat, with his work currently residing in the library collections of The Met, Yale Private Library, The Whitney, and most recently, MoMA.

Karim Hamid (b. 1966 Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Denver, Colorado. The constant idealisation and consumption of the female form, from classical art to contemporary pop culture, has been a consistent theme in Hamid's work. In response to the extremely superficial representation of women in history and the media, he draws on a variety of sources to focus on what the male gaze means via distorted and exaggerated images of women.