The Night is Not Still

Lauren Cline

Stephano Espinoza Galarza

Amorelle Jacox

Kiyomi Quinn Taylor

New Collectors is pleased to present The Night is Not Still, a group exhibition that brings together four artists who investigate the relationship between unconscious thoughts or feelings and waking, everyday life.

Each artist featured uses their work to confront how they experience reality–the passing of time, movement in space–is influenced by their inner world, memories, and dreams. This space is not limited to logic, physics, or even our memories. Instead, it is the generative, illogical, and unruly part of our mind that colors our reality with our desires, fears, and repressed feelings. The works in The Night is Not Still investigate conscious actions or lack thereof, and how they are ultimately subject to the influence of one’s own personal dreamscape.

In Feat of rest, to dispel bitterness (2022) by Kiyomi Quinn Taylor and Kitty (2021) by Lauren Cline, the figure contrasts their environment, resting and contemplative despite a sense of external unease. Where Kiyomi uses allegory and metaphor to question toxic adaptability–slowly handling discomfort until it’s too much to bear–Lauren searches for meaning in mundane, domestic life as something that mirrors her internal thoughts and desires. Both artists bring themselves into their work, examining how their unconscious mind creeps into their environment and how they perceive reality around them.

In To be faithful is to fall (2021) by Stephano Espinoza Galarza and Forever is a finite fold (2022) by Amorelle Jacox, both artists use space and time to question the bounds of the figure. Stephano captures the space between consciousness and unconsciousness with a figure shown both resting and resisting. A tension caught in an instant. Amorelle instead examines a capacity for change and how material shapeshifts and morphs independently of where they exist. The figure and the space they hold have no causal relationship. Experience cannot be shaped entirely by any mold.

Collectively, The Night is Not Still brings together artists whose work can be seen as an exercise akin to lucid dreaming–intentionally making choices while at the same time being guided by internal forces. Through their work we can learn to see how we create our reality unconsciously, how our waking lives mirror an inner world.

—Polly Adams

Amorelle Jacox is an American artist, born in Oklahoma, raised in Ohio, and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She recently received her MFA from Hunter College. Jacox has shown her work in Ohio, New York, Los Angeles, Texas, Georgia, and Switzerland. She was a finalist for the Hopper Prize in 2022 and her works and writing have been published in Assemblage Journal, Penmarks Literary Journal and Yale School of Divinity’s Letters journal.

Kiyomi Quinn Taylor (b. 1995) is a multimedia artist born and raised in South Orange, New Jersey. Taylor received her BFA from New York University in 2017 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2020. She makes work that examines iconographies of her mixed-race heritage (Black and Japanese) as well as her family’s narrative history. Taylor uses collage and mixed media (including painting, drawing, sewing, stop-motion animation, and printmaking) to examine ancestral memory and her own inner, emotional life. Taylor received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts in 2022. She has shown her work internationally. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Lauren Cline (b. 1992) is an American figurative painter whose work explores the realm of the home, the bedroom, and other domestic spaces. She is interested in interiors because of the way they reflect the interiority of the subjects that inhabit them, as well as because domestic spaces have long been the domain of women, and their depictions the domain of women artists. Lauren uses a process-based approach to create her compositions that is derived from Jungian psychoanalysis. She lives and works in New York City, where she is currently pursuing an MFA at Hunter College.

Stephano Espinoza Galarza (b. 1992, Guayaquil, Ecuador) is a visual artist who lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. They earned their BA in Social and Cultural Analysis with concentrations in Latino and Metropolitan Studies from New York University in 2015. He’s expected to receive his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2023.